The decision had already been made.
Y sat in the crowded coffee shop—the one that stayed open past seven, the one where everyone congregated when the other locations closed—and felt the weight of what he was about to do. Not the anxiety of uncertainty. The gravity of certainty.
Sam's offer was still on the table. The money hadn't come through yet, but it would. It always did. A steady paycheck. A title. The prestige of working on what Sam called "the second coolest thing in tech."
But Y had seen something else. Something Sam refused to build.
"I didn't break his heart," Y said to his collaborator, recounting the conversation. The negotiation remained open, the bridge unburned. But Y's mind had already crossed to the other side.
Yesterday. Or maybe it was the end of last week. Time compressed in those moments when vision crystallizes into action. Y had realized Sam wasn't going to build this—the intelligence system that Y had been architecting in his head for years. The ambient AI. The always-on awareness. The thing that would know you better than you knew yourself.
Y had tried to steer Sam toward it. Had laid out the growth strategy, the path to market, the viral mechanisms. Sam kept saying no. Kept pulling back to the safer vision, the enterprise play, the knowledge workers.
So Y did what builders do when the architecture doesn't exist: he started laying the foundation himself.
Two days. That's all it had taken.
The prototype was running on his iPhone 15. Local transcription—audio that never left the device, chunked into fifteen-minute segments, processed in under a second. No cloud dependency for the core function. No privacy nightmare. No unit economics death spiral like the competitors who were burning dollars per user per day on remote processing.
Y had found the unlock: fluid models running on Apple's Neural Engine. Open source. Efficient. Possible.
"Your audio never leaves," Y explained, the words carrying the weight of someone who'd just solved a fundamental problem everyone else was approaching wrong. Limitless had raised thirty million dollars. Granola was building meeting transcription tools. Sentience had gone to desktop and abandoned the mobile dream.
They were all thinking too small.
Y pulled up the interface on his phone and showed his friend the generated output:
"I didn't break his heart, one said discussing a recent business negotiation. The money hadn't come through yet, but the opportunity remained open."