Six months ago I left the corporate world at Ball Aerospace to found an AI startup with Adam, who I’d met on Twitter only briefly before. We hadn’t even met in person, yet I left one of the most stable 6-figure tech jobs where I had no complaints. It was a hard decision because I loved my work, had great coworkers, excellent benefits, and a reasonable salary. I’d been working next to some of my coworkers for 5 years at that point.

Burnout

Why? I was burnt out. Over the last few years, I’ve learned that burnout for me comes not from overdoing something, but from not doing enough of anything. I need challenges, I can’t live in a mediocre world where everything just works. “The norm” grinds me down, I can’t do it. I live for uncertainty, stress, and tight deadlines. Most people hate when they’re asked to work late on Friday. Even in a corporate job where that wasn’t expected, if someone wanted something ASAP, they were going to get it ASAP. I stayed up coding until 3 AM some days and became known as the guy to GSD and do it fast. I got bonuses and a pat on the back every time, but whatever the word for grossly failing to maximize your results is…that’s what applies here. If you’re like me, save voraciously, then quit while you’re ahead.

Maybe it’s not burnout. Whatever it is, I get lethargic, I don’t want to do anything, and I can focus on anything but work.

My startup cured me of whatever it was. My workload immediately shot up from 40 hours a week (on the dot) to 80 hours being a “break week” and most in the 100-120 range. When you’re at a startup, it’s do or die. Not only did I need to put in a lot of hours, but I also had to context switch faster than ever before.

More Tasks, Less Time

Roughly speaking, I had to be able to do 10 major tasks in a day starting out, then 5 in a day after 3 months, then 2 a day after 6 months. When I was in corporate, we usually measured tasks in multiple days or weeks. Those same tasks are now hours. The primary reason for this falloff over time, is also why large companies tend to move so slow: it becomes increasingly complex to iterate as your software becomes more full-featured and complex.

Yet that’s only part of the picture. If I had to put a number on it, I’d say there’s also a minimum 2x speed improvement you have to apply to yourself anyways. This is because:

1. You are the product owner. You must be able to make good decisions on scope. You no longer have someone telling you to do this or that. If ‘that’ takes too long, you can just do ‘this’ – especially when ‘that’ is only 20% of the value.
2. You have to become a faster engineer. Learn things faster. Take longer days. Go to new environments every 3-4 hours. Read documentation when you can’t be code. Find libraries or open source applications that do 95% of what you need, and then ignore the other 5%. Adam calls me a 10x dev, and I’d say this is why.

Solving Problems Alone

Until we started hiring, I was responsible for every bit of tech 24/7. That also means you get to use whatever tech you feel the most comfortable with which makes you feel like you have inhuman coding capabilities. At my corporate job, I didn’t even have the senior title yet (mostly due to corporate HR BS about how years = experience, but still). At Reddy, that didn’t matter. I was the only technical founder, every technical problem was my problem to solve and boy did I solve a lot of problems.

We landed our first client earlier than most startups which is great, unless you’re the engineer trying to get everything stood up in 25% of the time you thought you’d have. Keep in mind the first time I seriously touched web dev was January 2023, and our pilot product had a real-time simulator using websockets. I can’t remember exactly, but it went something like I learned what websockets were one morning, coded a prototype that day and then had end-users breaking it a day or two later.

Breaking it? Of course. One of my first major bugs I got to work on was when audio streaming over the websockets was crashing the connection. After many hours of beating my head against the wall (remember this was new tech to me, so as always the perceived problem space is significantly bigger than when you know something better), I left to go eat dinner at my family’s house. I talk it over with my dad who is also a software engineer and his hunch is right that we were hitting bandwidth limitations at our client company’s router. That was with only a handful of people running it in parallel. I spent the evening in Wireshark which proved him right and then spent the night fixing it (and a host of other bugs we had seen). That was my first of several all-nighters. At one point Adam thought I was saying midsockets, so now whenever software goes wonky, we just say it’s “midsockets all over again.”

Room to Breathe

Thankfully the midsockets have long since been fixed and the product has become both substantially more elaborate and stable. Best of all, building this product has leveled up my web knowledge so much that I feel more comfortable doing web than what I’d been doing for 3 straight years before. This makes sense, because I was doing 6 months at 3x hours, and because it was all back-to-back, my recall and learning skyrocketed. There’s nothing like a startup to teach you new things and keep your skills sharp.

Skip forward ~4 months. We’re getting ready to pilot another product, and decided it was time to hire. I’ll save the rest of the story for another day, but I think it’s important to say that going from one engineer to two engineers on the team was an incredible relief. If you’re a solo dev, as soon as you can, get someone else. No matter how good you are, having someone else you can turn to or just to keep each other motivated is such a win.

Thankfully 120 hour weeks are largely behind me, now I’m focused on delivering an increasingly higher quality of work than shipping a large mass of features as fast as possible. It’s not really any easier, and it’s still a thousand times more challenging and fun than a 9-5, but it’s nice to work (slightly) less than every waking moment.

I’ll be in this startup for a while, but I can’t imagine wanting to go back to corporate when it’s done.