Over the last 6 years, I have been my own pen pal. I have written myself emails at different moments in my life to capture where I was at the time and relive what I was going through. The first email I sent myself was the first email I ever wrote on my @getofficial email account.
A lot has changed since that first email, but I still write to myself periodically, and I figured it probably makes sense to tie it into K-factor to actually share how I’m feeling.
So for this one, I want to talk about the concept of being lost, and what it means to feel lost while you are trying to move forward.
Truthfully, I don’t know how to write this; over the last couple of weeks, I think the most common question I’ve been asked is if I am okay. It’s been for a variety of reasons, but essentially it all boils down to the same thing: people see me spinning.
I am going to try my best not to sound like a total dick, but from an outside perspective, I have won life. What I am about to talk about are the epitome of first-world problems:
I sold a company for 8 figures at 25, got to travel the world for a few years, and pretended to work, all while investing and growing my network and net worth. After leaving Bumble, I scaled Golden Egg with Sarah and Duncan to a team of 15. Throughout all of that, I have been dating an incredible person who I love and who loves me dearly. And yet, now I don’t know what to do with my time but code and play Fortnite. It’s great that I have been able to step away from things to focus on what’s next, but truthfully, I don’t know what’s next. There is so much uncertainty.
But one thing has been my anchor, and it has changed everything.
So what changed? Well, I learned how to “code”
Over the last 100 days, I have missed only 1 day of coding, and it was for an interview with an accelerator that I didn’t get into, mainly because I wasn’t focused enough.
Now that I have the ability to build, every day is a chance to build something new. For the first time in my life, I can create anything I put my mind to. It’s complete and utter freedom. Yet once you are free, you can go in any direction you choose.
When I was building Official, I was forced to build the company because I couldn’t build the product; now I am building the product instead of the company. This is what I missed so much when I was at Bumble. While I was in London for work, I dreamed of the day that I could get back to work and really go build; now it’s here, and I have endless possibilities of what I can build.
I can access public data, clean it, structure it, and build on top of it in less than 24 hours. I have personally built over 30 different websites in the last 100 days, all of which do drastically different things that I could go sell and focus on.
Within SIL, we have more git repos than customers, which isn’t very difficult because we have only had a few customers, and most are special-situation work.
Does it bother me? Absolutely, it eats away at me. But are we moving towards our goal? Without a doubt.
We process over 200M videos a day and are now detecting trends as they form and before they peak. For the first time, literally yesterday, we were able to show that we predicted a peak almost 4 hours before it happened. We are processing data at a scale that multi-billion-dollar companies do, and we are doing it from a few servers duct-taped together.
Does that change how I feel? Not at all.
I still wake up and think I am a failure. That it’s my fault we aren’t growing faster, building bigger, achieving more.
So why would I write this and share this with colleagues, friends, and even the VCs who rejected me? Partially because it will be fun to reread in a few years, when I am in a crisis over something else that makes this seem small, but also to show that everyone struggles with being lost and not knowing what the future holds.
When I was a kid, I always thought teenagers had it figured out because they were able to make their own decisions; then when I got to high school, I thought college kids had life figured out since they knew what they wanted to do, then after college I thought early grads had it figured out because they were finally off the trial of life, and working and doing things for themselves, but then I realized something, I didn’t have life figured out, nor did many of my friends even though we all went to great schools and had stable jobs. Realistically, no one has it figured out; if they did, it would be a lot easier, but part of the beauty of life is in the chaos that we live in.
So I will leave you with the one thing that changes my brain chemistry and makes me take a breath: a cringy, inspirational Instagram compilation to remind you that you are alive.
Stay Golden,
Z