Startups

I’m 23 and running out of time to learn how to ‘change the world’, and it feels as though at some point the hourglass will run out of sand and the beaches and land will go with it. The threats to our world loom larger every day, and my contribution remains small. I don’t give a shit that it’s hard for one person to have a big impact. I love this world, and I want to give it everything I have. I keep on coming up shorthanded.

Startups are complex. There is a fuck ton of money, pressure, and time spent together. Some people resonate cohesively, and others explode, and will take you out with them. You need to really know who you’re getting in the plane with — who you’re trusting your company with, and how they think about what you need to do to make this worth their while.

I’m doing something harder than restarting a company: forcing myself to take a break. Dreaming up technical diagrams could happen in my sleep, because that’s not the hard part to me. The true hard shit is knowing I have this immense desire that’s been burning since I was 13, and not seceding to it.

There is a certain brutality in creating a company. Business is not about economic transactions as much as it is a framework for making decisions. That framework is rather simple: get money, buy stuff that makes you money, sell the things, cut back on what you buy if you’re not making enough. It’s a framework that standalone makes sense, but it’s also a framework that when viewed in isolation leads to dehumanization. These are the perfect conditions that cause harm.

You know about them. Maybe you’ve been in some. These are the rooms where people talk to people and make decisions that affect the lives of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of people. I didn’t want power 3–4 years ago. I thought it was corrupting, self-aggrandizing, and a path to a seat at human reality I didn’t want to experience. Now, I still think all of those things. But I know I need it.