Time
The best times pass too fast. It might just be the cruelest quirk to this weird experience called life. An impatient minute feels like an hour and a blissful hour feels like a minute. Painful moments stretch out and take more time than they deserve. The clock is consistent but the way we process time is not.
I spent my early 30s suffocating in corporate numbness, trapped in a failed marriage, and doing everything I could to keep my spirit subdued. I spent my late 30s recovering from my belly-of-the-whale moment, liberating that spirit, and becoming the man I wish I had become when youth was still on my side.
The best parts passed too fast.
Time. Timing. It’s all a bit of a mystery.
Plant a tree and stare at it for years that feel like decades, and one day the fruit falls. Or think about planting a tree and the years fly like seconds and one day you wish you had planted that tree years before.
I launched an ETF company in 2016 and spent the next four years thinking about how easy it would have been five years earlier. I am launching a startup in 2022 and thinking about how much easier it would have been raising capital five months earlier.
Maybe my timing is off. Whether that is luck or foresight is kind of irrelevant.
A startup is a 5-10 year commitment. When I am exiting atNav in a decade it won’t really matter much if the fundraising environment was a little hard a decade prior. Time will pass fast. We are going to build and focus on the things we need to focus on.
There’s a lot of talk these days about investor timeframes. The joke goes that an investor is a trader when the market moves against them. So there’s a lot of trader-turned-investors right now. The whole thing is just a matter of timeframes.
Startups are not a trade. Startups are an investment - and an obsession. It’s a commitment you’re making from the time your alarm goes off until the time you fall asleep. In an age of monopolies and corporations with free capital and limitless resources, that’s what it takes to come in and disrupt. Focus, commitment, and time.
I might be too early, I might be too late. I couldn’t know.
Time just keeps on passing. Two years of covid passed and I can’t tell if it was a month or a decade, but I know it didn’t feel like two years.
I’m getting older. My few gray hairs are spreading, and planning a full takeover within another year or two. My kids are older. They aren’t even kids as much as little people. It’s a whole different thing. I’m proud of them!
Time is going to keep passing, can’t do anything about that. But it’s passing fast these days, and I guess that’s a good thing.