here's a writeup I shared that might be of interest[0]
it's mainly been product-led growth. I've always just been a guy that likes building cool things, and I spent most of the early years head-down coding. anything marketing-oriented was new to me, and not my natural skillset.
gradually PL started getting some attention in the FI / FIRE space, and recently I've begun building out a small team while staying bootstrapped.
To me, "what is it like to be a" is more or less the intersection of sensory modalities between two systems... but I'm not sure the extent of the overlap tells you much about whether a given system is "conscious" or not.