A Year That Changed Everything
2026 has been one of the most important years of my life.
It is difficult to summarize a year like this because so much happened at once. Some things went exactly the way I hoped. Others did not. There were products that moved from ideas into something real, decisions that changed the direction of Yavqo, new people entering my life and others moving into different chapters of theirs.
More than anything, this year taught me how quickly things can change when you are building something you genuinely care about.
Yavqo became much bigger than a company with a few products
I have always wanted Yavqo to become an ecosystem rather than a company known for one thing.
This year, that vision started feeling significantly more real.
We continued expanding products across AI, software, infrastructure, developer tools, communication, entertainment and consumer technology.
Yavqo Labs became an increasingly important part of that future.
Sunlight continued evolving as our AI platform. We worked on new Sunlight models, real-time AI, image capabilities and the broader direction of what AI inside Yavqo should eventually become.
Sunlight Workers became another part of that story, giving us a different way to think about AI assistants and how people could work with them.
We also continued developing products such as Yavqo Maps, Yavqo Streets, Yavqo Translate, Yavqo Forms, Yavqo Cloud and many others across the ecosystem.
Some of these products are already useful today.
Others are still early.
And that is fine.
One thing I have learned is that not everything needs to be perfect immediately. What matters is having the willingness to keep improving it.
We started building more for developers
One of the areas I became increasingly interested in this year was developer infrastructure.
We started publishing more packages and making parts of Yavqo available to developers outside the company.
Projects such as Yavqo Maps, Captures and Yavqo Streets became part of that effort.
Yavqo Streets in particular allows developers to integrate our street-level imagery technology into their own products.
We also began thinking much more seriously about developer tooling itself.
That included ideas like Yavqo Code, our vision for a platform around source code, repositories and collaboration.
It also included smaller open-source projects through Yavqo Labs.
I want Yavqo to be a company that does not only build products for consumers. I want developers to be able to build on top of what we create too.
AI became one of our biggest priorities
AI has obviously changed technology enormously over the past few years.
For Yavqo, this year was about deciding what our own role in that future should be.
We worked on Sunlight, Sunlight Workers, real-time voice systems and different approaches to visual intelligence.
We also experimented with more technical projects such as Aivory, an open-source effort focused on making large AI models easier to run on more accessible hardware.
There is still an enormous amount of work ahead.
But I am increasingly convinced that AI will eventually become a layer across almost every Yavqo product rather than being limited to one application.
We started looking beyond software
One of the things I am most excited about is the point where software and hardware meet.
This year we continued working toward that.
We started developing Vision 1, our AI smart glasses project.
The idea is simple in theory but much harder in practice: create glasses that can understand what you see, communicate naturally with you and eventually become a useful everyday computing device.
We have been experimenting with real-time voice, visual understanding and the software architecture behind the product.
We also started thinking more seriously about our own operating systems.
That includes SonaOS, which is intended for future Yavqo phones and computers.
There is still a long road between prototypes and products people can depend on every day.
But this is exactly the kind of long-term work I want Yavqo to be doing.
We built new businesses around the ecosystem
Not everything this year was directly about AI.
We also explored entirely new categories.
Yavqo Domains was created around domain registration and internet infrastructure.
Yavqo Businesses became our attempt to rethink professional and company identity online.
The idea evolved significantly while we were building it.
It started closer to a business listing platform and gradually became something much broader, with personal profiles, company pages, employment verification, posts, followers, messaging and professional identity.
We also explored products around jobs, education and other areas where I think Yavqo can eventually contribute something meaningful.
One of those ideas became Yavqo Studies, focused on educational material for schools, with a much larger long-term vision around school software.
A lot of what we are building today will probably look very different several years from now.
That is part of building.
We kept improving what already existed
Something I realized this year is that adding more products cannot be the only goal.
At some point, you have to go back and make what you already built better.
That became a major priority.
Across Yavqo, we started focusing more heavily on product quality, user experience and consistency.
The objective is to bring our products closer together visually and functionally, especially around the white-and-blue Yavqo design language.
Some teams continue developing completely new products, while others focus on improving the products millions of interactions may eventually depend on.
Both are equally important.
Building the future is exciting.
Maintaining and refining what already exists is what turns experiments into real products.
