Today I launched a new business at the same time as having my bloods taken ahead of going in for an infusion tomorrow.
If you'd told me a year ago that I'd be starting a company while having chemotherapy for Stage 4 cancer, I'd have told you to jog on. Not because it sounded impossible — because it sounded like one of those inspirational LinkedIn posts that makes you want to throw your phone in the sea.
But here we are.
The business is called Known & Cited. It measures how AI — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, all of it — talks about businesses. Whether it recommends them. Whether it even knows they exist. It's a real thing, it solves a real problem, and I've built the whole thing over the last few weeks between chemo cycles and hospital visits.
Why am I telling you this on the FC:AI blog?
Because this is the cancer side of the story, and it's connected… but also a bit separate.
Known & Cited is a proper business. It has a website, pricing, a methodology, reports, the lot. When you look at it, you won't see cancer anywhere (much). That's deliberate. Clients don't need to know I'm ill. They need to know the work is good.
But over here, on FC:AI, I can be honest about what this actually looks like from the inside.
It looks like:
- Coming up with steroid induced brainwaves at 3am and having to go downstairs and record them all in my phone, before I can go back to sleep
- Working in 90-minute blocks because that's all my concentration gives me
- Building a website with AI doing the heavy lifting because I physically can't sit at a desk for eight hours
- Katy — my wife and copywriter, and the person keeping me going — editing everything I write because my attention to detail was pretty poor on that front before I started chemo, let alone during
This is something I wouldn't have known where to start with 2 years ago. AI made this possible. Not in some vague "AI is changing everything" way. In a specific, practical, "I used Claude to build an entire business infrastructure while too ill to leave the house" way.
That's why FC:AI exists.
FC:AI will (hopefully) be funded by K&C revenue. Every piece of work we do at Known & Cited puts money into building free tools for cancer patients. That's the plan. Hopefully it will also buy me excessive holidays and a helicopter, but that's some way off.
So when I launch Known & Cited today, it's not just a business launch. It's the engine that funds everything we're building here.
Cancer doesn't give you clarity. That's bollocks.
What it gives you is a very short list of things you can actually do in a day. And when the list is that short, you stop wasting time on things that don't matter.
K&C matters. FC:AI matters. My family and friends matter.
If you're reading this and you're going through treatment and you're thinking about starting something — a project, a business, a blog, anything — do it. Not because cancer taught you some beautiful lesson about life. Because you're bored, and angry, and you've got Wi-Fi and a laptop and fuck-all else to do between appointments.
Let's do this x.