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X (Twitter)

Ten years is a long time to lose track of someone. There's a guy I…

Ten years is a long time to lose track of someone. There's a guy I went to school with. We got close in grade 10, 11, 12 and then life did what life does. We drifted. No falling out, no drama, just the slow quiet of two people moving in different directions. I hadn't spoken to him in a hot minute. Then out of nowhere he found my LinkedIn. Saw I was co-founding something. Reached out. I'd just finished training when he messaged. Could have easily said I'd get back to him later. I didn't. We got on a call and within about ten minutes it hit me how strange and kind of brilliant timing can be sometimes. He's building his own business too. Independently. No overlap in what we're doing, just two guys who sat in the same classrooms years ago and somehow ended up on the same road without knowing it. You never know what people might be going through. That phrase sounds obvious when you say it out loud but most of us don't actually live by it. We assume the people we've lost touch with are fine, or busy, or just somewhere in the background of a life that doesn't involve us anymore. Sometimes that's true. Sometimes they're in the exact same place you are, working through the same kind of uncertainty, and neither of you knew until someone picked up the phone. What came out of that call wasn't just a nice catch-up. He pointed something out that's been sitting with me since. South Africa has a real gap. The potential for solving actual, meaningful problems with the tools that exist right now is massive, and it's largely untouched. Not because the talent isn't there. Not because the problems aren't real and urgent. Just because the dots haven't been joined properly yet. That part of the conversation landed hard. It wasn't new information exactly, but hearing it from someone who grew up in the same context, who's been quietly observing the same market from a different angle, made it concrete in a way it hadn't been before. I keep thinking about the timing of it all. He didn't reach out six months ago. He reached out now, when I'm in the middle of building something, when the questions about where this goes and who it serves are loudest. And the conversation added something to that, gave it a bit more shape. Bits and pieces come together in ways you can't plan for. That's essentially the lesson. You can be heads down, doing the work, and then an old classmate finds your profile and says something in a twenty minute call that reframes something you've been looking at for months. Kudos to where kudos is due, he's doing the thing. Building his own business, navigating his own version of this. And the fact that we reconnected when we did, both at the start of something, both figuring it out, felt like more than coincidence. If there's someone you've been meaning to reach back out to, just do it. Not because there's a clean lesson at the end of it. Just because you don't actually know where they are or what they're building. And sometimes that conversation is the one you needed without knowing it.

James GoddardJun 17, 2026Published to X — @JamesGodda75737View original ↗

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