There’s a version of founding a company that looks like this: you are the company. Your identity, your calendar, your sense of self-worth are all threaded through the same thing. When it’s going well, you feel invincible. When it’s not, you disappear.
I’ve been close to that version. I don’t think it ends well.
The cost I didn’t see coming
I expected building a company to be hard. I expected long hours, hard decisions, rejection, uncertainty. I was prepared for those things, or at least I thought I was.
What I didn’t expect was how quietly it could start to eat the other parts of my life. Not through any dramatic crisis, but through a thousand small substitutions. Skip the workout because there’s a fire. Miss the thing with family because the week ran long. Let the friendships go dormant because there’s just too much happening.
None of those trades felt significant in the moment. They all felt necessary. But they compound. And after a while you look up and realize the version of yourself you were building the company to support has quietly been hollowed out.
What I’ve been doing differently
I don’t have a clean system to share. I’m suspicious of founders who do.
What I’ve got are a few practices that have helped:
Treating rest as a business input. Not as a reward for finishing, because finishing never happens. Rest as an operating requirement, the same way you’d treat server uptime or team morale. When I’m depleted, my judgment degrades and my decisions get worse. That’s a business problem.
Keeping something that has nothing to do with the company. For me it’s being outdoors. Not optimized, not tracked, not a productivity hack. Just something that exists outside the story of Halda.
Being honest with the people close to me about the actual state of things. Not performing confidence. Saying “this month is hard” when it’s hard. That turns out to be both personally important and useful — you find out quickly who’s actually in your corner.
The part I’m still working on
Identity is the harder thing. It’s easy to say “I am not Halda” and much harder to actually mean it when things go sideways with the company.
I don’t think I’ve fully solved this. I still feel the pull to conflate the two — to let a good quarter make me feel like a good person, or a rough patch make me feel like a failure at something more fundamental than business.
But I think awareness is the beginning. Noticing the substitution before it becomes the default. Choosing, at least some of the time, the version of building that doesn’t require you to give up the rest.
That’s the work. Not separate from building the company — alongside it.