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MY BUSINESS PARTNER IS A WORLD CHAMPION YO-YO PLAYER AND WE HAVE NEVER MET IN REAL LIFE

March 4, 2026

Two office chairs facing each other across a very long conference table that stretches across the entire continental United States, one chair has a tiny clown nose hanging off the armrest and the other has a yo-yo tangled in the wheels, the table is covered in Discord notifications and unanswered emails, a single tumbleweed rolls across the middle of the table wearing a lanyard that says “IN-PERSON MEETING CANCELED (AGAIN)”, outside the window on one end it’s sunny and on the other end it’s raining, a cat is asleep on a laptop at one end and a yo-yo is performing a trick by itself at the other end as if haunted

Look. I need to tell you about my business partner Steve.

Steve Brown is a world champion yo-yo player. Like, an actual, real, competitive, has-trophies-and-everything world champion yo-yo player. unklesteve.com. Go look. I’ll wait.

Yes, really.

No, I’m not making it up. Yes, I know how that sounds. Yes, it’s exactly as cool as you think it is. The man is a legend in the yo-yo world, which is a sentence I never expected to type as a way to introduce my business partner at a software company, and yet here we are. Life is beautifully stupid sometimes.

Steve and I run nervous.net together — we build SaaS tools and Discord bots for small businesses. A clown and a yo-yo champion building software. If you wrote that in a pitch deck, people would assume you were doing a bit. But no. This is a real company run by two real entertainers who somehow ended up writing code for a living, and honestly? It works. It works really well.

The Part Where I Mention We’ve Never Met

We’ve been working together for almost four years.

We have never met in person.

Not once. Never. We have never been in the same room. We’ve never shaken hands. We’ve never gotten coffee. We’ve never done the awkward “should we hug or is this a handshake situation” thing that happens when internet friends meet IRL. We have built an entire business together and the closest we’ve gotten to being in the same physical space is being on the same continent, which — and I cannot stress this enough — is a very large continent.

Sarah thinks this is hilarious. She’s right. It is hilarious. We’re running a company the way some people run a long-distance relationship, except instead of “I miss you” texts it’s Discord messages about database migrations and API rate limits at 11pm. The romance is palpable.

I’m sure we’ll meet eventually. Probably at some point one of us will be in the other’s city and we’ll get lunch and it’ll be completely normal and anticlimactic and we’ll both be like “yep, that’s what you look like in three dimensions.” But right now the absurdity of it has become sort of load-bearing. It’s part of the bit. You can’t break the streak on purpose — it has to happen naturally or not at all.

The Entertainer-to-Coder Pipeline

Here’s the thing that shouldn’t work but does: we both come from entertainment backgrounds. I’m a clown. Literally. I went to clown school. I’ve done shows. I have clown credentials. Steve is a world champion yo-yo player. We are two people who spent significant portions of our lives perfecting skills that make exactly zero sense on a tech résumé.

And yet.

Entertainers are really, really good at figuring out what an audience needs. We’re good at reading a room. We’re good at knowing when something isn’t landing and adjusting on the fly. Turns out those skills translate surprisingly well to building products for people. When Steve and I look at a piece of software, we’re not just thinking about the code — we’re thinking about the person on the other end. Is this confusing? Is this delightful? Would this make someone’s day slightly better or slightly worse? That’s entertainer brain. It’s annoyingly useful.

Steve Does Email So I Don’t Have To

I’ve written about my relationship with email before. The short version: I selected all, hit archive, and never looked back. The long version is in that post. But the crucial detail I maybe undersold is that the only reason I can get away with ignoring email entirely is because Steve is an absolute email boss.

Steve lives in the inbox. He thrives there. He does things with email that I find both impressive and deeply unsettling, like responding to people within hours and keeping his unread count at zero. Zero! Voluntarily! The man treats his inbox like a garden he tends daily instead of the burning dumpster fire I treated mine as before I abandoned it entirely.

This is the dynamic. Steve handles the things that would literally break me — email, client communication, the organizational backbone of keeping a business running like adults are in charge. And I handle the things that would literally break Steve — writing code at 2am because I had an idea in the shower, building weird prototypes nobody asked for, and convincing myself that a Discord bot feature is “urgent” when it absolutely is not.

The Complement of It

Sarah said something a while back that stuck with me. She said Steve and I are like two halves of a competent person. I think she meant it as a compliment? The math checks out either way.

The stuff I’m bad at, Steve is good at. The stuff Steve doesn’t want to do, I’m already doing. We don’t step on each other’s toes because we’re not even in the same room — literally, we’ve established this — and we’re definitely not reaching for the same tasks. There’s no ego thing where we both want to be the one making the big decisions. Steve has his domain. I have mine. We meet in the middle on the stuff that matters and stay out of each other’s way on the stuff that doesn’t.

It’s the most functional professional relationship I’ve ever had, and it’s happening entirely through screens between a clown and a yo-yo champion who have never met. If that’s not evidence that the universe has a sense of humor, I don’t know what is.

The Actual Appreciation Part

I’m not great at sincerity without a joke buffer, so let me get through this quickly before it gets weird.

Steve is genuinely one of the best people I’ve ever worked with. He shows up. He cares about the work. He cares about the people we’re building for. He handles the parts of running a business that I can’t — not won’t, can’t — and he does it without making me feel like I’m the weak link for being allergic to my inbox. He makes nervous.net possible in a way that isn’t just “he helps.” If Steve wasn’t doing what he does, there wouldn’t be a nervous.net. It would just be me, alone, with a pile of code and an inbox on fire and no idea how to talk to another human being via email.

So yeah. My business partner is a world champion yo-yo player. We’ve never met in real life. We run a software company together from opposite ends of the country. A clown and a yo-yo legend, building tools for small businesses, communicating exclusively through screens.

It shouldn’t work. But it does. And I’m really damn glad it does.

Steve, if you’re reading this — and I know you are because you actually read your messages unlike some people — thanks, man. For real. Now please go check the email.