Led by fellow independents

Hi, we're Shaina and Harry, friends and longtime startup operators who now build a variety of income streams around our core skills — we're living this path right alongside you.

We think independent entrepreneurship is the future of work for people like us, so we started Manual Override to help others make the most of the opportunity.

This is a new career path for tech folks: working as entrepreneurs, but not building traditional tech startups. People like Lenny Rachitsky (opens in new tab), Mallory Contois (opens in new tab), and Wes Kao (opens in new tab) paved the way here: they built credibility and world-class skills in full-time tech jobs first, and now share their point of view broadly, managing multiple revenue streams around that core expertise.

We've seen firsthand that this work isn't just interesting — it can be more sustainable than a full-time job. When you have five clients and three revenue streams instead of one employer, you're never one layoff away from zero. When you monetize your skills across channels and products, you build leverage that compounds. When you own the definition of success, it can expand to include meaningful time with family, volunteering, and traveling — not just work.

This is, of course, easier said than done. Many of the best operators we know struggle to land on exactly what their special sauce is, or get caught up chasing 'perfect' instead of launching. Making the leap from employee to entrepreneur is just plain hard: finances, focus, personal accountability. And most people doing it are sitting alone in a guest bedroom home office, figuring out positioning through trial and error, undercharging because they don't know what to ask for, and wondering if they made a huge mistake.

Then there's AI. This isn't optional anymore. The companies hiring operators increasingly expect AI fluency — not as a nice-to-have, but as a baseline. The operators who build real systems around how they work will move faster, serve more clients, and win the work. The ones who don't will find themselves competing for less of it. That's not a scare tactic — it's what we're already seeing.

We built Manual Override to tackle all of it: the business foundations and the AI systems. We've already built this for ourselves, and we won't just teach you what worked — we'll connect you with a network of people doing the same. Startups have YC, 500 Startups, and TechStars. We built MO as the answer for independent operators.