Hey tech friends and advisors,
The last time I wrote to you was March 6 in 2024. If you’re reading this, it’s because you enjoy the journey and the chaos (which was not pleasant). The takeaway from this period is to leverage one win to get another opportunity, create your own luck, and to “bet on yourself”.
March 2026 – I started working for Sharry as a Delivery Manager.
Sharry is a “workplace experience” platform that enables buildings to delegate their daily access control operations to different teams at class A office buildings and for global corporations with multiple offices.
My role is one that combines an “Implementation” role of an Enterprise SaaS with that of a Software engineer. The role is very client facing and it's a fully remote position where I am one of two employees in the USA driving projects in the USA and Latin America. I spent two weeks working at Prague HQ with the rest of the team.
The journey getting here was not easy. There was a storm but now I feel like I have caught wind in my sails.
Below is a true story of my stormy era. But before you read it, I have a small ask for you.
What you can help me with:
I am connecting with business owners with 25+ employees in professional services industries like law and financial services firms with the goal of uncovering what their challenges are with their current technology tools or processes.
I am asking friends and advisors to connect me to these business owners they know who fit that criteria to hit my goal of having 30 conversations.
Now here’s what happened since you last heard from me:
Truthfully, with the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022 and rising interest rates (in yellow), the market for tech knowledge workers changed completely. See chart below.
Big tech companies laid off hundreds of thousands of workers in early 2024, and the fundraising climate took a while to recover from 2023 to 2025 because of the rise in interest rates.
These macro events affected the supply and demand for tech workers and as a result senior tech workers accepted lower salaries and crowded out more junior talent. The same “super tool” that increased productivity in my previous email updates also led to the role of software engineer becoming treated as a commodity.
These changes directly impacted my life, and it still seems like the situation is still dire for folks earlier in their career.
I took some small bets on myself to stand out in this period and increase my chances of getting back on track. I treated these opportunities as low-stakes, high-leverage experiments to maximize my visibility. My philosophy is to create a budget that is the lowest possible to achieve a goal, pull the trigger in booking flights, car, find a friend's couch, whatever it takes by being resourceful, respectful and transparent of what my goals are and minimizing the size of “any ask I make” as much as possible. I did this twice in 2024 and it made an impact in helping me create my own luck.
April 2024 – I booked flights to San Francisco for the Stripe developer conference.
I kinda used the fact that I’d be in the Bay Area as an opportunity to engineer an invitation to Apple Park in Cupertino for an in-person meeting. (Apple is very strict about the use of recording devices so I don’t have much footage).
Shout out to Abe C. who was a former WashU administrator who was a huge believer in me at WashU and made an introduction to the entrepreneur and engineer who developed the Emergency SOS Direct to Satellite feature who was kind to meet me for a coffee chat at Apple headquarters.
I also got to meet-up with one of my mentors, Robert M., and his family when I drove back and stopped by Mountain View.
Ok, so I’m “in between jobs” but I planned the trip around the Stripe Developer conference because it was a low financial risk. I got a 100% discounted developer invite code to be “inside the room”, rented a car to actually drive to Cupertino for the Apple visit, and slept on a friend's couch. This experiment led to some Software engineer interviews and lots of new contacts, but did not materialize into job offers as I had hoped for, but it was worth shooting my shot. Every experiment is seeing if you win or learn, and in this one I learned. Again, shout out to Abe C. because he literally generated like 10 intros to people for that trip.
August 2024 – I started working at Invisible Technologies as a Software engineer via a referral from a WashU alum (shoutout Jackson). Unfortunately, after a mere 7 weeks, the company over-hired, and I was let go.
While I was working at Invisible, my LinkedIn location was set to NYC, and someone on LinkedIn reached out with an opportunity to apply to be a speaker at Google’s TEC Innovate conference. I applied with the talk of “How to build an app in 45 minutes”. It was a pretty bold claim at the time , this was before Lovable and Claude Code, where it would probably take over an hour. When I got accepted, I learned how to actually build an app quickly and I practiced the steps, so I could execute it live.
October 2024 – I bought a flight to NYC and stayed on my friend’s couch and executed on my plan.
It was so cool to teach aspiring engineers how to build a Full Stack App in 45 minutes. The talk had so much demand that it filled all 40 seats in the room and some students weren’t allowed in because the organizers underestimated demand. I learned a lot preparing for this talk and it was a great experience.
Google was being obnoxiously strict about recording devices. Truthfully, I wanted to execute the talk as I had promised them but I also wanted to record it and publish it on YouTube. I had to find a way to do both while abiding by the recording device restriction. After being relentless and asking to be introduced to someone on the AV team, I discovered a workaround that involved using a device that was already in the room that allowed me to record the session via Google Meet.
Mission accomplished; the talk, on YouTube, is here -> buildappin45mins.com
I took the lessons from a book I read called Play Bigger and hijacked the event to create some great content marketing (while abiding by Google’s strict rules) for my LinkedIn profile and YouTube. The goal was to show people (who may not know me but could hire me) what I am capable of doing and get to know me better before an interview. Anyone who could hire me and would look at my LinkedIn would not miss this background photo. It is very apparent. I invested my own funds, as my bank balance was running low, to make this happen since I don’t live in NY. This move was me fighting to stand out during the dire market conditions. Don’t hate the player, hate the game.
