The masthead on my stack page says "I BUILD COOL SHIT." in big fat letters, and I stand by it, but it's also, on most Tuesdays, kinda a lie.
Here's the truth nobody sticks on their landing page: a huge chunk of my week is not spent building cool shit, it's spent making a slide about the cool shit, then on a call about that slide, then updating a spreadsheet that projects how much cool shit we can even afford to build next quarter assuming the call goes well, which it might not, and the building, the part I actually love, somehow ends up being the smallest slice of the whole pie.
Nobody really warns you about this part, or okay, people warn you, but in the same useless way they warn you that uni is expensive or that Finland is cold, where you nod and go "sure, makes sense" and then go live it and realize the warning did not even slightly prepare you for the real texture of the thing.
Take being a founder and a CTO at the same time, which are two different jobs that lowkey hate each other, because when you're the CTO your instinct is dead simple, there's a problem so you open the file and fix the problem, and that instinct is good, it's the whole reason I'm here, but the founder half of me spends its whole day being told that the single most useful thing I can do is not open the file, it's to be in the room, to tell some coherent story about a future that doesn't exist yet to a person deciding whether to bet real money on it existing, and those two guys, the one who wants to be in the code and the one who has to be in the room, are constantly fighting over my calendar, so some days the CTO wins and I ship something and feel like myself again, and some days the founder wins and I close a conversation that keeps the lights on three more months, and both of them matter and neither ever really feels like enough on its own, and the trick, apparently, is being okay with doing each at like 70%, because 100% of one means 0% of the other and the company needs both, and yeah, I have not fully made peace with this, I'm just being honest with you.
And then there's the money, because raising investment is its own whole craft and it is genuinely weird, where you're somehow the most optimistic person in the room, because you have to be, because if you don't believe it nobody else will, while also being the one person who knows exactly how held-together-with-duct-tape the present actually is, so you're out there selling a shiny future while standing in a present that would give the buyer a heart attack if they saw the repo at 3am, and that's not lying, and I really wanna be clear about that because early on it felt like lying and it messed with my head, but it's not, because a startup is just a bet on where things are headed and your whole job in that room is to make that bet make sense, here's where we are, here's the gap we're squeezing into, here's why the thing goes up and why it's gonna be us that drags it there, and the duct tape is fine, everyone's present is duct tape, and the people who make it are the ones who can hold "this is barely working" and "this is gonna be huge" in their head at the same time without losing their mind, and I'm still learning to hold both, and some weeks I hold neither.
So why even do it? Honestly because of a thing I wrote back in 2023, because in some old post I said we're all living in an age where it's either create or be consumed, and I meant it as just a vibe back then, a nice line to end a rant on, but turns out it's true, and living it is a whole lot less poetic than saying it, because building a company is the most concentrated version of "create" I've ever found, it's the thing where if I don't do it it straight up doesn't get done and the entire shape of it is my problem, which is terrifying and somehow the most alive I've ever felt, and the spreadsheets and decks and calls are just the tax you pay for getting to point the whole machine at a problem you chose and go "nah, we're doing it like this."
Would I love to just be in the code all day building cool shit? Obviously, hell yes, but the code doesn't get to exist unless somebody does the unglamorous half, and right now that somebody happens to also be me.
And I don't have this figured out, and I wanna say that plainly, because there's more than enough founder content out there where the author pretends they cracked some secret and now they're on a mountain dispensing wisdom, and nah, I'm just in it, it's messy, ask me again in a year, and if you're doing the same thing, the founder-and-builder-at-once thing, and it's kicking your ass some weeks, then reach out, genuinely, because it's a lonely little corner and it's a lot better with company.
More soon.
~ A.