26 Years of Sliving — BTS of my founder life

Speaking to myself in 3rd Person, creating context & remembering the ones who matter :-)

Up until about 2 weeks ago I was in my early 20s.

As I turn a year older, I have been spending tons of time reflecting on the things that have shaped my journey to date. As I’m sitting on a 14 hour plane ride across the world, I thought to document some of these thoughts.

It’s been about a year and a half since I left Google and started working full time on my startup.

People on social media often tell me how inspired and jealous they are by are by the things I’ve accomplished so far. But even as we know things always look perfect on social media and isn’t 100% true, we often still fall prey to believing what we see.

Most stories about people’s progress online has been a linear, upward trend. Won more customers, raised more money, 3x their MRR, automated operations, shipped a new feature and reduced their churn.

No one posts about being stuck fixing a bug for a week. Or feeling lost in direction and having to kill their feature. Or having to pivot completely and re-run your product design process from scratch.