Maybe I am an entrepreneur after all

For most of my career I was paid well to know what I was doing. I'm leaving that. Not cleanly.

They wouldn't let me go properly. Offered part-time while my replacement gets up to speed. I said yes. The safety net was warm and the conversation was kind, and I'm not as brave as the founder narrative wants me to be.

The replacement is a man I haven't met yet. I have decided to like him. I have decided this because, left to my defaults, I won't.

Eleven months in to running my own AI company. The cushy job is still there in my head when the calendar gets quiet and a wire transfer is overdue. I knew the money was there before. I never had to know where it came from. I just knew it would land.

Now I know exactly where every pound comes from, and how fragile that is. That's the part nobody quite warns you about — not the long hours or the stress, those are exactly what they say on the tin. The harder thing is the exposure. The fact that the work has your face on it. The fact that nothing protects you from looking foolish if it doesn't land.

It's uncomfortable. I don't want to lie about that.

Here's the bit I didn't expect.

The passion came back. Not the I love what I do version that goes on a LinkedIn bio. The version where you can't stop. Where the four open tasks at the bottom of your terminal — yes, that one — are exactly the same texture as the dopamine hit of taking a meeting at midnight because it might lead somewhere. Each tractable. Each ten minutes. Each one that lights up a small bright thing in your brain.

“

The dopamine that dresses like productivity wears another set of clothes when it dresses like ownership.

I wrote a postcard a few weeks ago about how the addictions that wear productivity-clothes won't get a moral panic. The people who love you are impressed. Same drug, prettier wrapper.

Running a company is that, with the volume turned up.

I had told myself for years I wasn't an entrepreneur. I liked the salary. I liked the certainty. I liked the bit where someone else was carrying the risk. Maybe that was true. Or maybe I had just not yet found the dopamine that fit.

Eleven months in. Exposed. Tired. Awake. Practising warmth on a stranger who shows up in two months. He and I will be best friends inside ten.

Maybe I am an entrepreneur after all.

— maria