Someone asks what I do, and I still don't have a clean answer, even after all this time building the actual answer in real life. "I build a payment app" is true, and it's also somehow not the whole truth, the way a photo of one room isn't the whole house. "I'm also an artist" makes people's faces shift slightly, like I've just complicated something that was supposed to be simple. Pick a lane, their expression says, without ever actually saying it out loud.
I used to have a shorter answer ready, something clean enough to fit in an elevator. I've stopped reaching for it. The short answer was never actually true — it was just easier to say than the real one, and I'm not sure "easier" was ever a good enough reason to keep saying it.
Here's the thing nobody warns you about when you're building more than one version of yourself at once: the world has a strong preference for people who fit into a single sentence. Investors want a founder, singular focus, one clear metric climbing in one clear direction. Fans want an artist who lives inside the music, not someone splitting attention with something as unglamorous as a checkout flow. Everyone, in their own well-meaning way, is quietly asking you to simplify yourself down to whichever part of you is useful to them in that specific conversation.
For a while, I tried to give people that simplified version. I'd talk about CozonPay with founders and quietly leave Owlzila out of it, like it was a secret that might undercut how seriously they took me. I'd talk about music with other artists and downplay the fintech thing, worried it would make me sound like someone hedging, someone who didn't fully believe in the art enough to go all in on it. I was editing myself down to fit whichever room I happened to be standing in, and I told myself that was just professionalism. Reading it back now, it feels closer to a quiet kind of dishonesty I'd gotten so used to I stopped noticing it as dishonesty at all.
What actually broke that habit wasn't some grand realization. It was smaller and more embarrassing than that — I noticed I was tired in a specific way that had nothing to do with hours worked. Not the good tired that comes after a real day of building something. A duller, more corrosive tired, the kind that comes from holding two versions of yourself apart from each other, carefully, so they never accidentally touch in front of the wrong audience. Keeping two things separate takes its own kind of energy, it turns out, energy I hadn't accounted for because it doesn't show up on any calendar as a task.
I think the deeper fear underneath all of it was actually about being taken less seriously either way. If I lead with the music, will the fintech world write me off as unfocused. If I lead with the platform, will the music world hear it as a hobby dressed up as a side hustle, something I'm not fully committed to. Both fears are really the same fear wearing different clothes — the fear that being more than one thing means being adequate at neither, instead of what it might actually mean, which is that both things are shaped by the same person, and that person happens to contain more than any single label was built to hold.
I don't think this tension fully resolves, if I'm honest. Some days I still feel the pull to simplify myself for whoever's in the room, because it would genuinely be easier, and easier is a real temptation, not a small one. But I've started noticing something else too, something that's made the discomfort worth carrying. The work is better, on both sides, precisely because it isn't separated the way I used to keep it. CozonPay is better because I think about it the way I think about a song — does this actually feel right, not just does this technically function. The music is better because I bring the same discipline to it that shipping a payment system demands — you don't get to hand-wave the parts that are hard just because they're less exciting than the parts you're naturally good at.
Maybe the honest answer to "what do you do" was never supposed to be a single sentence in the first place. Maybe the discomfort of not having one isn't a problem to solve so much as a signal that I'm actually building something whole, instead of a curated fragment optimized for whoever's asking. A person who fits neatly into one sentence is often a person who's quietly cut away everything that didn't fit the sentence, and I'm no longer convinced that's a trade worth making just to make small talk easier.
So now, when someone asks what I do, I try to just tell them the actual truth, even when it takes longer than they were expecting, even when I watch their expression do that small recalibrating thing people do when you haven't given them a clean box to file you under. I build things that move money safely for people who've been let down by systems that were supposed to make their lives easier. And I make music under a different name, because some things I need to say don't fit inside a checkout flow, and never will.
Both are true. Neither one is the whole story without the other standing next to it. I've stopped apologizing for that taking two sentences instead of one.