I check my brokerage account more often than I check my metrics. That tells you everything you need to know about where I’m at right now.
The severance ran for a while. Longer than most people get. Amazon is generous with that if you’ve been there long enough. But it’s a fixed number divided by months, and the months keep happening whether you ship anything or not. The severance is almost gone. What’s left is Amazon stock I accumulated over a decade of vesting, and every month I don’t have revenue, I sell a little more of it to cover rent and health insurance and the Hetzner bill and everything else.
It’s a weird feeling, watching a stock position you built over ten years get chipped away $3,000 at a time to fund something that doesn’t have a single paying customer yet.
The spread
I’ve been building for six months. The portfolio page on gmacko.com lists sixteen ventures and a handful of experiments. That sounds impressive until you realize that none of them have users. Not “not enough users.” Zero. I’ve built a lot of interesting technology and I’ve proven to myself that I can ship fast. What I haven’t proven is that anyone wants what I’m building.
The spread was intentional at first. I was exploring. Feeling out different verticals. Seeing what was technically possible with AI tooling, what I could build as one person that used to take a team. That was a legitimate thing to do for a few months. But six months in, “exploring” starts to look a lot like “avoiding.”
The hard part was never building. I said that in Sandcastles and it’s still true. The hard part is picking two or three of these things and actually running them as businesses. Talking to strangers. Cold outreach. Sales calls. Going to industry events for controls engineers or escape room operators or youth sports parents and saying “hi, I built something, can I show you.” That stuff terrifies me in a way that debugging a distributed system at 2am never did.
So instead I keep building. Another prototype. Another feature. Another venture that looks great in a portfolio and means nothing without a customer.
The stock question
Amazon stock has done well. It’s still doing well. Every share I sell to fund this is a share that would have compounded for the next twenty years. I’m not just spending money. I’m spending future money. The opportunity cost compounds.
At the current burn rate I can keep going for a while. Not forever, but a while. The question is whether “a while” is long enough for any of this to work, or whether I’m just slowly converting a retirement fund into a portfolio of demos.
I don’t have an answer.
Looking at jobs
I started looking at jobs this month. I haven’t applied anywhere yet, but I updated the resume. I’m browsing LinkedIn with intent instead of just scrolling. I’m thinking about what kind of role I’d take, what I’d be willing to go back to, what I wouldn’t.
I hate that I’m doing it. It feels like giving up. Every time I open a job listing I hear the voice in my head saying “the man who says he can and the man who says he can’t are both usually right.” If I’m already planning the exit, I’m making it more likely that I’ll need one.
But I have a mortgage and a wife and a dog, and burning through stock to fund something that might never work isn’t brave. It might just be reckless. That thought gets louder every time I check the brokerage account.
Saying this out loud
Writing this down and putting it on the internet is probably stupid. A hiring manager reads it and thinks I don’t believe in my own ventures. A potential customer reads it and thinks I’m about to fold. An investor reads it and writes me off.
Or someone reads it and recognizes the feeling. That specific feeling of having left something stable to try something uncertain and watching the uncertainty start to win.
I don’t know if being public about this helps or hurts. Keeping it inside wasn’t helping. Solo founding is isolating. All day in your own head, making decisions nobody reviews, building things nobody uses, and the only feedback loop is the bank balance going down.
The belief problem
Belief in startups is load-bearing. You have to believe it’s going to work hard enough to keep going when everything says it won’t. Not delusional optimism, but real conviction that you’ve found a problem worth solving and you’re the person to solve it.
And right now my belief is cracking. Not because the ideas are bad. PlayTrek solves a real problem. Controls Foundry addresses a real market gap. There are manufacturers running thirty-year-old PLCs who would pay for what I’ve built. The ideas aren’t the issue.
The issue is me. I haven’t done the work to find out if I’m right. I’ve been hiding in code because code is comfortable. Putting it in front of people and finding out if they care is not.
That’s the honest version. Six months of building, zero months of selling. The clock is running. Something has to change.