Growth
I’ve been part of multiple startups, almost always as a founding team member, rarely as a founder. I don’t think I’m proud of it, and I even if I’m slightly proud. the pride sits next to some hard lessons about startup culture: why those environments are genuinely useful when you’re early in figuring yourself out, and why at some point you have to stop defaulting to yes.
This note continues from Walking Contradictions: I Don’t Love Leadership , and from the weight of being trusted , where I got into why people kept pulling me into these things when I was never the one seeking them out. this piece is less about the leadership and more about what I saw once I was inside.
I do not complain about the life I am living.
I do not point fingers at the surroundings anymore.
I used to do that, a lot, but I stopped.
now I look inward and stay there.
and sometimes a quiet question rises.
what if I never stopped blaming the world and allowed it to carry my pain for me.
what if naming the environment was easier than naming myself.
A friend of mine called Mahmoud , I have loved this friend so much. unfortunately he was also a victim of my constant avoidance , but we are good now. Mahmoud and I were completely different personalities, yet something linked us at the core. thankfully to this relationship, I finally had a name for it. we were the only ones who allowed themselves to get lost.
sometimes distance doesn’t change how much you know someone.
It only changes how helpless you feel watching them from afar.
And then I’m surprised because… I guess I’m surprised because people care, cause I think, when I was young growing up, I felt like nobody cared, and you put up all these things inside of you because nobody cares, and then you happen upon a small moment where somebody really cares, and it just disproves everything you ever knew about the world, and that is surprising. Theo von
At the start of the year, I had to catch up with a team I’m part of. we wanted to escape the dull rhythm of formal meetings and genuinely check in on how everyone had lived through 2025.I asked a simple question: