June 4, 2024 - from a Twitter thread
Announcement: One month ago, I decided to stop working on @BananaDev_
I realized I was out of ideas, and forcing something I didn’t have my heart behind.
I’m now focused on reconnecting with what brings me joy.
I wasn’t sure how to share this, because so much of my identity had been built up around being the founder that never stops.
But part of healing is acceptance, and those who have already known have shown nothing but support, so I wanted to share publicly.
For the last five years, I pivoted and persevered, lifted by incredible teammates like @kylejohnmorris, the Banana team, and countless founder friends.
I knew that all that mattered was survival, so through those five years, I did what it took to survive.
For the last two years, I quietly faced the deepest burnout of my life and tried to ignore it.
As an ultramarathon runner, one learns to distrust your brain when it tells you to stop. While this mentality certainly has its utility at times, I realize now that I took it too far.
Following the pivot from Serverless GPUs, I found myself in an uncomfortable position:
I didn’t care about any new idea.
In service of never giving up, I’d proudly proclaimed that we’d pivot, yet again, and we went through the motions to push out a few MVPs.
But it missed a vital component: a founder who genuinely gave a shit.
I’d overindexed on my ability to keep pushing, drove myself into burnout, and was no longer able to show up as the CEO that I needed to be.
The pivots were not to win, they were to avoid losing.
Being a founder is the ultimate line of work. In no other position can you be unapologetically ambitious, and it will always be my calling.
As it became clear that we weren’t in a position to make Serverless GPUs work long-term, I couldn’t see any other idea that felt so important, so ambitious.
And with the burnout, I couldn’t find joy in the search for that new idea.
So I’ve decided to take the scary, unfamiliar route of stopping work on the startup.
With the team taken care of (plenty of severance, strong referrals for their next gig), my attention shifted solely toward overcoming burnout and reconnecting with what brings me joy.
I’ve spent the last month doing exclusively that:
Travel, motorcycle trip in Morocco, learning new languages (zig/gleam), jamming on my drumset, drinking coffee, reading sci-fi, running, lifting, time with my friends, time with my wife.
I’m still far from healed and have no expectations for when I’ll feel fully back to myself, but this month alone has felt so good, so right, that it’s clear I made the right decision.
Surely I’ll write a blog about burnout recovery eventually.
What’s next?
I’m still figuring that out. If I force an answer, that goes against the hard lessons I’ve learned here.
What I know for certain is that I just want to build.
I know I could use my Banana clout to leverage this into some VP role at a cloud company, but I literally just want to work with cool people, write lots of code, and talk to customers who are using my code.
I want to build and sell, not because my job title says I should, but because I genuinely want to.
That’s what I loved in early Banana.
Our product became great not because my job said so, but because I truly enjoyed the work.
I need to find that again.
I’m incredibly optimistic about AI, and I believe that so much will change about how we build software.
There’s so much work to be done in infra and tooling, and I believe it’s where I have a chance to leave my mark.
My DMs are open if you’re working on core infra for the AI era and would like to eventually work together.
I’ve still got lots of coffee to drink, sci-fi to read, and dates to enjoy with my lady, so I’m in no rush, but happy to start the conversation now.
Thanks all!
Thanks to my team, our customers, our investors.
And thanks to you.
I’ve learned that people, for some reason, seem to give a shit about me and whatever I work on, and it’s been a superpower. Thank you, whoever you are, if you’ve helped me along the way.