Yavqo grew, and my responsibilities changed with it
Running a company at a larger scale is very different from starting one.
As Yavqo has grown, my role has changed too.
I still care deeply about products.
I still get involved in details.
I still have opinions about everything from interfaces and naming to product strategy and how something should feel when someone opens it for the first time.
But leadership increasingly means thinking beyond individual features.
It means deciding where the company goes next.
It means deciding what deserves resources, what needs to be delayed, what needs to be rebuilt and occasionally what needs to end.
Those decisions are not always enjoyable.
But they are part of the responsibility.
Not everything this year was positive
It would be easy to write a year-end post containing only launches and milestones.
That would not be honest.
There were difficult periods too.
Some ideas did not work as well as expected.
Some products needed far more improvement than I originally thought.
There were technical problems, design mistakes and moments where we simply had to admit that something needed to be rebuilt.
There were also changes involving people.
People join companies, people leave them and people sometimes move on to build something completely different.
Those moments can be difficult, especially when you have worked closely with someone for a long time.
There were personal challenges as well.
Some moments this year were exciting.
Others were lonely.
Some days I felt extremely confident about where everything was going. On other days, I questioned decisions far more than most people around me probably realized.
I think that is something founders do not talk about enough.
Building something ambitious can be incredibly rewarding while still being mentally exhausting.
Both things can be true at the same time.
Tiescop became another new chapter
Outside Yavqo, I also started working on Tiescop.
The ambition behind it is very different from most of the software products I have built before.
Tiescop is focused on neurotechnology and the longer-term relationship between humans and computers.
It is still extremely early.
But starting it reminded me of something I had almost forgotten.
There is a unique feeling when something exists almost entirely as an idea and you are slowly giving it shape.
No expectations.
No legacy systems.
No established rules.
Just the question:
What should this become?
That feeling is one of the reasons I started building companies in the first place.
I also became more public this year
For a long time, I mostly focused on building things.
This year I started becoming more active publicly too.
I started using platforms such as X and Instagram more intentionally and sharing more of the things I am working on.
That is still something I am learning.
I have never wanted my life to become a constant stream of carefully manufactured founder content.
I would rather share things when there is genuinely something interesting happening.
Products.
Experiments.
Ideas.
Mistakes.
Maybe the occasional completely random thought.
I think that is more interesting anyway.
There are still things I want to do differently
Looking back also means acknowledging what could have been better.
I want us to move faster in some areas.
I want certain Yavqo products to feel much more polished.
I want our ecosystem to become easier to understand.
I want our AI work to become significantly more ambitious.
I want us to release more developer tools and more open-source work.
I want to spend more time thinking years ahead instead of weeks ahead.
And personally, I want to become better at knowing when something needs my attention and when I should let other people solve it.
That might be one of the hardest parts of being a founder.
When you built something from the beginning, everything feels like your responsibility.
Eventually, you have to learn that leadership also means trusting other people with something you care about.
I am still just getting started
Despite everything that happened this year, I do not feel like I have reached anything close to the destination.
If anything, 2026 made the scale of what I still want to build feel even larger.
I want Yavqo to become one of the companies that genuinely influences how people use technology.
I want Sunlight to become significantly more capable.
I want our hardware work to become real products people use every day.
I want our developer ecosystem to grow.
I want Yavqo to keep entering areas where people might not expect us.
And I want to keep building companies and technologies that feel slightly unreasonable when they first begin.
There is still so much I do not know.
There are still countless things that can go wrong.
There will probably be products we shut down, strategies we change and ideas that look ridiculous in hindsight.
That does not bother me.
Progress has never been a straight line.
Thank you
To everyone working on Yavqo, thank you.
To the people who have challenged my decisions, thank you.
To everyone who has used one of our products, reported a bug, written something about us, built with something we released or simply followed what we are doing, thank you.
And to the people who have been part of my life outside the company, especially during the less visible parts of this year, thank you too.
2026 gave me some of my proudest moments.
It also gave me some of the most difficult ones.
I learned more about business.
I learned more about technology.
I learned more about people.
And I learned quite a lot about myself.
There are still a few months left in this year.
And I have no intention of slowing down.
This year changed everything.
I have a feeling the next one might change even more.