Three Years, Ten Thousand Dollars, and a Thing That Should Outgrow Me

I have been building this for three years. Two and a half of them inside Vocational Rehabilitation. Last month they approved $10,000 to start the business — and here is exactly where it went.

I want to tell you the actual numbers, because I have spent a lot of words on this platform arguing that people should be able to see how systems work, and it would be strange to be cagey about my own.

Three years

I have been building Kaleidoscope Systems for three years. Two and a half of those were inside Vocational Rehabilitation — the state programme that helps disabled people get into work.

That sentence is doing a lot of quiet work, so let me unpack it. VR is not a grant scheme for people with ideas. It is a system you enter because you cannot work, and it is slow, and it is full of forms, and it asks you to justify your own existence in fifteen-minute increments. I have written elsewhere about what that does to a person. I stand by all of it.

I also want to say plainly: it worked. Not smoothly,…