7 years ago I met an incredible individual called Josh Roxby.

Both of us grew up a 30 minute drive from each other in the pits of rural Ireland but had never met - neither of us had access to decent internet, heck to this day both of our family homes have mobile signal blackspots where you couldn’t reach the outside world if you wanted too.

We bonded over a shared hunger to do more and continued to connect a couple of times a year. We were both working in the events industry at the time, Josh had been touring on large scale theatrical productions and I was whipping around commercial circuits from stadium tours to conferences. Until one faithful conversation in 2019 over pints on a rooftop bar in Dublin - we hatched a plan to turn Josh’s photographer moniker “Exhale” into a creative powerhouse, or at least that’s how we saw it at the time.

We nailed down our launch strategy, landed a partnership that would give us unrequited access to a year of shows, artists and events - for which we would provide onsite media and post production services, wrangled a team of hungry creatives and were ready to go to work. Until on March 18th 2020, the same day we received the incorporation papers for “Exhale Productions ltd.” - the world shut down.

A lot happened in this time, we had to let the entire creative team go and figure out our next move. Something I often ponder over the is the power of mutuals, there really is no higher stamp of validation of another person in my eyes than when someone I would trust with my life introduces me to someone who they would trust with theirs, and boy did that become a cornerstone of the past 4 years of our lives.

A group of us moved into a house in Galway for the summer, bright eyed and bashful, while the world was shut down there was still this infectious feeling we shared that by the time it opened back up we would be swinging for the fences. It’s at this point of the story where we introduce Finn, Martin, Shane, Tadhg and Dylan. Each of us connected to one another in different ways, bound by the power of various mutual friendships.

Around a year later, we had another addition to this rag tag misfit mafia - Arek, the somehow pragmatic eternal optimist, now one of my favourite human beings on the planet, joined the fold. Brought in by Dylan, Arek had just finished his computer science degree and at the time I was on a solo side quest in Budapest looking for “what’s next” and banging my head off a keyboard trying to get a grasp of solidity. Arek became our CTO - Yet another testament to the power of the mutuals.

The group never intended to end up in business together, it was more so a conscious intention to create a support network for each other to pursue our own goals - but over time they began to merge into the one. We bounced from challenge to challenge, moved and traveled together on this quest to “figure it all out”, shared wins, consoled loses, lived in all kinds of conditions - from a lavish villa on the coast of Spain to squashing 6-8 people into 2/3 bedroom houses/apartments in Athlone/Barcelona. I will forever look back at that period of life as one of the most exciting and transformative periods and honestly couldn’t imagine a better crew to have shared it with.

At this point the team had formed two sudo structures under the same scaffolding - one focused on tech and providing developer services, the other focused on content and marketing - both had there ups and down’s, ironically often inversely , which led to one side carrying the other at different points in time. Yet as we tallied a win here and there on either side, the resume began to open doors for both and kept us dynamic to the point that I think it was at the very least, intriguing if not confusing to anyone on the outside.

Fast forward to the beginning of this year - The content side of the business (Exhale) spearheaded by Finn is steadily building momentum as the team continues to drive 10s to 100s of millions of views each month across platforms for some of the biggest Artists in the world. While on the tech side, Arek, Josh and I, have been 100% dedicated to figuring out our next chapter since we stumbled upon a very purple protocol which we now call home.

I felt inspired to write this today as we received the incorporation documents for our next venture: "Categorically Large - a self proclaimed Onchain Entertainment Company."

I hope for everyone's sake that the world doesn’t react to this one like it did the first, regardless, I just wanted to let you know, we will be swinging for the fences building things that we hope can capture your imagination, entertain you and create compelling offerings to onboard the world to the protocol we believe is best positioned to bring the world onchain through the things that matters most, people and connection.

Long Live Farcaster.