Founder Guilt and the Lonely Chapter
\*\*DISCLAIMER\*\* This is quite long, I jotted this down for someone that's going thorough a chapter where they feel lost and hopeless and it is a reminder to me on how far I've come and documenting it all through the process. I spent just writing for the past hour everything I could remember, hopefully it makes sense for you (the reader) :)
I'm turning 21 in three days. Looking back, I spent the last seven years chasing startups, quitting more projects than I can count, burning out, shutting down my first company, and realizing entrepreneurship looks nothing like the YouTube videos that got me into it at 14.
Your product becomes your gf/bf that you keep clinging onto, tweaking it and pushing it to become better, not knowing you're investing into something that doesn't have any near future ROI, perhaps I should say, it's a shit investment and all you daydream about is how to make it even better, make it more fancy, more features, improve UX/UI, but forget to ask, what tf is even going to use my product.
I started this whole entrepreneurial, online money making lifestyle, flashy car mindset back in 2019, near COVID and lockdowns began andI was 14 years old. A lot of people were watching those YT videos on how to make money online, get rich, tutorials, Shopify, online markets, affiliate ads, digital products, courses form YouTubers, doomscrolling on reels even late 2020 when it launched.
2019: I made a photography page and was always enthusiastic and passionate about it and wanted to grow, but never fully dedicated to it, my page was on FB with 500 Followers, they were gold to me, especially at 14, that was DIAMOND
2020: My first go-to was TikTok videos and be cringe af and not give a damn who was watching my video and felt embarrassed to post and shy and didn't wanted my face to be out there, I then started to stream PUBG mobile on YT while playing with friends so we can become famous. That was part of it, I even started a cooking channel that I shut down after reaching 44 subscribers on 2 months. I just wanted things quickly, I was too naive to understand that goof things and rewards take time.
2021: I was working back on photography page on FB and made insta page as well and was tweeting quotes on Twitter(X) and the did gain me around 1000 followers, but I just didn't continue, I just wanted to make money and none of this was making it work, but little did I know how money worked
2022; Got into investing and Crypto, invested and lost 500$ and low-key felt risky and the BTC and ETH stuff was out of my mind , I didn't see much opportunity or possibility to learn something form it, tho it does since I look at it now, but yeah.
2021-2023: I then went from making TikTok, insta videos and YT channels and streaming to Shopify building a pet store and used google Adsense to monetize and Google Ads and FB ads to run and advertise my products I drop shipped form ALiExpress/ AliBaba. Now that was a lot of endorphins kicking into my body telling me, "Good Job Kid", you did an amazing job, CONGRATU\*\*\*ingLatins! I had dreamt of million dollars in my bank when buy fiver freelancer emailed me the website is ready with the products :) I was on top of the world. little didi I understand the Long-Term Game, I QUIT.
2023: I then made another store for luxury candles and custom printed shirts, candles to sell online and agin ran ads and Adsense, made videos on new TikTok accounts for it, but quit since I still haven't learnt about the importance of Long-term work. Then I made a drop shipping site to sell vine stands and made videos again on social media, quit because I didn't understand the importance of Long-term work, I QUIT.
2023: Another store about car lights and how they glow to make it look cool, guess what y'all, after posting those social media posts, I F\*\*\*ING QUIT! Also failed my first year at uni and got kicked out, but got back in the same year LOL. My mind was elsewhere building. I was on X, making digital products, making YT shorts for motivation, back at it again I know, but this time I stayed for a while and just switched to making personal brand late 2025, it did take a while, but in 6 month I generated a million impressions and went viral a couple times and I was as happy as I could get. Watching motivational YouTube Videos was the Go LOL.
