Rob Kirkpatrick
§ About · the long version
Updated · May 2026

Hi, I’m
Bob.

I’m a software person who keeps a topographic map within reach of every desk I’ve ever worked at.

Most days I’m building products — small ones, lately. I like teams of four. I like decisions that are reversible. I like the part of a project where you haven’t yet been clever, and the path forward is obvious.

The rest of the time I’m in the mountains, or reading about them, or writing essays that are nominally about something else and turn out to also be about them. I learned to read a map before I learned to read a stock chart and I think it shows in how I work.

I grew up in the Midwest, which sounds like the wrong place to fall in love with peaks, but the flat ground has its own way of pointing somewhere. I now live in Colorado, which solves the geography problem and creates several new ones.

This site is a long-running personal notebook — selected work, essays, and photographs from trips. It’s built by hand, hosted on a server I can name, and edited whenever I have something to say.

14
Fourteeners summited
87k
Feet of vertical, 2025
19
Countries visited
Half-written essays
§ Index
A loose timeline
An incomplete, intentionally imprecise sketch of how I got here. Years are approximate. Pride and embarrassment are in equal measure.
2025 →
Now
Independent — building Fieldbook & writing
Boulder, Colorado. Mostly mountain weather and morning coffee.
2022 — 25
3y
Product Lead — a quiet B2B tools team
Remote, with a desk in three time zones. Shipped two things I’m proud of.
2019 — 22
3y
Founder — a small mapping company
Started in a garage. Ended in a Slack channel. Net positive.
2015 — 19
4y
Engineer — at a place that grew up around me
San Francisco. Learned a lot about scope and very little about cycling.
2011 — 15
4y
Wandering — odd jobs, side projects, a few mountains
Variously. Best decision I made in my twenties.
§ Notes
A few held opinions
Subject to revision. Held with appropriate confidence.
i.
Small teams, narrow scopes.
Four people who can hold the whole thing in their head will out-decide twelve who can’t.
ii.
Tempo matters more than talent.
In a climb and in a company, the steady party catches the brilliant one before lunch.
iii.
Optimize for reversibility.
Decisions you can take back, you make fast. Decisions you can’t, you sleep on.
iv.
A map is a strong opinion drawn at scale.
Same goes for a roadmap, a strategy doc, and a really good README.
§ Get in touch

Say hello.

hello@robkirkpatrick.com I read everything. I reply to most things.