A whole year!

You know that feeling when you put on earphones during a commute and the entire ride suddenly feels like a movie? The traffic, the bad weather, the guy chewing too loudly – none of it touches you. That’s roughly what building a company feels like. I don’t have kids, but I imagine parenting is similar. The difference is that the music plays inside your head, and you have to keep the volume up even when the outside gets loud.

Last month we celebrated one year of Faradworks. This isn’t the business post – that’s a different one I’ll owe you eventually. This is just the personal stuff. The things I didn’t expect.

Mondays are magical

Somewhere along the way I stopped looking forward to weekends and started looking forward to Mondays. Mostly because Monday is when my clients open their emails – which I write on Sunday and schedule for 7 a.m., like a sniper.

Yes, I can hear you: classic burnout starter pack. Maybe. But for the first time in my adult life, the work isn’t something I’m recovering from. It’s the sport.

Whose advice you should actually take

A few months ago I sat in a room full of founders who’d already made it to the other side. The thing that struck me wasn’t the war stories. It was the humility. They listened to first-time founders the way a parent listens to a kid explaining why the dinosaur drawing has six legs – fully, without correcting.

Meanwhile, the loudest critics of entrepreneurship I’ve ever met have rarely tried it themselves.

My rule now: take advice mostly from people who’ve actually done the thing, and discount everyone else by about 80%. The people who’ve been in the arena are gentler with you than you’d expect, because they know how thin the margin is between making it and not. The people who haven’t tend to be very, very sure.

“Slow is fake”

I read that line on Nat Friedman’s blog and it lodged itself somewhere I couldn’t shake.

When you actually believe in what you’re building, going slow is genuinely hard. It keeps you up. It makes you twitchy. The only things I’ve ever been able to do slowly are the things I didn’t really care about. In startup land we like to dress slowness up as “gradual traction” or “creeping toward product-market fit,” but mostly that’s effort that isn’t compounding because the ladder is leaning against the wrong tree.

The faster you can spot what’s not working and walk away from it, the faster you find what does. And usually that cycle starts with letting go of something you were proud of.

Everyone has a museum of failures

Every successful founder I’ve talked to this year has, at some point, been completely flattened. They tell you about it the way people tell you about a bad flight: “Oh yeah, that one was rough.” The phase looks grim from inside it and almost ordinary from the outside.

After about a year of building Faradworks, my cofounder left for personal reasons. This was the person I’d spoken to every single day for 365 days – the primary believer in the idea, and the one who’d written almost all of our code.

For two months I was, to put it generously, clueless. I was learning to code on a product I didn’t fully understand, while talking to customers as if I did. Claude Code helped. It was still an uphill walk. But somewhere in the middle of squinting at the codebase, I figured out why the product had been performing the way it had. The fix was small. Trial users responded almost immediately.

I don’t think I’d have found that bug if he hadn’t left. I’m not sure how to feel about that, and I think that’s okay.

Recovery compounds as much as effort

The more cycles of “this didn’t work, try again” you sit through, the shorter each recovery gets. Failure is a given. The real skill is the speed at which you turn back around.

This is the part nobody warned me about: it’s not the founders with the best ideas who win. It’s the ones who can take a punch and be back at the desk by Tuesday.

You won’t remember the work

We gained traction, lost it, hired three people, lost a cofounder, got paying customers, pivoted. There were weeks where I felt like a genius and an idiot in the same afternoon. Sometimes the same hour.

And looking back, I don’t really remember any of that. Not the wasted hours, not the bad nights.

What I remember is my parents, who never wavered for a second, even when I’m sure they wanted to. Friends who feel like home no matter how long it’s been. Strangers who helped for no reason. The late-night calls with other founders, where you both pretend you’re calling for advice but really you just want company.

For the first time in years, I felt connected to people. Most conversations default to transactional – what do you do, what do you need, can you intro me. I don’t blame anyone for it; I do it too. We’re all running the same script because it’s safer.

The shift, when it came, was small. I got tired of business conversations, and started talking straight from the heart. No agenda, no pitch, no mental checklist of what to ask for before they had to leave. Just genuine curiosity about the person in front of me. That’s it. People feel that almost immediately. And once they feel it, they show up differently – they tell you the real version of the story, not the LinkedIn version.

I work most evenings out of a cafe in Hoboken full of other founders and tinkerers, all in their own headphones-on movies. Before I leave, I try to introduce myself to someone new. No reason. Just to say hi and admit it’s nice not to be alone in this, burning the midnight oil. Some of those hellos turned into real friendships. None of it would’ve happened if I’d left ten minutes earlier.

For all our different backgrounds and histories, what we mostly want is to feel understood. It’s not a high bar. Pets do it without sharing a language.

What this has to do with startups

All of it, actually. To do something unconventional, the foundation has to be internal. You have to believe – quietly, without needing anyone else’s permission – that you’ll figure it out. That what happens out there doesn’t get to set the temperature in here.

It took me a long time to land on that. I hope it takes you less.

Okay, back to building! See you on Monday.