What It Really Feels Like to Build a Company While Building Yourself

People think being a CTO means writing elegant code in a quiet room, making big architectural decisions, and occasionally stepping in for a technical crisis. The truth? My life feels more like juggling fire while sprinting on a treadmill that keeps speeding up.

When I co-founded our startup, I imagined late nights of coding, yes — but not the emotional weight that comes with leading a team, shipping a product, and still trying to remain a human being with a life outside GitHub.

My days usually start before sunrise. Not because I’m trying to be one of those hustle-culture heroes, but because my mind wakes up before my body. There’s always a pending decision hovering in my brain — a database migration, a security concern, a deadline I wish I had one more week for. I brew coffee, open my laptop, and start untangling whatever knot yesterday left behind.

But the real challenge isn’t the tech. It’s the people.

I’ve learned that being a CTO means becoming the emotional buffer between engineers who feel overwhelmed and founders who want everything “yesterday.” I’ve had days where I spend more time in 1:1 conversations about burnout, imposter syndrome, or personal struggles than debugging actual code. And honestly? That’s the part I’ve grown to value the most.

Of course, there are moments that remind me why I chose this path — like the night our product finally hit 1,000 active users. We were all exhausted, eating takeout on the office floor, but the joy… the sheer joy… made the stress worth it.

I won’t pretend I’ve mastered balance. I miss family events, forget to reply to texts, and sometimes stare at my idle bicycle thinking, “One day I’ll ride you again.” But I’m learning. Learning to delegate. Learning that rest is part of innovation. Learning that leadership is less about being the smartest and more about being the calmest.

My life isn’t perfect. But it’s mine — messy, ambitious, and filled with the quiet satisfaction of waking up every day to build something that didn’t exist yesterday.

And honestly? I wouldn’t trade it for anything.