Spend It Well

Do the math first

You sleep roughly 8 hours. You work roughly 9. That leaves 7 hours for everything else: the people you love, the meals you actually sit down to eat, the version of yourself that exists outside of what you produce.

Seven hours. And most of us spend at least some of that commuting, scrolling, recovering from the day.

Which means the people you work with, and the work you do together, are quietly consuming the majority of your conscious, waking life. Not your family. Not your closest friends. The people sitting on the other end of your WhatsApp messages and your late-night Google Meet calls.

I don't think most builders sit with that long enough. I didn't, until recently.

What 2am actually looks like

Our team builds remotely. Different cities, different setups, everyone on their own laptop. Most of them hold full time jobs during the day. They give their 9 to 6 to someone else, come home, eat dinner, and then open their laptops again to build Dodeez.

Some nights we're still on calls past 2am. Weekends too.

Working late at night, laptop open, phone propped beside it.

When I picture that, specifically, not as a hustle narrative but as a literal image: people tired, past the point where anyone could blame them for stopping, still working, still figuring things out, some of them learning skills they didn't have six months ago because the build demanded it. That image does something to me.

These are not just people who believe in a product. They are people spending hours they will never get back, on something that is not guaranteed, because someone cast a vision and they chose to follow it.

That someone is me. And I have never said that out loud to them directly.

The ask nobody names

Founders talk about vision. About product. About growth and impact and what we're building toward. We talk about the destination constantly.

What we rarely say is: I know what I'm asking you to give.

Because the real ask is not your skills. It's not your code or your design or your ideas. It's your time. The irreversible kind. The kind that doesn't care how the company eventually performs. Every hour you put in is gone regardless of whether we win or lose.

I think about this when someone on the team pushes through something difficult they've never done before. We have people building things that are genuinely outside their existing experience, figuring it out anyway because the product needs it. That's not just commitment to a job. That's someone betting their confidence alongside their hours.

Most founders, myself included, don't acknowledge that bet by name. We celebrate the output. We thank the effort. But we rarely say: I see the specific thing you are risking here, and I do not take it lightly.

This is me saying it.

Why it has to be worth it

The day we die, we leave with nothing. Not the money. Not the cars or the houses or the things we spent years accumulating. None of it comes with us.

What stays behind is what we built in the world while we were here. The value we created. The people whose lives were different because we existed. The problems we actually solved for real human beings who had them.

That's the only thing worth pointing your finite hours at. Not because it sounds good in a mission statement. But because when you do the math, when you add up what you're actually trading, it has to be worth the trade.

If you're going to spend most of your waking life with a group of people, building something together, you had better choose those people carefully. And you had better choose the work carefully too. Not just for ROI. Not just for market size. But because the work is where your life is going. And the people are who you're spending it with.

Who you work with and what you work on is not a career decision. It is a life decision. Treat it like one.

What I'm actually building toward

I want to build something that creates real value. That makes people's lives better in some concrete, honest way. That generates enough to take care of the people around me and fund the next thing and the thing after that.

But underneath all of that is something simpler. I want the hours to have meant something. The 2am calls, the weekends, the energy poured into a product that didn't exist before we made it. I want all of that to add up to something that mattered, not just to the people who eventually use it, but to the people who built it.

To my team: I know what you're giving. I know it's not guaranteed to pay off on any timeline we can promise. I know some of you are learning things you've never done before just because we need it done. I know you have families and other obligations and a finite number of hours in a week, and you are choosing to spend some of them here.

I don't say this enough. But I mean it every single time we're still on a call at 2am and nobody has logged off yet.

Build with intention. Because the people building alongside you are spending the only currency that nobody can make more of. So is the person who asked them to show up.

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Related: While They're Still Here — the same math, pointed in the other direction. The hours I owe my team, and the hours I owe the people at home.