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I knew running a startup would be hard. Everyone knows that.
What I didn’t know is how different it feels when you’re actually inside it.
Being a co-founder is not the same as being a C-level executive. I understood that intellectually. I didn’t understand it emotionally.
I’ll keep writing on this blog, but from here on these thoughts come from the co-founder seat. Less theory. More friction.
The thing that surprised me the most so far is the noise.
There is so much of it.
And the worst part is that most of it makes sense.
Product improvements that should happen. Marketing ideas that sound smart. Operational fixes that would clearly make things better. Hiring discussions. Small inefficiencies that feel bigger than they probably are.
None of these are wrong. That’s what makes it exhausting.
Before, as a CPO, prioritization was hard but contained. The fundamentals were already there. The company knew what it was. The direction was set. I was deciding what mattered more, not what mattered at all.
Now it’s different.
There is no clear baseline. You’re not choosing between good and bad. You’re choosing between many good things and doing almost none of them. And you don’t get to know if you were right until much later—sometimes too late.
Another thing I didn’t expect is how much this is about losing.
You can’t win most battles. You have to decide which ones you cannot afford to lose, and consciously let the rest go. Ideas you like. Decisions you believe in. Paths you won’t explore.
And you carry those losses with you. Quietly. Every day.
Frameworks don’t really help here. Not in the way we like to pretend they do. Things move too fast, information is incomplete, and waiting for clarity is usually the wrong move.
So you rely on instinct. On customer conversations. On a vague but growing sense of where the business wants to go. You pick a direction and commit, knowing it might be wrong.
You’re not filtering noise into a clean signal.
You’re choosing one signal among many and hoping it’s the right one—for now.
This is what the work actually feels like.
And I’m still learning how to sit with it.
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