The founder who got out.

By the time I hit 30, I had spent nearly a decade in Silicon Valley doing the things we are told lead to freedom. I started with no connections.

I built hypergrowth products at Airbnb and Uber Eats, and helped Uber Eats scale to $10B in bookings.

Then I co-founded Launch House and raised $23M, including a $12M Series A from a16z. The final checks came in at a nine-figure valuation.

By every external measure I was killing it. I was also increasingly miserable.

My cofounder and I were butting heads. A hit piece about my company went viral and Apple News pushed it to a hundred million people. Two years of brand-building gone overnight. I was in the worst shape of my life.

When I sat with what had actually gone wrong, the answer was underneath all of it. I had been making the decisions that looked right to everyone else instead of the ones that were right for me.

I could tell you my conversion metrics to two decimals. I could not tell you what evidence would have changed my mind about my own company.

So I made the hardest call of my life. I set up a new LLC with $10k in it, ended my marriage, scouted twenty cities, and moved to Charleston, South Carolina, where I knew nobody, to build a life that was mine.

It was not a leap of faith. I wrote down the worst case, counted every currency, and the old life was failing in four of the five.

Today I run Rye Valley from Charleston, a portfolio of companies I own outright. It has done over $4M in revenue. I am down 80 pounds. I am engaged.

Every week I write about the decisions I am making inside those businesses while I am still making them. What I am building, what I am charging, what worked, what I got wrong.

And what I think is about to change for founders, because the ground is moving faster than the advice is. The numbers are real and the mistakes are mine.