I built something real. And then I had to figure out what I was without it.

I put myself through design school doing freelance work. From the beginning, what drove me wasn't just the work — it was the feedback the work produced. Recognition. Legitimacy. A way of knowing I was doing something that mattered. I didn't pathologize that at the time. I still don't. It's a completely normal place to begin. What I didn't see was how that early hunger would shape everything that came after — the company I built, the decisions I made inside it, and what happened to me when it was gone. I scaled that company to 180 people and tens of millions in annual revenue. We were recognized publicly. By any measure the culture uses to keep score, it worked. And then I exited. And I spent years in a low-grade disorientation I didn't have language for. I kept working. Advising founders, consulting on strategy and positioning, ghostwriting for public figures, staying useful. What I was actually doing — though I couldn't name it then — was searching. For something that could replace what the company had quietly been doing for me all along. Giving me a place to stand. A way to know I mattered. What I found instead was that every founder I worked with was doing some version of the same thing. Making decisions not from first principles, but from a need for reassurance. Building structures that served their sense of legitimacy more than their business. Using the company to answer questions it was never designed to answer. I recognized it because I'd been doing it for years. Then the floor dropped. Illness. The loss of relationships I'd counted on. The slow disappearance of the external markers I'd used to know I was okay. At some point there was nothing left to optimize and nowhere left to hide from the actual question. That period produced The Identity Cost — a body of work examining how founders route personal needs through business systems, and what it costs them. And it produced Found Room.