The Startup of You

There are moments in life when everything you thought was solid shifts.

A job changes.
A parent gets sick.
A child grows up faster than you expected.
A diagnosis lands hard.
A technology appears that compresses decades of mastery into seconds.

You sit there and realize the ground was never the ground; it was this hacked together scaffolding.

And underneath it all, there has always been something else.

You.

I’ve spent most of my adult life around startups. Founders searching for product-market fit. Investors searching for asymmetric returns. Cities searching for relevance. Ventures searching for growth.

I’ve built programs, launched initiatives, helped founders raise money, watched some soar and too many dissolve.

But the longer I’ve lived, the more I’ve realized that the most important startup in the room was never the company.

It was the person holding it together.

Because companies pivot.

Markets change.

Capital moves.

But a human being carries their history, their losses, their love, their resilience into every room they enter.

That is the real enterprise.

You Are Not Your Job

We attach identity to roles because it feels stable.

“I’m a founder.”
“I’m an executive.”
“I’m an operator.”

“I’m an entrepreneur.”

The title becomes the logo on our chest or the startup name on the sweatshirt.

But titles are contracts; they are temporary allocations of responsibility inside someone else’s structure. They are funding mechanisms.

You are the venture.

A startup is, as Steve Blank defined it, a temporary organization searching for a scalable and repeatable business model. If that’s true, then a human life is also a search.

A search for meaning.
A search for contribution.
A search for where we are most alive.

Your job funds the search. It is not the search.

I didn’t always understand that. For years I believed competence was the goal: Learn more, do more, and be useful. Accumulate experience the way a company accumulates intellectual property. I treated my career like a growth chart.

And then life interrupts.

Loss rearranges priorities.
Illness changes timelines.
Children mature and remind you that time is a hell of a lot shorter than it seems.

You look around and realize the thing you thought was durable was just infrastructure.

The only enduring asset is your ability to adapt, to care, to create, to think, to love well.

That is the enterprise.

Product-Market Fit Is Personal

In startups, we talk about product-market fit as if it’s mythological -> When customers pull the product out of your hands. When growth becomes organic. When something clicks.

In life, the parallel question is the same.

Where do I feel pulled?

Where do my skills, my temperament, my experiences, and even my scars align with something the world genuinely needs?

Not what pays the most.
Not what impresses the most.
Not what feels safest.

What fits.

There were seasons of my life that looked successful from the outside and felt misaligned on the inside despite high activity and high output; something still felt hollow underneath.

Startups pivot when the market tells them they’re wrong. Humans often ignore that signal for years.

We tell ourselves that revenue equals validation.

It doesn’t.

Money is feedback, it is not fulfillment.

When something truly fits, the energy changes and you are no longer performing competence. You are inhabiting it. You are not forcing distribution; you are building resonance.

That is personal product-market fit.

Growth Isn’t a Promotion

Paul Graham wrote that startup equals growth.

Not fundraising and not branding: Growth.

In a human life, growth is daily more than a promotion and deeper than a salary increase. It is the expansion of capacity, the widening of empathy, the strengthening of judgment, and the ability to remain steady in uncertainty.

Some of my most meaningful growth did not happen in seasons of applause but in seasons where plans dissolved.

There is something clarifying about watching a carefully constructed future unravel. Something refining about realizing that a skill you spent decades mastering can be automated in minutes.

You are forced to confront what remains uniquely yours.

And what remains is rarely technical.

It is discernment.
It is relational steadiness.
It is pattern recognition across systems and people.
It is the courage to stay when things are hard.
It is the humility to repair when you’re wrong.

That is growth.

Not flashy.

But durable.

Your Burn Rate Is Emotional

In venture, burn rate is how quickly you consume capital before reaching sustainability.

In life, burn rate is more intimate in the erosion of energy when you are building something that isn’t aligned with who you are becoming.

You can look productive and be erratically depleting.

You can look successful and feel disconnected.

Eventually, the math surfaces.

You feel it in your body.
In your patience.
In your relationships.

Startups that ignore burn rate collapse suddenly. People who ignore emotional burn rate unravel.

If you are tired in a way that sleep does not fix, that is a signal. If you feel accomplished but not alive, that is data.

And data is not judgment; it is information.

You can respond to it.

Work Funds the Mission

Companies and our work are how the startup of us is funded.

Your employer is revenue, your clients are revenue, and your business is revenue.

They matter. They enable stability. They allow experimentation. They create opportunity.

But they are not the venture.

If the job disappeared tomorrow, would the startup of you continue? Would your values persist? Would your relationships endure? Would your curiosity survive?

If the answer is yes, you are building correctly.

If the answer is no, then work replaced your mission instead of funding it.

There is nothing wrong with structure; entrepreneurship is not morally superior to employment. The structure is neutral. Scaffolding.

What matters is whether you are expanding as a human being inside it.

Psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan’s Self-Determination Theory shows that autonomy, competence, and relatedness drive sustained motivation. We cannot sustainably build in environments that deny those needs.

You can grind for a season.

You cannot build a life that way.

The Startup is You

If your life were a startup pitch, what would be the thesis?

What problem are you uniquely wired to address?
What unfair advantages do your experiences give you?
Who are your true co-founders?
What kind of life compounds love instead of just achievement?

There is no steady state in startups; you are either compounding or decaying.

The same is true for a human being.

The hopeful part, the part we rarely say out loud, is that you can pivot.

At 25.
At 45.
At 65.

You can decide that the job was infrastructure, not identity.
That failure was data, not definition.
That heartbreak was pruning, not destruction.
And that loss clarified what matters most.

You are not late.

You are still building.

And if the structure around you shifted tomorrow, would you still recognize the person you are becoming?

The startup of you has been operating beneath every venture, title, and transaction.

Today ask not whether it exists, ask if you are living your startup with intention.