Not an expert take, just why I'm actually doing this.
Part of why I'm doing this is dumb and simple: I wanted to learn how to actually build a directory and a community, not read about how other people did it. You learn the real stuff by hitting the annoying parts yourself.
The other part is more personal. I was a frontend dev at a startup, and I was watching AI change what my job even looked like, week by week. I'm not trying to make it sound dramatic, it was just happening, plainly, in front of me. So instead of sitting there and just letting that happen to me, I figured I'd pick up the same tools and go build something of my own with them. That's why this whole thing leans on AI so much. It's not a gimmick, it's the only reason one person can run this at all. There's no team behind this. It's just me.
I also just wanted a real reason to be in the SoCal tech scene instead of reading about it from the outside. Building something like this kind of drags you into it whether you meant it to or not.
I don't have a five-year plan here, or really even a one-year one. I'd just like this to be the thing people around here actually pull up, instead of some national list that treats this whole region like an afterthought. A newsletter, a community, whatever comes next, none of that matters if that first part isn't already true.