Welcome to the very first edition of our new interview series, where we dive deep with the builders who are quietly wiring the future. Each episode spotlights one maker’s unfiltered journey; the wins, wipeouts, and wildcard detours that got them here.

We caught up with Dane Wilson, Steel's founding engineer, who went from soldering circuits in rural New Zealand to building browser infrastructure for the next billion AI agents. This is his story of failed startups, enterprise escapes, and why he barely uses AI despite helping build the future of it. This is the interview with the man who soldered his way to Steel.

So I heard you were that kid who'd rather solder circuits than kick a ball?

Dane: Yeah, guilty. Started messing with electronics when I was like 8 or 9. Building little robots, taking apart anything with a circuit board. My parents probably thought I was going to burn the house down. Then at 11, I discovered web development and that was game over -- I was fully cooked on building things online.

11 years old and already coding? What were you building?

Dane: Oh man, this is embarrassing but... game server hosting. PHP everything. I'd stay up until 3am FTP-ing files to some sketchy shared hosting, building these whole billing systems from scratch. The wild part? I didn't even know open source was a thing back then, so I literally built everything myself. No frameworks, no libraries. Just raw PHP and whatever I could figure out from random forums. Never made a cent, but I was absolutely obsessed.

That's unhinged in the best way. How'd you go from that to "proper" computer science?

Dane: University was... interesting. The CS degree was all theory and mathematics, barely any actual building. Like, we're learning about Turing machines and finite automata while I'm sitting there thinking "but can it ship?" The real education came from landing an internship pretty quick -- stayed there for like four or five years. That's where I actually learned software engineering. We were building this big data database for health records, critical infrastructure stuff. Learned about data structures, testing, what happens when your code actually matters.

Enterprise life at 20-something -- that must've been a vibe shift.

Dane: Man, the meetings. The meetings about meetings. I couldn't handle it. After a few years I was like "I gotta get out." So I moved to Toronto, started contracting. Complete 180 -- went from enterprise molasses to shipping something new every three months. Marketing sites, smart contracts, healthcare systems, whatever. Just this constant stream of problems to solve. That's where I learned to move fast and not overthink everything.

Then COVID hit and you... started a startup while contracting? That's chaotic.

Dane: Peak chaos. I'm working for this Toronto agency while also being founding engineer at a New Zealand startup. Time zones were absolutely cursed. But we grew that company from just three founders -- two non-technical and one fresh uni grad -- to like seven or eight people. Helped them raise a solid pre-seed round. They just raised their seed and are entering the US market now, which is wild for a company from the bottom of the world.

That's a W. But then came Sane?

Dane: Ah, Sane. My beautiful disaster. I'm super visual -- I draw everything out on paper, mind maps, diagrams. Can't think without sketching. So we built this 2D infinite canvas thing, like Pinterest meets Notion but spatial. You could create these blogs in 2D space, mood boards that were actually functional. I was so sure it was the future.

Narrator (imagine Attenborough voice): It was not the future.

Dane: Yeah, we couldn't secure our seed round. Ran out of money start of this year and had to shut it down. That one hit different. When you're watching your bank balance hit zero and you've put everything into this thing... that's your deepest hole right there.

But plot twist -- that's when Steel entered the chat?

Dane: Exactly. I'd kept in touch with Nas, and when Sane was clearly dying, he's like "yo, come build browser infrastructure for AI agents." The timing was perfect. Plus, Steel is everything I care about -- fully open source, building in public, solving real problems. Every company I've worked at, I've pushed for open source and engineering content. I learned from reading other people's deep dives on distributed systems, so I wanted to pay it forward.

You mentioned you're building for AI but barely use it yourself. That's... ironic?

Dane: I know, I know. I'm that guy still preferring to code everything myself. Autocomplete? Distracting. Copilot? Thanks but I'm good. I'll use Claude or ChatGPT for research or maybe some refactoring, but I'm not automating my life away. Which is funny because at Steel we're literally building the infrastructure for AI agents to use the web.

So what's your take on where AI is heading?

Dane: Look, I used to think I'd never have to worry about AI -- like, "I'll always have a job." Now? The developments are absolutely wild. But here's the thing. AI is just another tool. Same as blockchains, same as any other tech. The problem is always the same: how do you make it not suck for actual humans?

Like, my parents aren't technical. They don't care about LLMs or vector databases. But if AI can help them automate some annoying task using natural language? That's the win. That's what excites me about agents -- closing that gap between what people want to do and the technical knowledge needed to do it.

What's cooking at Steel that you're excited about?

Dane: We've got a bunch of internal packages I've been building that we're going to open source soon. Can't share all the details yet, but imagine making browser automation as simple as calling an API. No more fighting with Cloudflare, no more getting instabanned, just... it works.

Plus, working with browsers at scale is genuinely fascinating. Like, how do you keep a Chrome instance warm for 24 hours? How do you make fingerprinting detection think your bot is human? These are cursed problems with elegant solutions.

Any advice for developers who want to make the jump from enterprise to startups?

Dane: Ship things. Even if they're terrible. That PHP game hosting site I built at 11? Absolute garbage code. But I learned more from shipping that than from any CS course. Also, draw your systems before you build them. I know it sounds basic, but visualizing architecture saves so much pain later.

And honestly? Embrace the failures. Sane dying sucked, but it directly led to Steel. Every hole in that Vonnegut curve sets up the next climb. You just gotta keep building.

Last question -- what's the endgame? Where's Dane in 5 years?

Dane: Still shipping, hopefully. Maybe we've democratized web agents to the point where my parents are using them without even knowing it. Maybe I'll finally start using AI for more than just research. But seriously, I just want to keep building tools that make other builders' lives easier. Open source everything we can. Write those engineering blogs I wished existed when I was starting out.

The web's about to get real weird with agents everywhere. Someone's gotta build the infrastructure for it. Might as well be us.

Dane's currently cooking something special at Steel. Follow the journey at steel.dev or catch him in our Discord probably explaining why some browser behavior is cursed at 2am.