A while back I was having a conversation with someone who was asking me all kinds of questions about what I do. One of them was where I wanted to take all of this. Big question. I told him I just wanted to be retired.
He nodded, moved on to his next question, and never circled back to the one that actually mattered. What does retirement look like to you?
I floated that answer on purpose. Call it a litmus test. I wanted to see if he would get curious about what I actually meant, or just take it at face value and keep going. He took it at face value. No hard feelings. The question he skipped has been rattling around in my head ever since.
The Whole Canvas
His question was not a bad one. He just stopped pulling the thread right when it got interesting. Asking a builder where he is headed and then nodding at "retired" and moving on is like walking up to a painter, pointing at the one eye he has started on a face, and asking why it is not finished yet. The rest of the canvas is barely sketched. You are staring at one detail and missing the whole composition. The eye is not the painting.
If he had kept asking, here is what he would have found. Not one company. About five of them, each with its own products, its own plan to reach a market, and its own honest status.
There is the managed IT and security firm. That one is already live, serving real clients and paying the bills. It is the engine, the part that proves we can actually run technology for people who cannot afford for it to break.
There is the shop building real AI products. Not slideware. Actual tools meant to do actual work. The flagship is Hextant, a virtual C-suite, a whole room of AI executives an operator can actually sit down with, and a working version of it runs today. Underneath it sits RhizomeRAG, a memory system for AI agents that we put out in the open for anyone to build on. Behind those two are a few more pieces in active build, the engine that makes a fleet of agents work together, the parts that wire all of it into the tools people already use. I would rather hand you something that runs than sell you a demo.
There is the open source lab. When we solve a problem worth sharing, the tool goes out into the world for anyone to use. A developer security dashboard called HexOps. A hardening baseline for a directory server that almost nobody bothers to document. A handful of smaller tools, including the little content system this very site runs on. People I will never meet are running our code today. That one still gets me.
There is a small media arm. It is not much yet, but it works. If you need pictures taken, it can take them today.
And there is a consulting network, the newest of the bunch and the one still closest to the notes I scribbled at two in the morning. Not a firm with employees. A co-op of independent operators who send each other work and vouch for each other. The whole idea is to get founders the help they actually need from people who have already done it and are still doing it, not from somebody who read about it in a book. We are still gathering the founding partners for it. It is the earliest piece of everything here, and I am fine saying that too.
The whole group has its own home now too, a roof over all of it. Hexaxia.
The mission we wrote over the door is simple. To stand with every business ready to become what it was meant to be.
The vision underneath it is just as plain. To make Hexaxia the word a business says when it means "the one that got it right."
Most people never get a single company off the ground. We are almost at five. I sat on all of this for a long time and kept it under my hat, waiting until enough of it was actually standing that saying it out loud would not feel like bragging about a daydream. Enough of it is standing now. So I am done keeping quiet.
What Retirement Means To Me
So when I say I want to be retired, here is what I actually mean.
For most people, retirement means the day you stop. The last meeting. The handoff. The rest you spend forty years saving up for. I get it. I burned out hard enough once to know exactly what the fantasy of stopping feels like, and how loud it gets when you are running on empty. I wrote about that whole mess a while back. It nearly took me out.
That is not what the word means to me anymore.
For me, retirement is building Hexaxia into something worth at least a billion dollars. Not so I can cash out and disappear onto a beach somewhere. The number is not the point. A thing worth that much is a thing that actually got built. It stands up without me. It outlasts me. People build their own lives on top of it. That is the part I am after.
The billion is just a proxy. What I really want is the proof. I want to stand in front of something real, something that works, something nobody gave me permission to make, and know I built it. That is the rest I am chasing. Not the absence of work. The presence of something finished enough to hold its own weight.
Anyone who has known me a while knows the shape of this. I tore my whole life down once and rebuilt it. The path back turned out to be the path forward.
Over a year ago I got laid off. At the time it felt like the floor dropping out from under me, the kind of thing that is supposed to wreck you.
It did the opposite. Looking back, it was more like being a coke bottle somebody had been shaking up for years. All that pressure with nowhere to go, building under a cap I did not even know was screwed on that tight. Then one day the cap came flying off.
I could think for myself again. My decisions were my own, no longer bridled by somebody else's plans, somebody else's risk tolerance, somebody else's idea of what counted as realistic. That is really when this started.
So I go be Aaron and build the thing. And I do not stop.
When you measure where a person is going by exits and growth curves and how fast they can hand the thing off to somebody else, my answer does not compute. Where do you want to go with this? I want to build it until it does not need me to build it anymore. That is not the answer that mindset is looking for, and that is fine. We were never going to land on the same number.
Not Alone
And I am not swinging at this alone, which is the part that took me too long to learn. I have a business partner, Jay, who keeps me on track and, just as important, keeps me throttled when I want to run straight through a wall. My wife props me up on the days I do not think I have another one in me. My family cheers us on. And our core group of people is starting to come together, so we are not out here slugging it by ourselves anymore. That matters more than the billion ever will.
The universe has a funny way of clearing the people out of my path who do not need to be there, and dropping the right ones on my head when I am not even looking. That is most of how this group found each other.
I am not tired of this. I am not counting down to the day I get to quit. I am building the only retirement I have ever actually wanted, the kind where the thing you made is strong enough that it does not need you holding it up every single day.
So that is the real answer to the question he never asked. I am already retired, in the only way I care about. I just have not finished building it yet.
