What People Don't See
From the outside, being a startup founder looks like freedom. You're your own boss. You set your own hours. You're "building the future." People outside the startup ecosystem see the upside — the potential, the autonomy, the stories about overnight success — and they romanticize it.
They don't see the other side.
They don't see the days where you swing from the best day of your life to the worst in the span of a single phone call. There's no in-between with startups — it's euphoria or crisis, and you have to show up the same way for both. They don't see the 48-hour stretches with no sleep because a critical bug hit production at midnight. They don't see what it feels like to have an investment term sheet signed, only to have it fall through because of something entirely outside your control — financial planning, timing, a change in priorities on the other side.
They don't realize that you never really feel safe. There's no steady paycheck, no guaranteed tomorrow. The data tells the story: most startups don't survive their first year. And the ones that do? They carry scars nobody talks about.
An Ode to Founders
I wanted to build something that captured this. Not a blog post, not a tweet thread — something you could feel. That's where Founder Runway came from. An endless runner game on iOS where you're a startup founder dodging AWS bills, server outages, and investor ghosting while trying to collect MRR coins and keep your company alive.
It's a game, but it's also a mirror. For people outside the founder world, it shows — in a way that's fun rather than preachy — how relentless the grind actually is. For founders who play it, the reaction is always the same: "This game gets it." There's a sense of recognition, maybe even a bit of comfort in knowing someone else understands the chaos.
Proving I Still Had It
But Runway wasn't just about the message. It was personal.
After months of operating as CEO — meetings, strategy, fundraising, managing people — I'd stopped building. I'd talked myself out of it, told myself there wasn't time. Runway was my way of testing whether I still had it in me. Not just building an app, but pushing my limits: a 3D game with SpriteKit, something I'd never done before.
I built it in a weekend. And shipping it to the App Store — actually seeing it live, something I'd made with my own hands after a long break — felt like a small victory. A reminder that the builder in me hadn't gone anywhere. He'd just been waiting for permission to come back.
This one's for every founder running on fumes and still showing up.