This is a personal website of Tadas Vilkeliskis. The goal of this
site is to share information with others. This could be something
that I find interesting, useful, or just want to be captured on my
site for some reason. This site is served from my home
server.
As of 2025, this site is completely handcrafted by me. Everything
that's written here is original content, not generated by AI, unless
otherwise stated.
I hope you enjoy browsing this site as much as I enjoyed building
it.
About me
This is a photo of me taken in 2023, wearing a handlebar mustache from a pizza box.
2006: Moved to Kaunas for college to study computer science
2008: Moved to New Jersey, USA for another college to finish my degree
2011: Graduated college and moved to New York City for Chartbeat
2015: Went through Techstars with a couple of folks to build smart light bulbs
2016: Joined another startup because light bulbs did not work out
2017: Launched Simple OKR and tried to grow it, did some devops consulting and other random things
2019: Got married
2020: Started working for a fintech startup because my OKR business did not grow, moved to Raleigh
2021: Bought a home in the burbs
2022: Spent lots of time figuring out how to run a home, maintenance, lawn and whatnot
2023: Created npsbox.com but the product did not gain traction.
2025: Working on storage systems at Airbnb
2026: ...
Practical minimalist
I would consider myself a practical minimalist. Not sure if this
is a term that exists, but what this generally means is that my
consumption habits are minimal, but also I'm not trying to remove
everything from my life. I do not buy things for the sake of buying
things and prefer quality over quantity. Similar thing applies to
digital services and products. Check my listicle of things I use.
Entrepreneurship
When I look back at my life, a good portion of it has been spent
on entrepreneurial activities.
It all started when I was around 10 years old. At that time in
Lithuania you could buy Coca-Cola 0.5L bottles. Inside Coke bottle
caps you could find a marking of a Coke bottle. Not all caps had
these markings, but the ones that had them could be exchanged for a
free Coke bottle at a grocery store. The first things I sold in my
life were these Coke caps with bottle markings. I collected them and
later sold them to other kids who wanted to get Coke for less than
the store price. This is somewhat ridiculous sounding, but selling
bottle caps was my first taste of entrepreneurship.
After graduating college I joined a tech startup, Chartbeat. This
was my first job out of college. Our offices were inside Betaworks
incubator on West 12th Street in NYC. We were hanging out with a
bunch of other startups; Bitly is probably one of the better-known
ones. This experience gave me a glimpse into how software companies
get built.
After Chartbeat I joined a friend that I met there to work on a
hardware product. We went through a Techstars/RGA accelerator program
and were able to manufacture a smart light bulb prototype with a team
of three. Hardware was completely different from software, all custom-made with custom firmware. Much more difficult to make.
Unfortunately, we ran out of funding.
About four years later I decided to bootstrap an OKR management
SaaS—Simple OKR. It was a perfect storm of several things.
First, I learned about OKRs at another job I was at around that time.
We were using OKRs but did not have any way to track them. Another
big inspiration was Gary Vaynerchuk. I used to listen to his podcast
on my way to work. It was very inspiring. So I decided to try and
build a SaaS on my own. I bootstrapped it while working full time and
received my first paying customer a couple of months after launch.
The SaaS is still operational and has been running since 2017. This
experience taught me a lesson that anything is possible, despite it
not becoming a successful business.
Currently, I'm taking a break.
My software philosophy
I've been writing software for more than two decades. I taught
myself programming in my early teens, I later got my computer
science degree, and then spent years working at tech companies. This
experience shaped my beliefs on what software should be and how I
think about software and software development.
I like simple, purpose-built software. Software should have
longevity built in. Unfortunately, this is getting harder and harder
to see in the world due to the proliferation of
software-as-a-service and more recently access to LLM code
generation agents.
Because of this I will almost always choose battle-tested
solutions that stood the test of time (e.g. PostgreSQL) over some
novel shiny thing.
When I write code, I try to avoid adding as many external
dependencies as possible. Any dependency is a liability. System
architecture must remain simple for as long as possible. This becomes
increasingly important if we start talking about distributed
systems.
Software should be easy to use. Easy to use does not mean simple.
These are not mutually exclusive. I would even argue that software
that solves a complex problem while staying accessible will always
maintain its value.
