I thought maybe, if I became someone important, all of the abandonment and pain would turn into fuel. That through success, I would achieve salvation from the price of what it cost: from who it turned me into.

This is the "becoming" that everyone loves to reminiscence on but never relive. You sharpen, you go from dumb fuck to business leader, you learn and you push yourself and learn until you think nothing else will fit in your brain. And then you try to learn more.

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I am a systems person, and the last thing startups often develop are systems. What I did over the holidays was build mine. It’s designed not only to organize everything for me, but to be extensible as jumping off points to share with the team, or to keep them functioning if I die tomorrow. Our company will live and die by the knowledge we acquire, and failure to track and implement that knowledge is legitimately throwing money in the trash.

Building a design system to standardize development at Astra Labs.