Need advice from the elders, pls help....
I'm 18, skipped the traditional path, and I'm terrified it might all fall apart.
It's 2 AM while I'm writing this. I'm 18. I got selected into MIT but choose not to college eventually. I chose to build a deep-tech aerospace startup.
Some days I wake up feeling like I'm on fire. I feel like I'm going to pull this off, raise the money, build the hardware, and spend the next few decades building the future I dream about.
Then there are nights like this.
Nights where it feels like I'm walking on the edge of a knife with fire all around me.
I'm talking to investors, applying for grants, joining accelerators, building a team, talking to customers, and closing my first pre-seed round. Things are actually moving in the right direction.
But then this little voice in my head keeps asking...
"What if none of this works?"
I've never raised half a million dollars.
Nobody in my family has. (Tbh, they have tons of money but it came from a traditional background not through this startup stuff and all)
Nobody in my neighborhood has.
Nobody I personally know has.
So every investor meeting feels huge. Every email notification changes my mood. When someone says they like what we're building, I start imagining the future. Then five minutes later my brain goes,
"Yeah... but what if they say no?"
and it's not even about one investor. It's all of them. The weirdest part about being a founder is that you don't really get to talk about this. You're supposed to be the confident one. The person everyone believes in. If your team senses uncertainty, they'll worry. If investors sense uncertainty, they'll question your conviction.
The only person I could actually say all of this to was my girlfriend. We broke up about two months ago. So now it's just... me. My team sees the CEO. Investors see the founder. LinkedIn sees the milestones. Nobody really sees the guy who's awake at 2 AM wondering if this whole thing is going to work.
I don't even want sympathy. I just wish there was someone who understood what this feels like without me having to pretend I'm 100% confident all the time.
So most of the time you just carry it by yourself.
My parents always tells me not to stress about money because they'll feed me no matter what.
But I can't.
I've been trying to stand on my own feet since I was 15.
I don't even like taking money from my parents because I want to earn my own; and honestly... I'm not building this because I watched some flashy startup reels on Instagram.
I genuinely believe humanity's future is in space. That sounds ridiculously ambitious coming from an 18-year-old, but it's what I've dedicated my life to. I'm not trying to build another startup just to flip it for a few million dollars and disappear.... I don't even care for a million or even a billion dollars because they are just commodity.
I want to spend my life building something that actually matters. Maybe that's stupid. Maybe it's naive; but that's the mission I chose. There's also a really personal side to all of this that almost nobody knows.. Whatever,
Hope that there are questions bigger than my own life. Maybe that's one of the reasons I'm obsessed with building impossible technology. Not because I think I have all the answers; but because I don't.
Maybe I'm just a kid trying to solve problems that are way bigger than me.
I honestly don't know. I don't even know why I'm writing all of this. Maybe I just needed to tell someone that being the founder isn't nearly as glamorous as LinkedIn makes it look.
Sometimes it's just you, sitting alone at 2 AM, wondering if you're building the greatest thing you'll ever do...
or making the biggest mistake of your life.
(I use AI to refine my grammatical error so don't bother to comment that Its AI generated and pls don't see this post as startup stuff and all, see this with a perspective that an 18 year old tryna' build something in life)