2024: Got into my first relationship, and romanticized a lot, two should just were desperate for attention and being understood that weren't; their whole life. Late Ron we broke up June since things were not going well and we parted our ways, took me a while to move in since first love, its just too innocent, pure, and filled with that joy that you'll never feel again, and as a man, y'all know what I'm talking about. Anyhow, I had a job as a dishwasher and it made me realize that I just failed so many things, so many times and look where had I ended up as. Making couple hundred bucks week for a jobs work that made my back loose its ability to stand after 14hr Shifts, 6 days a week. I realized the importance of dedicating to something long-term and its ability to affect you late when you grow up. I was still working hard on videos and saving money for university to self-support myself and yea, this life comes at a cost, either you pay with money, time or attention. Like they say, "Attention is the new currency". I fell involve with reading, and I read multiple books on psychology, philosophy, poets, quotations and books from Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Friedrich Nietzsche, athletes, entrepreneurs of our generation Like Musk, Bezos, Altman, Dario, Pichai, Tim Cook, I read about Insys Therapeutics and one of the biggest pharmaceutical frauds, understand cinematography, art, nature, read biographies of people and artists, I was reading about Rome, I was diving deep into the "Matrix" where I see what I was taught my whole life on how to Live, Love, Laugh, Sleep, Cook, Fly, Make friends, Health, every possible way you could think of, I questioned everything I did. Fast-Forward late 2024, after all that, I launched my first company, "XenoraAI" and our model named "Nora". As a first time founder, I was really excited, I had a great co-foudner, and CTO and I hired interns and I was funded money by Microsoft credits and a family member, but little did I know how goddamn hard this is going to be. I built the first product idea, and had my "friends" join my team, and little did I know, never, ever have your friends be part of your journey because most will not understand, they will mock you, they will talk about it, they will do a lot fo things you wont be ready for, either be certain about the person, or go solo and the right person comes later on. Fortunate enough, I had enough to continue and I did for a year and a half until January 2026.
2025: I built the product, I reach out to my university to help, they were launching a legal advocacy center and they wanted a software for the uni and students, they offered $100k to be part of my uni and help grow the business and host it on their servers, but that wasn't what I wanted, I wanted to apply for programs to help students grow their startups, not be part of a university where I was giving away my company which could've been potentially worth billions of dollars in the future. Of course I said NO, and I don't regret a single bit of it! There was no way, that I just spent last 4 months, sleeping 5 hrs day, working 15/16 hrs a day, building my company, just to eventually hand it over???? NOPE! A lot occurred during those times from friendships falling apart, losing trust in people and the lonely chatter was being jotted down in my life. I was writing and documenting on my notes, notion, diary, I made YT videos, Shorts, and its till up there in my timeline on my channel on how it all began. I worked myself, starved myself, I become relentless, the hope of, "it gets better" kept me going in ways I couldn't have imagined. Later on the year I applied to a startup incubator and got accepted and that was when my true entrepreneurial side was shown, I was pitching my idea to VCs, I was validation my idea, I hired a CFO, I hired an intern, I was meeting crazy people at tech events around the city, my GOD I even go the VP of Morgan Stanely to introduce me to clients and potential customers. I was all time high energy and was burning with this desire that I have it all and I wanna make the best out of it. Holding meetings with team, organizing the team of 10 was hectic and especially when you hire the wiring people, because either you have to be really fats at what you do or you'll be left behind. Personal issued came into teams, separations began and yea that was the end of the team, so my cofounder and CTO and Intern kept pushing it from October to January 2026, and on the first day of semester I declared to shut it all down, the burnout was REAL.
