On Change

“Everything changes all the time.”

I heard this phrase so many times at AWS that it became almost like a mantra. I can’t remember which manager said it first, or even if it was always the same person saying it, but I heard it over and over. In a company moving at AWS’s pace, where new services launched every week and teams reorganized every quarter, it wasn’t profound wisdom so much as observed reality. The thing about hearing something repeatedly in that environment is that eventually you stop noticing you’re saying it yourself.

I’m writing this from a very different place than where I heard that phrase. I’ve left AWS, left big tech entirely (maybe for good), and I’m now building an EdTech startup from scratch as a solopreneur. Which means I’m currently living through one of the more significant changes of my professional life, while simultaneously reflecting on all the other changes that got me here. It’s made me think differently about that phrase.

The Technology Waves

Here’s what I’ve watched shift over my career: mainframes gave way to client-server. Novell NetWare (remember that?) got replaced by Windows NT and beyond. We went from 32-bit to 64-bit, from tin to VMs, from VMs to containers, from datacenters to cloud. Then serverless. Mobile transformed how we thought about everything. AI/ML went from academic curiosity to business imperative. And now GenAI is rewriting the rules again.

Each wave looked like the final form when you were in the middle of it. I remember thinking VMs were going to be how we did things forever. Five years later, everyone was talking about containers like VMs were legacy thinking. (They kind of were, but that’s not how it felt at the time.)

The pattern you notice after watching enough of these shifts: the technology changes faster than organizations can adapt, which changes faster than people want to adapt. That’s not a criticism, it’s just friction. Useful friction, mostly. The laggards sometimes turn out to be right about which changes actually matter.

The Organizational Reality

But technology change is almost easier to talk about than organizational change, because at least with tech you can point to objective improvements. Organizational change is messier.

I’ve lived through multiple rounds of layoffs. Very smart, very competent people losing their jobs not because they did anything wrong, but because the strategy shifted or the economic winds changed or some VP three levels up decided to restructure. I’ve watched re-orgs that completely changed the goal posts mid-game. New priorities that made yesterday’s critical work suddenly optional. The kind of changes that make you question whether any of the planning actually matters.

Here’s where “everything changes all the time” stops being a helpful reminder and starts feeling like fatalism. Because if everything changes all the time, what’s the point of committing to anything? Why pour yourself into a project if the org might pivot away from it next quarter? Why optimize for a goal that might not exist in six months?

The answer, I think, is that you do it anyway. Not because change won’t happen, but because the alternative, constantly hedging, never committing, guarantees you won’t build anything meaningful. The people who did the best work at AWS weren’t the ones who were always positioning for the next re-org. They were the ones who committed fully to what they were building, knowing it might all change, and figured out how to adapt when it did.

The Personal Cascade

But here’s where it gets interesting: professional change doesn’t stay neatly contained in the professional realm. My career has taken my family through multiple relocations. Each one was a choice, technically, but they were choices shaped by changes happening at work.

The most significant was Geneva.

I came back from an internal conference in Chicago in January 2020. One week later, I was talking to the EMEA group about a role working with the United Nations as a customer. The opportunity was sudden, the kind of thing that appears and needs an answer quickly. At the same time, something else was happening that seemed like a distant news story: a virus in China that was starting to spread.

I got the job. The internal transfer was approved. And then the world changed.

I couldn’t physically relocate. So for two years, I worked from Australia on EMEA timezone. My kids would get home from school as I was heading into morning meetings. I’d have dinner with the family and then go back to work until 2 or 3am. It was this weird liminal state where I’d accepted the change, committed to it, but couldn’t actually live it yet. Hurry up and wait, pandemic edition.

The family was supportive. We wanted the big life experience. My wife wanted to live somewhere French-speaking again. I wanted our kids to have an international, non-English-speaking experience. I needed to work in English. Geneva and the UN checked all those boxes.

So we sacrificed those two years, me working odd hours, all of us waiting, to get the chance to eventually live and work overseas. When we finally moved in 2022, it was worth it. In retrospect, that Geneva period was the highlight of my professional career. So far, anyway. Maybe the startup world will overtake it one day.

But that’s the thing about personal change following professional change: you don’t really know what you’re signing up for. The decision in January 2020 seemed clear enough. The reality of what that decision meant, two years of timezone hell followed by an international move with young kids, that’s something you only understand by living through it.

The Adjacent Possible

My company is called Adjacent Possible Tech. The name comes from Stuart Kauffman’s idea that innovation happens at the edge of what’s currently possible, you can only reach what’s adjacent to where you are now. You can’t skip ahead to some distant future state. You have to take the next step that’s available from here.

I’ve been thinking about that concept a lot as I build this EdTech startup. The business isn’t born from my AWS experience, not directly. It comes from personal struggles with the education system, watching my kids and other parents navigate an increasingly demanding academic environment. I want to help families get through the school years with less stress and hopefully achieve more. Shift that bell curve to the right.

But here’s the connection: I can only build this now because of all the changes in the tech industry. Specifically, the rapid emergence of GenAI. Five years ago, this idea wouldn’t have been technically feasible. Two years ago, it would have been possible but prohibitively expensive. Now? Now it’s adjacent to where the technology sits.

Which means all those technology waves I witnessed, all those organizational changes I lived through, all those personal relocations, that weird pandemic-era timezone hell in service of a Geneva dream, they positioned me to see this opportunity. Not because I planned it that way. Because change kept happening, and I kept adapting, and eventually the adjacent possible shifted to include something I actually wanted to build.

That’s the paradox at the heart of “everything changes all the time.” It sounds like chaos, like nothing matters because it’ll all be different tomorrow. But it’s actually the opposite. Everything changing all the time is exactly why your next step matters. Because what’s possible tomorrow depends on where you’re standing today.

What I Wish I’d Known

If I could go back and tell my younger self something about change, I’m not sure what it would be. “Don’t resist it” sounds too passive. “Embrace it” sounds like LinkedIn inspirational poster content. “Plan for it” suggests more control than you actually have.

Maybe it’s something like: “Change is going to happen whether you’re ready or not, so you might as well be doing something interesting while it happens.”

The changes I’m going through now, leaving big tech, building something from scratch, betting on myself in a way I’ve never done before, they’re terrifying in ways that technology shifts and re-orgs never were. Because this time I’m not adapting to changes happening around me. I’m choosing the change. Initiating it. Which means I can’t blame anyone else if it doesn’t work out.

But that old AWS refrain keeps echoing: everything changes all the time. The question isn’t whether things will change. It’s whether you’re changing toward something or just drifting with whatever current is strongest. And whether, when you look back, the changes you lived through positioned you to do something that mattered to you.

I don’t know yet if this startup will work. I don’t know if leaving big tech was the right call. I don’t know if the technology shifts I’m betting on (GenAI, mostly) will play out the way I think they will. What I do know is that I’m standing in a place I could only reach by going through all those other changes, the technology waves, the organizational chaos, the pandemic-era timezone hell, the Geneva adventure.

And from here, I can see the adjacent possible. That’s something.

Everything changes all the time. The trick is figuring out which changes to resist, which to ride, and which to initiate yourself. I’m still working on that last part.