Fast forward two months and still no job offer, but I received this text from my friend’s younger brother, Alain, a senior at Duke University, who was using my talk to learn “React and NextJs” from “one of the goats”. This moment was really fulfilling and helped me realize the impact of putting valuable things out to the world.
In February 2025, I convinced myself that I had to pursue a greater technical challenge and showcase my talent to people in tech. I built and launched an app to gamify my weekly soccer game.
Here is the launch video for playerratingsmiami -> https://www.instagram.com/reel/DJZg-_4NmTv/
In one sentence, every participating player voted on every other participating player’s “rating” after each soccer game and the app also tracked each player’s “win” streak by tracking the score of each game every week.
The motive of making this app was to get the experience of building a full stack app by myself (a challenge that I had not done at the time). I learned how to handle unexpected bugs in real time so users can give me their feedback and it was a practice run of actually launching something of my own in public.
I really hoped this would be my ticket to a new job in the dire market conditions and it absolutely helped!
February 2025 to June 2025 – Built an MVP of the app in one month, launched it and worked out the kinks with consistent weekly usage of 40 active users. If I wanted to keep pushing to expand, the app was ready to accept more groups.
When I sent screenshots of this via text to the founder of Accessgrid, he invited me to his office. He was already familiar with me since he was a recipient of my advisor update emails, and offered me an opportunity to work for his company on-the-spot.
Once I got hired at Accessgrid, I shut down the app. It served its purpose, and it wasn’t pleasant to have a number tied to each of my friend’s names. I learned a lot from the experience from setting up the entire architecture of the database, setting up the schema of each table and making the architecture work for all groups who would join the app.
June 2025 to Jan 2026 – Accessgrid
The scope of work at Accessgrid started with technical writing work. The goal was to create guides of very esoteric technical demos related to the access control industry using open source software and other tools that people would search online.
This turned into making three ad-hoc full-stack applications addressing various specific needs, participating in some sales calls, pitching customers at ISC East conference, doing live installations and customer support of access control systems for customers both in Miami and on the ground for a customer in Europe.
I worked 80 to 100 hour weeks directly with/for the founder of a billion dollar company and learned a lot of esoteric knowledge about Access Control, card readers, and encryption protocols for both the reading and transport of credential data.
Here’s a random photo of me taking apart a door simulator:
Here’s a picture of a UHPPOTE micro-controller screwed to the concrete wall (final version) and a VTAP card reader installed (first photo taken as I swapped a pin code reader).
I wrote 20 technical guides, 4 of which have been published.
I built a python based Windows application that served as a bidirectional data sync between a database and a REST API. There were a lot of lifecycle states that needed to be tracked that made this project a great challenge before shipping it off to a customer. This was one of the most technically complex projects I’ve ever worked on.
I scraped Reddit and built a website ranking the top access control brands and added reference to some of the comments → pacs50.com
I built several browser automation scripts that would automate clicks on a website, one of them took a manual task that took one hour and turned it into 210 seconds…it even accomplished advanced 2 factor authentication on a very popular global third party portal.
I learned a lot and am very grateful for the work experience because I truly learned a ton.
The founder of Accessgrid made me an offer to stay long term at the company. While I am grateful for the experience, we ultimately went our separate ways.
March 2 - I started as a Delivery Manager at Sharry. It was a very fast interview process because the work experience and knowledge I had was directly applicable. There’s a ton to learn about more complex access control systems, IT networks, and how to deal with people within corporations. To successfully deliver a project, I have to unblock barriers across three different teams.
In my first month at Sharry, I built automation scripts of 4 manual reports the support team was orchestrating manually. This was a key win that helped deliver trust since I was still the new guy. I also built a customer support ticket theme aggregator script that uses the GPU on my computer to analyze clusters and embeddings of each ticket.
Also in March 2026 – I won third place in a hackathon.
While the last two years have had a lot of volatility, I finally feel like I’m back. I’ve built resilience and have gotten more conviction in what I know and how I can contribute. I have cold-called people and sent hundreds of cold emails and have really learned how to pitch myself for opportunities. It was a very challenging period and I am excited to keep learning more and develop more relationships as I talk to more people in the industry in my customer facing role.
It means everything to me that you are following along and rooting for me because you help me stay accountable to my goals.
Some books I read since my last update
- The Prince
- Corporate Turnaround Artistry
- The Little Prince
- One Hell of a Gamble
- The Alchemist
- Play Bigger
I am tracking the books I’ve read and have now published the previous advisor updates on my website: michaelpichardo.com for all to see.
Lastly, I have been playing a lot of tennis and soccer and I feel confident in my ability to shine at events and conferences. If there any that can help with what I’m working on lmk. Overall, I am back and really excited about the future.
Thank you for being part of my journey,
Michael