After the call with my friend, I sat there for a long time.
He’d asked me why I didn’t fight for it. I’d told him the truth. I had nothing left. And that was the end of it. Not the end of the conversation. The end of whatever engine had been running inside me for two years.
I didn’t cry. I didn’t have some dramatic realization. I just sat on my couch and noticed that for the first time since I quit my job, I wasn’t trying to figure out the next move. There was no next move. There was just this. Me, alone, in an apartment that was too quiet, with a bank account that was getting quieter.
My mentor called a few days later. The same one who’d given me permission to stop when Lumos was eating me alive. The same one who’d been there for every chapter of this thing, never judging, never rushing me toward a conclusion I wasn’t ready for.
“So,” he said. “What now?”
I didn’t have an answer. I told him that. No pitch, no plan, no “I’m exploring a few things.” Just: I don’t know.
He didn’t fill the silence. He just let it sit there. That’s the thing about having someone who’s seen you at your worst. You don’t have to perform for them. You can just be empty and it’s okay.
We talked for a while. About practical things, mostly. Money. The kind of conversation I’d been avoiding.
I didn’t grow up with money. I built myself into someone who made good money. Years of work, of learning, of climbing. And then I’d taken everything I’d built and poured it into a venture that didn’t work. The startup itself. The tools, the subscriptions, the time I wasn’t earning. Two years of spending and not earning adds up in ways you don’t fully feel until you stop moving.
And now I’d stopped moving.
The decision didn’t happen in a single moment. There was no green kitchen on Rothschild, no phone call that changed everything. It was more like weather. A slow shift in pressure that you don’t notice until one morning you look outside and it’s a different season.
Maybe going back to a job wasn’t giving up. Maybe it was the thing that would pull me out of this. Stable income. Structure. People to talk to who weren’t my own reflection in a dark laptop screen. Maybe I’d even learn something. See how other people build, from the inside, without the weight of it being mine.
I didn’t announce it to anyone. Didn’t post about it. Didn’t frame it as a pivot or a strategic decision. I just opened my laptop one morning and started looking.
The first person I called was Shahar.
Shahar is a headhunter. We’d first talked almost eight years ago. Over the years he’d suggest companies to me every now and then, good ones. I was never interested. I always had something else going on, something I thought was more important. In hindsight, every single company he suggested ended up exiting. Made great money for everyone involved.
I never listened. He kept calling anyway. That’s the kind of person Shahar is.
This time I listened.
We talked about what I wanted. I told him the truth, the same truth I told everyone from that point on. I’d made a promise to myself: no hiding. No polishing the story. No pretending I was something I wasn’t.
So I told every company the same thing. The next company after this one is going to be mine. I’m here to learn. Not just engineering. I want to do sales calls, support, whatever people need. I want to understand how a company actually works from every angle. In my free time, of course. But I need you to know: I don’t know how long I’ll be here. Could be two years. Could be less. Could be more. But however long it is, I’ll give everything I have. Like it’s my own.
People didn’t love hearing that.
Turns out, companies are afraid of entrepreneurs.
I get it. From their side, I was a flight risk. Someone who’d already proven he was willing to leave stability for a dream. Why would they invest in training me, integrating me, trusting me with their product, only to watch me leave when the next idea hit?
I reached the final stage at most places. The conversations were good. People liked me. They knew from the first call who I was and what I’d been doing. None of it was hidden. And they kept going anyway. Round after round, all the way to the end.
Then came the decision. And at the decision, the entrepreneur thing won. Not during the process. After it. They’d spent weeks getting to know me, and in the end, the risk was too much. Too unpredictable. Too likely to leave.
Some companies still wanted me. But they wanted me to lead their R&D, to commit for the long term. And in my heart, I couldn’t promise that. I’d rather be honest about uncertainty than lie about commitment. I’d learned that much.
A few other entrepreneurs reached out during this time. People who wanted to join forces, start something together. A year ago I would have jumped. But I wasn’t looking for another adventure. I was looking for solid ground.
Then Shahar called again.
He sounded different this time. Hesitant. Almost unsure of himself, which wasn’t like him.
“I started working with a new company today,” he said. “Literally today. I don’t know everything about them yet. But I worked with one of the founders before, back at Noname Security. He was head of research there.”
He started describing the company. What they were building. The technology. The market. The problem they were solving.
And as he talked, something strange happened. I knew what he was going to say before he said it. Not vaguely. Specifically. Every detail. The architecture, the approach, the customer pain points, the competitive landscape. I knew all of it because I’d lived all of it.
They were building exactly what Dan and I had tried to build.
I should have felt a punch in the gut. Two years of my life, my savings, my partnership, my sanity, all spent trying to crack this exact problem. And here was a funded company with a real team, doing it.
But that’s not what I felt.
I felt pulled. A strange, quiet excitement that I hadn’t felt in months. Not the manic kind that comes before burnout. Something steadier. Like recognition. Like the problem I’d been chasing hadn’t forgotten about me either.
The company was called Anchor Browser.
The interviews didn’t feel like interviews.
First was a phone call with their founding engineer. Then the CTO, the one Shahar had worked with before. Then the CPO, who was also running R&D. Then the CEO.
Every single conversation was just… talking. No whiteboard problems. No system design exercises. No “tell me about a time when.” Just two people sitting across from each other, trying to figure out if they wanted to build together.
And I kept my promise. I hid nothing. Told them about the startup. About Dan. About the burnout. About the year of building Lumos alone in my apartment. About Threefold and the rejection that took whatever fight I had left. About why I was here now, looking for a job, when six months ago I would have said I’d never go back.
They didn’t lean back. They didn’t pause too long. They didn’t change behind the eyes.
They loved it.
I got the offer.
I took it. Of course I took it.
But I knew, even as I signed, that this was going to be complicated. You don’t spend two years trying to build something and then walk into a company that’s building that exact thing and feel nothing. You don’t watch other people succeed at the thing that broke you and just be grateful for the paycheck.
I told myself it would be hard because of that. Because of the weight of watching someone else build your dream.
I was wrong. It was hard. But for entirely different reasons.
That story, though, is for next time.