Seeing your startup grow is a lot like raising a kid. When it’s small, it’s everywhere. But then suddenly, it can walk on its own.
Published in the San Diego Union-Tribune, February 23, 2026
by Neil Senturia
Two years ago, I had a half-baked idea, courtesy of my analyst, to create an AI chatbot. I was out of tricks, and he wanted to make sure I could continue to make the payments.
He referred me to a young genius, 19, in a foreign country who had skills in artificial intelligence. I called him, suggested an idea, unicorn hunter.ai, and he said he could do it. We did. It was cute.
Then the entrepreneurial growl. Could not leave well enough alone. This goofy bot had unintended consequences. The infamous, “what if.”
So this young man, whom we will call Sam, and I decided to start a real company, askturing.ai. Co-founder and equity (a concept that was as foreign to him as his country was to me). Now he had a crisis. His family wanted him to continue his education. It would be safe. He could always teach. Are you sure you want to dance with a wild man 8,000 miles away? This was entrepreneurship up close and personal, real life, not just a course in a fancy college.
It has been 18 months, we currently have 54 employees, and Sam recently wrote about the truth of the startup world. Below are his unedited words from the front line.
“Seeing your startup grow is a lot like raising a kid. When it’s small, it’s everywhere. It lives on your laptop screen, in your notes app, in the back of your mind when you’re supposed to be with friends. Every tiny bug, every user complaint, every new sign-up goes straight through you. You’re in the trenches for all of it — shipping at 2 a.m., answering support emails with half-open eyes, duct-taping systems together just to keep the thing alive.
In that stage, you are the safety net. If you step away, things actually wobble. You know every customer by name. You remember which line of code is a hack and which part of the system will probably fall over if someone breathes too hard. It’s exhausting, but it’s also intimate. The company feels like an extension of your own nervous system.
Then, slowly, it changes.
People you hired start making decisions you don’t even hear about until later — and they’re good decisions. Processes exist that you didn’t personally write. There are parts of the product you don’t touch anymore. Some customers have no idea who you are, and that’s normal. The thing has its own heartbeat now.
You’re still important, but you’re no longer the center holding everything together. And on paper, that’s the dream. It means you’ve built something real — teams, systems, culture — so it doesn’t crumble the second you take a day off.
But there’s this quiet, bittersweet part no one really talks about.
You miss knowing every little detail. You miss the chaos where you were needed for everything, even though it nearly broke you. You miss those first weird users who took a bet on a half-broken product, the first time “we” was just you and a partner on a call, planning features that felt impossibly big.
You’re proud of what it’s become — of the people, the product, the fact that it can stand without you holding it up all the time.
And still, every now and then, you catch yourself scrolling back to those early screenshots, old Notion docs, the first logo, and you feel that small ache.
Because somewhere between keeping it alive and helping it grow, you didn’t just build a company. You outgrew a version of yourself you’ll never fully return to, and that hurts a little, but it also feels right. The nostalgia for that tiny, fragile thing that needed you for everything never fully goes away, it just sits next to a bigger feeling: the quiet, very real pride of watching it walk on its own and knowing you helped it get there.”
I don’t think I could say it any better. So, enough said.
And by the way, the young man is going back to school and continuing to work at the company in a reduced fashion. As he said to me, “40 hours is a no-brainer after I have been working 80.”
Rule No. 818: “It’s not the mountain we conquer, but ourselves,” Sir Edmund Hillary