on time
the rhythms of life as an early stage "founder" (navel gazing alert 🚨)
Lately I’ve been letting weekends come when they feel like. Work has blurred across the week unimpeded, so has “fun”, somewhat less-so.
This has made me crazy1.
So much so that I even applied for a job, yes, a real, full-time job. The allure of external structure, a regular paycheck, that “boost” of joining something new. The potential for passive validation, people caring about your work even when you don’t ask them to.
Indeed, the grass is always greener. I have tired of the problems at hand: chasing freelance payments, trying not to think about how expensive healthcare is, being fully in charge of my own priorities and progress, pushing through the doubt and uncertainty. This fatigue led me to sell myself on the notion of “addition by subtraction” with my time, that the structure provided by a job would allow me to be at least as productive towards starting a company as a side hustle.
Now, we’re back: I didn’t get an offer, and maybe that’s for the best. Onwards. Last week I was bummed, this week it’s fuck em (respectfully).
I was recently asked by a friend about what I do all day, how I structure my time. I did not have a clear answer. For myself, for posterity, and hopefully for the public interest, I documented a “day in the life” yesterday last week. I’ve attempted to not be performative (or cringe2), you be the judge.
A DAY IN THE LIFE: MONDAY, JANUARY 27, 2025
9:03am - alarm goes off
9:24 - summon energy to leave bed, stretch
9:32 - fold leftover laundry, wash face, dress
9:45 - walk to bodega for a brick of coffee
9:50 - put on coffee, sit down at desk, send texts, eat banana
10:15 - work on pitch deck
10:45 - breakfast, read sre handbook, a little phone time, more pitch deck
12:00pm - book train to Philly to visit the homie
12:30 - send some messages to founders in my network
12:45 - take a call about upcoming potential freelance work
1:20 - cook + eat lunch (eggs, kale, toast; I hadn’t been to store)
1:45 - dev work, refactoring the prototype to an event-driven architecture
3:30 - ideation on substack stuff (this post and future)
4:00 - hit a roadblock, go to the gym, texting friend who’s in VC
5:30 - call my parents, go to the grocery store
6:30 - make it home, eat a small weed gummy, shower
7:30 - impromptu call with friend/founder to discuss potential YC application
8:15 - walk to halal spot for dinner even tho i was gonna cook (#relatable)
9:30 - send some texts about calls in next couple weeks
9:45 - try to read about deepseek, get distracted, watch nba, play balatro
10:45 - brush teeth, wash face, **trying to be responsible**
10:50 - stretch before bed
11:00 - lay awake for an hour, irresponsibly on phone, sleep comes eventually
Does this sound like a good life to you? It’s an honest look, less any observer effects. I’m still not quite sure what to make of it, but the exercise was helpful for me.
the tension between thought and action
In the present vacuum, my tendency towards deliberateness can be stifling. Thinking only answers so many questions. And yet, building this prototype feels more like creative work than technical development. I sit, and sometimes I get ideas. Progress comes in fits and starts - I have absolutely no gauge for how much I’m doing, or not.
I have seen people that can bang out code, building out functionality far more rapidly than I have. Action. It is tempting to measure myself against these people. I have also seen people build the wrong thing, or build nothing at all. I have seen how close “nothing at all” looks to the thing that is actually very real. “Nothing at all” can get you millions of dollars on a pitch deck - an idea that was never going anywhere can get funded for multiple rounds. Better said by
: “intellectual honesty is the only thing that will save you”3.I don’t want to build “nothing at all”, even if it gets me a pot of VC money to burn along the way. I’d like to think that I am uncovering the true conceptual architecture of a product during this time - it really feels like a reductive process, unearthing something that was already there, freeing David from a block of marble.
Hallucination is omnipresent in the venture capital funded tech world, and I’m not just talking about the shroom chocolates at your startup’s last Aspen offsite. Rather, the collective imagination of “what might be possible” - a necessary question on the path to building something transformative4. I am currently grappling with the experience of cultivating this hallucination while otherwise largely unmoored. I gaze at the marble, and the marble gazes back. In this light, perhaps you can see how I’m losing myself a bit at times.
One thing that has been incredibly grounding, and I am actively seeking more of, is speaking with people about my idea. If you’ve made it this far, you’re probably someone I’d like to talk to about it! Let me know, or schedule some time directly.
In the meantime, I am hopeful that the moments of reflection as to the nature of my product are worthwhile in bringing me towards the True Center - an idea with a fighting chance.
P.S. As a result of some of these recent conversations, I’m applying to Y combinator. I’m gonna open source my application on here, less the sensitive bits I’m not ready to share yet. See you next week.
don’t worry mom I am adjusting my approach accordingly !!
hey at least I didn’t make a vibey influencer video about it
take a gander; he touches on similar themes here and is speaking from far more direct experience than I am
An aside: who gets to arbitrate what is possible, and what is doomed? How do the bets that are placed influence outcomes, and shape our world? To what end, and whose benefit? These are worthwhile questions, but not for this post