Damn. I got dengue.
The CEO of a mosquito-fighting tech company, taken down by a mosquito.
I originally wrote this in September 2024, about a year after we landed in Thailand. I’ve added a note at the end from now.
Me getting dengue is like Elon Musk crashing a self-driving Tesla.
For four years I was the Founder and CEO of Diptera.ai, where we built technology to fight dengue, malaria, and other mosquito-borne diseases. Then I left - and less than six months later, a mosquito put me in bed for two weeks.
It started small. I felt weak, figured I was dehydrated. The next morning it was worse, and a blood test came back with the answer: dengue. High fever, body aches, and in the bad cases, real complications. Even death.
The irony stings, because at Diptera the whole point was stopping exactly this. We developed technology to fight mosquitoes with mosquitoes - an approach called the Sterile Insect Technique. We’d mass-produce sterile male mosquitoes (males don’t bite), release them into the wild, and they’d mate with the females, whose eggs then never hatch. The local population collapses. No pesticides, no poisons - the mosquitoes end the mosquitoes.
It was the most fascinating company I’ve ever worked on. Brilliant people, backing from the Gates Foundation, and a mission I genuinely believed in: mosquitoes are the deadliest animal on earth, killing hundreds of thousands of people a year - most from malaria, most of them children in Africa. The technology we built is deployed there now, fighting exactly that. It’s hard to imagine work that matters more.
And still - after four years, I couldn’t turn it into a business. The science worked; the business didn’t. I left, a new CEO took over, and then the disease I’d spent four years trying to stop came for me personally.
Day after day my blood levels dropped. I got close to being hospitalized. There’s no treatment and no cure - you wait, and hope your body wins. I also learned that a second case is usually worse than the first, which is a strange thing to sit with: the next bite could be the one that lands me in a hospital.
What got to me wasn’t the fever, though. For months I’d already been frustrated that I hadn’t built anything that worked lately. Being sick made it concrete - lying in bed, useless, unable to even help with the house or the kids while everyone else carried the weight.
Somewhere in the recovery, that frustration turned into something sharper. Not a grand idea about purpose - I wasn’t there. Just a plain need to feel useful again. To pull my weight. So once I could stand, I got back to building something new. I didn’t know if it would work, or if it was even the right thing. I just couldn’t stand still.
A note from now (June 2026):
Reading this back, what stays with me isn’t the dengue - it’s that last part. At the time I thought I just needed to get back to work. To feel useful, to stop being a burden. That’s all I could see.
It took a while to understand what was underneath it. The thing I threw myself into worked for a bit and then ended. So did a couple of things after it. And somewhere along the way I realized it was never really about staying busy, or even about building a business. It was about wanting the work to mean something - not just to make money or free up my time. I didn’t have the words for that yet when I wrote this.