Last year, a media company asked me to lock myself in an apartment until I hit $1M ARR. Here’s how it went down: About a year ago, my co-founder Oliver and I were both in the same place: eight months into separate pivot journeys, no idea what to build, both a little bit lost. We'd worked together at a previous startup and stayed in touch, but we weren't actively building anything together. Then I got a DM. A media company was putting together a show called "PMF or Die." The concept was simple: Lock startup founders in an apartment and don't let them out until they hit a million in ARR. My previous co-founder said absolutely not. His girlfriend was not going to let him get locked in an apartment for 90 days. But Oliver? He said, "That actually sounds like an interesting forcing function." So we signed on. And to prepare, we figured we should spend a couple of weeks working together just to see if we could find an interesting idea to build once we kicked off the show. Turns out, we worked incredibly well together. We both geeked out about the same problems in developer tools. We had the same instincts about how to run a company. We wanted to build in person, in San Francisco, with a tight-knit team. Then the show got scaled down. We got the call: "Sorry, you're not going to be on the show." Didn't matter. We were already building. That prep work turned into Mesa, and today we're building GitHub for Agents, helping top companies store, version, and understand AI-generated code. The lesson? Sometimes the best outcomes come from commitments that never actually happen. The show forced us to take the first step. Everything after that was momentum. If you're looking for a co-founder, stop waiting for the perfect conditions. Find a forcing function, any forcing function, and start building together. You'll know within two weeks.

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