Nobody died, don't worry.
This article comes from a LinkedIn post I wanted to write at 3:23 AM about something that has happened recently in my circle. It was probably going to be a slightly controversial post, because I speak very much from my point of view.
So I decided to turn it into a blog post instead. That way, the people who are actually interested in reading my opinion on the topic can take the time to read it and add nuance to it.
Context
Guille, a friend I made at indies.la, once asked me: "How do you manage to build startups that aren't solving things with AI?"
At the time I didn't answer very well because we were organizing an event, but now that I've thought about it more, I think the answer has a lot to do with what surrounded me.
As I've said many times before, I was born in Chillan Viejo, a city without many young people, with a pretty old population, and definitely not the tech capital my younger self would have loved it to be.
Over time I learned to love these places. I learned to love small cities, the ones everyone says "have nothing going on" or "have no future here." And while that is largely true, they are also beautiful in the sense that their stories stay marked there and, in some way, frozen in place.
There is something beautiful about that feeling that "nothing has changed." You can walk down Cabildo, a street in Chillan, and talk to grandparents about their youth, to older people about the problems they live with today, to separated mothers and fathers about how they deal with everyday life.
Or you can do my favorite activity: listen to other people's conversations on the bus and understand the everyday problems people have.
In Santiago you have the metro and the buses, but to me they are completely different worlds.
The underworld represented by the Santiago metro feels almost like a mirror of society there: the seriousness, the depression, the normalization of brutal things like suicides in the Metro.
Here, in my little town, it is different. When you get on the bus you hear people complain, laugh, talk.
What I mean is: the programming community is beautiful. I am a pretty stubborn fan of what they do and of what I do. But normally, and naturally, we lock ourselves into the problems we ourselves have.
Very often programmers solve problems that only programmers know about, and that traps us inside a bubble.
Comparison between WordPress, Claude Code, Codex, and Minimax
It's great that there are people solving those problems, but while other developers were optimizing LLMs or fighting over scientific notation to prove that 1 > 2, I was on a bus or having tea with my family.
Listening to everyday problems. Or the problems of those famous boring companies.
Watching the code I wrote reach ordinary people.
Regular jobs
In my short life, 20 years old at the time of writing this, I've worked in several things and, honestly, I had a pretty good time in almost all of them.
I've sold vegetables, worked at the street market, sold chaparritas, been the IT lead at a fruit company, designer, service technician, IT advisor, and server configurator.
Then I worked as a programmer for an Argentine company while also doing the night shift at the fruit company. I remember that period as the least sleep I've ever gotten in my life.
And I had a dream job: I wanted to work at Discord, because it's a platform I've used for a very long time and at that time I liked it a lot. It was Discord or Google.
Founding a startup
But when I created my first startup I fell in love with this: creating something, making a huge bet on an idea for which you have a little data and a lot of conviction that it can work.
I fell in love with the sleepless nights, the days when you almost cry from the fear of the uncertainty this brings, with breaking my brain studying things I never believed I would study.
I fell in love with all the bad parts too, because when you love something you don't stay on the surface: you go deeper and start loving even the ugly parts of it.
And I told myself I would never go back to a regular job. Not because I hated my bosses, or because I wanted to be my own boss, but because of how beautiful it is to build something that is yours.
Rest in peace (for now)
Lately I've had to watch friends I made in the startup world get hired or find themselves forced to pause their startups or side projects.
I respect them, I don't judge them, and I wish them the best.
But while I was trying to sleep, I started wondering whether I would be capable of leaving something my cofounder and I have dedicated so much time to. Something that has kept us from sleeping and taught us so much.
And yes, there are no salaries here. No loans or holiday bonuses either.
No Christmas fruitcake.
There are good months and bad months. Great moments and moments when you feel like looking for a regular job.
But I love that.
That is why I joined indies. That is why I love talking to people who are building things. Because having something of your own gives you something a job will never give you.
Something that is yours.
Something that doesn't let you sleep.
Something that makes you dream.