The next one.

A few things I’ll be doing differently.

There’s a specific kind of clarity that only shows up after you stop.

Not during. During, everything is urgent and nothing is obvious. But a few weeks out, in a new city, with the volume finally turned down, the mistakes start arranging themselves into a tidy little list. Neat. Almost insulting in how obvious they look from here.

Some of these hit me while I was still building the last startup. The rest waited until I wasn’t. I’ll be back on the field before I know it, so I’m writing them down now, while they still sting enough to be useful.

1. Never trade money for longevity

This is the single greatest learning.

The day our first check cleared, we opened a spreadsheet and started working backwards from the runway. How many months can we stretch this. It felt responsible. It felt like the adult thing to do.

It is the exact opposite of the point. You raise venture money to do things faster than you otherwise could. Not to buy more months of doing them slowly. We used the money to buy time, and time isn’t the thing that compounds.

I’ve already written about slow being fake, so I won’t relitigate it. I’ll just add the part I missed the first time. Slow is fake, and the spreadsheet is how it gets in. Nobody decides to go slow. You decide to be careful with money, and going slow arrives quietly, attached.

So: a proper round, not a first check. Three months at full intensity, burning everything, rather than a year of careful validation. Build the team, drain the idea pool, take the learnings straight from customers at volume. Go big or go home. Just never go slow.

Some of this is conditioning I had to unlearn. I grew up in India, where money you didn’t spend is money you handled well, and where you learn early to keep a safe version of the plan ready. It’s a good instinct. It’s good in almost every context except this one.

2. Build in public

I understood this properly only by watching people half my age do it better.

There’s a whole cohort of high schoolers and hobbyists on X and LinkedIn right now who post about their project constantly. The half-finished version, the part that broke, the thing they figured out at 2 a.m. By the time they actually ship, hundreds of people have been following the story for months. So when they hit a wall, the wall gets cleared. People jump in. They answer the question, send the part, review the design. Some of them have helped us that way.

We never had that. We had a product, and we had customers, and we had nothing in between.

The trap is that the moment you get a little traction, disappearing into the product feels like the responsible choice. And for engineers, building is the vacation. We can iterate on the same thing forever and it always feels like progress. But the loop that actually compounds is the one where you’re seeding an audience the entire time you’re building, so the audience already exists on the day you need it.

Look at who’s doing this well in electronics. tscircuit is the clearest case I can point to. The founder livestreams development, posts constantly, and the community turns up to review designs and file issues. Our competitors were all there too.

If we don’t teach the market what we’re building, who’s going to?

3. Build a team of people you love working with, as early as you can

Don’t wait for the next round. Don’t wait for a problem big enough to justify the hire.

The reason isn’t the one you’d guess. I’ve met a number of repeat founders who assemble an incredible team before they have a prototype, and the obvious explanation is speed. That’s part of it. But there’s a second reason nobody says out loud. On a bet this size, a great team is your floor. If the idea dies, the team is still an asset. Someone in the space will want the group that shipped a working prototype that fast.

The idea is allowed to fail. The team doesn’t have to.

4. Start with a grand vision

Almost everyone does this on day one. Almost everyone loses the thread by month nine.

Set the vision big enough and a dead idea is just one dead branch. Change how humans work with robots. Cure world hunger. At that size, the vision is wide enough to hold ten more ideas you can pivot into. When the starting idea is small, every pivot feels like drift. No direction, just throwing things at a wall and calling it iteration.

We started out wanting to let anyone build custom electronics. Canva, but for hardware. A few pivots in, we’d stopped being able to say that sentence out loud.

Looking back, there was so much we could have built while staying true to it. I watch other companies do exactly that today. Including the one I work for now.

5. Finding the right ecosystem

Build in SF. I resisted this for a long time and I was wrong.

Every time I visited, a day there felt like a month in New York. Not because of any single thing. Because of all of them stacked:

• how easy it is to find the right people to build with
• how willing people are to try the unproven version
• how comfortable they are sitting in uncertainty
• the talent density
• Venture capital?

It compounds. And it compounds hardest when the thing you’re building is unconventional, which is the only kind worth building.

This is as true of the people around you as it is of the city. Friends who’ve held the same stable job for years and quietly stopped growing tend to file startups under “outliers,” and eventually they file you there too. Life is just easier when the people nearest you think the way you do while you’re doing the hard thing.

Family is its own version. Nobody who loves you wants to watch you in pain, and the fastest available cure is always for you to quit. That’s never why any of us started.

There were a bunch of reasons I decided to call it a chapter and take a breather. But I’ll be back sooner than I think.

See you on the field 😉