The Start Line
The race is long. Getting to the start line is its own win.
This time last year, I left a big tech job to build a generational company. No Series A. No hockey-stick growth chart. No TechCrunch headline. Yet.
The race is long, and reaching the start line is harder than most people think.
Getting There
Training for a half-marathon when you’ve never been a runner: you sign up, train for months, wake up at 5 AM, push through the days you don’t want to.
Race morning comes. You’re standing at the start line in the cold, surrounded by thousands of strangers, heart pounding. You haven’t crossed the finish line. But you’re there. Most people never make it this far.
That’s where I am. I left a comfortable job and showed up for something I’d thought about for years. The shift from dreaming about starting a company to actually building one has changed how I see myself.
As I reflect on 2025 and build my 2026 goals, I’m realizing that matters more than I expected.
Lighter
I carried the weight of “someday I’ll start something” for a long time. It lingered in the back of my mind, and I would wonder if I would ever take the plunge.
That weight is gone. I traded the fear of never trying for the challenge of building something that (hopefully) lasts. Worth every ounce of uncertainty.
Risk and Family
I used to think of myself as someone who only thought about taking risks. Now I take them.
I also thought ambition and being present for my family were in tension. For years, I noticed a pattern: when work was on fire, my health and presence at home would slide. When I was grounded (working out, sleeping well, really there for the kids), I felt like I was leaving potential on the table at work. It felt zero-sum.
It’s not. Or at least, it doesn’t have to be.
As a bootstrapped solo founder, I have flexibility I didn’t have before. I take more school pickups and dropoffs than my wife does now. I show up to performances and parent meetings. When my kids come to play and I’m not in a critical meeting, my default is yes. I have a simple system: door open means I’m interruptible, door closed means I’m in deep focus. Small, but it works.
The bigger shift is that my ambition now includes my family. I’m building in ed-tech partly because I want better tools for my own kid. My work is in service of families and learning, not in competition with them. I want my kids to grow up seeing a parent who takes risks, keeps learning, and builds things that matter. And who’s also there.
I’m also learning to manage my energy better. The goal isn’t perfect balance. It’s getting better at switching on and off fully. When I’m working, I’m locked in. When I’m with my kids, I’m with my kids. Not half-present, checking Slack, mentally still in a product problem. Fully there.
This is hard. I’m still learning. But I’ve found that the ability to reset quickly matters more than never getting thrown off. Sahil Bloom put it well:
Both matter. Both happen. But only when I design for it.
Full Brain
I’m finally using my whole brain again.
At a big company, I owned a piece of a problem at massive scale. Now I get to build the whole arc: product, design, user research, distribution, fundraising, storytelling. I sit with parents, listen to their real struggles, and shape the product around actual lives instead of abstract personas. I go from idea to working prototype fast. I stretch into areas that used to feel like weaknesses: getting the product into people’s hands, talking to investors, telling the story in a way that lands.
This space aligns with my values in a way my old job never did. I care about learning as a lifelong practice, not just grades. I come from a family where education is core. I’m a parent building for parents and kids.
The problems I’m solving matter to me personally, not just professionally.
I’m also not doing this alone. I’m surrounded by advisors, founders who’ve built in this space and share their lessons freely, investors and mentors who orbit around education, and other ambitious people trying to build companies in areas that actually matter.
Compared to how stagnant I felt before (under-utilized, boxed into a role, not growing fast enough), this feels like stepping into the right current. Even with the uncertainty, the sleep deprivation, and the possibility I may need to pivot later, there’s a clear signal underneath it all.
I’m where I’m supposed to be.
The Goal
I’m here to win. Real impact for real users, seed round, the scale and more. That’s what I’m building toward.
I’ve cleared the hardest hurdle: I stopped dreaming and started building. I’m at the start line, and I’m moving forward.
If you’re on the sidelines wondering whether to make the leap: the finish line is what matters, but getting to the start is the part most people never do. Reach out if I can help.
Love the half-marathon framing. The part about your ambition now including family instead of competing with it feels like an underrated shift. I've seen people treat those as binary, but designing systems around presence (door open/closed) is way smarter than trying to force balance through willpower alone. The quote about quickly resetting hits too, I spent years trying to maintan a perfect equilibrium when really the skill was bouncing back faster.