2026: So I shutdown my startup and that energy had still bee n thereabout I felt at peace. I was carrying dead weight for over a year and it wasn't going anywhere so I decided to shut it all down, and the team of 4 had their own path to go on. I decided to take 5 classes in one term for the first time and my GPA take down and never doing that again. Forgot to tell ya, this whole time I had been full time taking 4 classes while building Xenora, so the burden and pressure was a lot. Meeting the VCs, directors of companies, startups and talking to people, working on the product, learning new tools and just kept on working and learning and reading and tweeting and posting on social media, back at the building stage with a lot of experience. I don even consider it a waste of time because when you look around, there is a rare chance you'll meet someone that had this much exposure form 19-20 years old, when everyone is "enjoying" their time and having "fun", you're sitting on your desk with the next prompt for Claude, Cursor and codex building the next Billion Dollar ideas, the curse never goes away, you live with it to the end of your life. I took a 2 month break, but my focus span was still on build mode and I relaunched as a Xenora for OS system for small businesses to manage their finances, marketing and reports in one dashboard, where people spend thousands of dollars on multiple features and products and handle all the integration, just connect to Nora, the product and let the dashboard deal with your workflow, automate with agent to do content writing, you approve and send, etc etc. I even pitched it at Shopify builder Sunday event to 100+ people and it seemed to me that it was going somewhere after I validated a but, I just didn't want to keep the name XenoraAI for my company and I just shut it down last month after filing taxes. I just went all in on social media making content for students, and founder, teaching ways on how to build products with AI and build your own company and mentor people a bit. Started documenting my weeks on YT videos and had some viral moments and started to learn new tools and use AI agents and workflow automations with Claude, Cursor and other tools. Its. crazy era to build your dreams for sure. I just cant stop exploring and learning and talking to proper. I pivoted to build a new framework on how we use AI and to dissever new ways of interaction with models and be less generic in a sense. It's not hard to spot AI generated sites, content, workflows and videos, but there needs to be a change on how we interact with these models. Onto brainstorming another idea, I could not fall asleep last night and purely functioned on 2 coffees throughout the day, working and working and working. It has been crazy 7 years of being in this lifestyle and theres nothing better I'd rather be doing. Entire goal is to validate ideas and see which works the best for me, document in public and solve problems for people that experience them. How I would make a difference in this world, and have the greatest impact for future generations.
I believe its luck, opportunities don't come to you when you just sit around in your basement and do nothing about it, they come for people that keep on trying and trying and trying for years to come with no output. You need to be on an insane level of dedication to be a founder, building a company, working with startup incubator and managing teas while being full-time student and doing it all as I mentioned earlier.
No one talks about the burnout because you don't feel it in the moment, but it slowly fills within you, and on a random day it kick in and you feel it to your nerves, when you feel lost, hopeless, no social cues, no idea what you're doing, whether all this is going to workout or not, you go CRAZY and thats why its important to keep yourself in check, or to at least have someone that checks once in a while. You start scrolling on reels, everyone is building, everyone is making the bar of $10K a month and flashing their lifestyle, but who knows whether its real or rented, maybe it is real, but how much pressure they had to handle to attain the certainty of being where they are. How much shit they had to go through! You see the flashy outside, not the miserable inside. It means not much without core values, purpose and direction.
Founder life isn't meant for everyone, especially when you come from norms where you have had to be there for yourself from a young age, its a blessing and curse at the same time since you were paying the sacrifices while you didn't know if it was a choice or not fr you because there was no other option of you at the time. You had to breakdown, build yourself up, make tons of sacrifices, get yourself up, work on days when you feel absolutely disgusted and cant't give 10% so you give 7% inn. Those are the day yo keep going at, because of the hop go "it gets better" I believe it does, you have to understand it does get better, because what you believe in becomes your reality. You need to be delusional, working with the norm isn't going to fulfill you, trust me, I've seen people go back to their old ways and regretted instantly. The founder lifestyle builds a whole different version of you, we were the kids who were afraid the teacher wouldn't call us upon to ask questions or to read aloud a paragraph form the textbooks, the introverts who never fitted in, who couldn't understand why things were the way they were frustrated when misunderstood, and have bad way of navigating and talking through our emotions. We were the people that had different childhoods than 99% of the world and it all came at a cost which we paid already and realized later when we become aware of it. It wasn't a matter of choice. it was a matter of survival, of learning and building yourself up from the depth of the grounds.
Im building another company which is till in idea phase and I have no clue what it is, but theres something that keeps me going, the idea of doing any other thing haunts me and U just wanna build and work what I love doing the most, and as a matter of fact, I hate being told what to do, so theres no other better way to build a life that to be an entrepreneur and founder working for you and for those that care about.
If you want to be an entrepreneur, be ready to risk and sacrifice because this life comes at a great cost and most are not willing to sacrifice, and that point I remind myself,
"What have I got to lose when I never had anything in the first place, I came from nothing".
I've been documenting this journey publicly over the past year. If anyone's interested, my links are on my Reddit profile.