Not So Different

The day the room went quiet.

January 2025. Eighteen years in product and AI behind me. A Teams call ended a chapter, and I closed my laptop thinking the next one would open easy.

It did not.

Five hundred applications. One discovery.

I treated the job hunt like a job. Coffee at sunrise. Ambient music in the basement. A window full of trees and a list of openings that never seemed to end.

By application five hundred, I had learned something nobody warns you about. Rejection is not the hard part. Silence is.

The inbox stayed empty. The phone filled with scammer texts from numbers that had scraped mine off job boards. The world had gone quiet, and the only voices left were liars.

I called my network. Tim. Shelly. John. Names you build a career with. Every call ended the same way. Laid off. Looking. The market was not slow. The market was frozen, and everyone I respected was standing in the same dark room I was.

The hobby that would not stay a hobby.

I started building. Not because I had a plan. Because I needed something to do with my hands while the dread did its work.

One small script. Then another. An RTX 3090 humming in the corner of the basement, applying to jobs while I tried to sleep upstairs.

By week five, it got me an interview.

I told my neighbor Jeff, ten years a friend, also out of work. The next morning he sent me a GIF of an actor slowly removing his sunglasses in disbelief. The applications had started pouring in for him too.

Then came the strangers. And the messages I still cannot read without something catching in my chest. "You better not shut this down. I had given up. I have a newborn coming. I really needed this. Please bring this to market."

2:15 in the morning.

One evening I was fixing my garage door when John, my old boss from my Oracle days, called from a layover. He had just been laid off. I told him what I had built. He went quiet for a moment and said, If I were you, I would charge for this. Turn it into a company.

That night I could not sleep.

The bedroom window was cracked open. A tree just outside the second floor moved in a slow breeze. No traffic. No rain. Just leaves.

Then my wife's voice in the dark. What are you thinking? She knows the look. She always tells me to spill it.

I did. Every piece of it.

She said, "You have given your best to other people (old employers). It is time to give it to everyone who needs you."

That sentence is the reason this company exists.

The leap.

A month later we sold the house. We found an angel investor at a family gathering. I told him the truth. You can give me this, but I cannot tell you when I will return it.

He looked at me and said, I am not worried about the money. I am worried about why nobody has done this before.

That is when CoBlack stopped being a hobby.

Why the name.

I have stood in that dark place more than once. The one where the inbox is empty and the bills are not. Where you start to wonder if you are still the person you used to be.

A lot of us stand there. Most of us stand there alone.

I wanted to build a companion for that place. Co for the company you do not have when you need it most. Black for the dark you find yourself standing in.

Who this is for.

When I picture who CoBlack is for, I do not see a job seeker. I see my kids. Because the true cost of unemployment is not the unemployment. It is what it does to the people who love you. A person can survive a job search alone. A family pays the bigger bill.

So this is for them. The partners, the parents, the children, the friends. The loved ones who carry what they cannot fix.

Same darkness. Different doors.

You might be reading this and thinking your circumstances are nothing like mine. You might be right.

But here is the truth I learned in those months. With eighteen years of experience, a network full of executives, and a working understanding of how the system was supposed to run, I still could not crack it. The system is not lightly broken. It is structurally broken, and a lot of companies quietly depend on it staying that way.

We are not so different, you and me.

We are all starting from the same darkness. We are just looking for different doors.

I am still looking for mine. I just decided to help others find theirs along the way.