'The Trek of a Solo Founder: My Life in Startups' by padenfool founderstories onlineidentity
At the time, I didn’t know what a startup was, I knew what a business was, I knew that you sold things to make money, but I didn’t know its purpose.
The obvious shortcoming of a solo founder is to lack the experience that comes from a team of well-diversified and intelligent people. To take the journey of bringing your creation into the world alone, you must be willing to identify your failings to face a relentless wave of inability and foolish failure.Or at least that sounds like a fun adventure to trek.At the start of 2019 I had just finished my first and second college majors .
Luckily one of my housemates was a great engineer, happy to suggest the most difficult course of building my imagined MVP.Well anyway, my friend convinced me to learn about vue, .net, and building OAuth services from scratch.But that is not to say the simple path wasn’t noted. It is to say that the understanding which came out of lower-level thinking is… worth considering.
The next day I was on the road again, I detoured into mt Rushmore where a road sign convinced me to smoke a joint and rent a helicopter + pilot. Part of that experience was a focus on humanity, not documentation of the experience . Long story short I hung out in Boulder for a few days, we really liked talking to each other. After I drove back home, I realized that I had found someone very special to me, truly inspiring in her own journey. But really, I found a sort of human superpower.We formed our relationship in a long-distance manner, that is to say, I drove back to California and eventually moved to a new location outside of Stockton.
It is rather simple to justify this belief; I have had an incredible experience in which I felt truly aligned with life and purpose. Yet, on this same journey tragedy was striking those around me. Including my own relationship- in which my partner not only faced the tragedy of losing a parent but her own existential mortality in an accident which I can only attribute the survival of as luck.