Opening up is hard, but I felt the need to do this. With a lot of you I speak with there’s a resemblance with this phase, so I decided to share my internal thoughts.

Back in my teens, my passion has always been computers. This made me go to engineering, but last minute I selected Electrical and not Computer Science. I felt that going for Electrical was less nerdy and would open me more doors in case I didn’t want computers after all.

My more outward-facing personality brought me to experience less technical projects throughout college, and ended college going into a Product role: the perfect mix of technology and business.

With a mix of luck and hard-work, I was climbing up the corporate ladder. 5-years in, I had the first epiphany: I want something smaller. I ended up joining a startup reporting directly to the founders, managing teams of marketers and engineers, I was happy.

The next step was even bigger: becoming a General Manager at a unicorn company, scaling a delivery company amidst the pandemic, scaling a 10-people team to 100. It was probably the job of a lifetime. But I felt the need to change.

I picked something smaller again within the same company, so that I could grow it. This one didn’t turn out into anything, too much corporate politics. I joined a VC afterwards, which only made me go for my own project even faster.

And here begins the second phase of my life: the one where I begin what maybe I should have done right when I was selecting the path I wanted to take back in college.

It comes with advantages doing it later in life: more financial comfort, more clarity on what you want to build, more knowledge on how to do it. But a frequent thought comes into my head: why didn’t I do it earlier? The most frequent thought is risk-averse mindset (frequently instilled by the people around).

It also comes with disadvantages: generally less energy/time (although trying to counteract it), and definitely a mind pressure to reach the goal faster (less years to live).

There’s really no way of going back in time, so I live seeing the upside of it. I now can do what I wanted to do, and cannot see in the near future another way. Entrepreneurship is mostly a battle against yourself: the constant thought of the lost financial opportunity elsewhere, the lack of supporting mechanisms around you (bless my wife), and the idea that this journey mostly depends on you exclusively.

Does this stop me from carrying on? No, just gives me more strength.