Hi, my name is Jeff. I’m a founder. I haven’t paid myself in a year.

August 2026 marks one year since I went full-time on building a company.

It also marks one year since I last paid myself a salary.

That is a strange sentence for me to write because, for most of my life, work and earning money have been connected.

I probably have to go back to when I was eight years old to find another stretch like this. After sports, I would help my dad at his office refilling ink cartridges. I would cut grass for missionaries. I was always looking for something useful to do, and usually some way to earn something from it.

I have never been afraid of work. Work made sense to me.

I put in effort. I produced something. Someone paid me.

As I got older, the stakes changed, but the basic equation remained recognizable: work hard, deliver, get paid.

Then I became a full-time founder.

For the first time in my life, I learned what it feels like to work harder than I ever have while having less evidence than ever that I am succeeding.

That may be the part of entrepreneurship nobody can adequately prepare you for.

There is a version of startup life that looks great from the outside. Conferences. Investor meetings. Photos on stages. Funding announcements. The words founder, CEO, entrepreneur and builder all sound exciting.

But most of the year has looked nothing like that.

It has looked like sitting in front of a laptop late at night going through expenses again. Looking at what is left in the company account, then what is left in my personal account. Deciding what needs to be paid now and what can wait. Telling myself I do not need a salary yet, then making the same decision the next month.

I can have one of the most productive weeks of my life and finish it financially worse off than when it started.

There is no paycheck arriving because I showed up. The market does not care how many hours I worked.

Effort matters. But effort alone is not evidence.

The company we are building, ProfytAI, works in a part of software nobody finds glamorous: helping institutions turn regulatory obligations into evidence somebody else can verify. Today that mostly means banks.

I believe deeply in the problem. That does not make the company easier to build.

Sixteen-hour days have become normal enough that I sometimes have to remind myself they should not be. My computer is often beside me when I go to sleep because there is still something I am waiting on. A customer response. A meeting confirmation. An investor follow-up. A technical issue I want resolved before morning.

Something that, in that moment, feels like it might change everything.

Usually, morning comes and nothing has changed everything.

So I start again.

The 2 a.m. founder

Some of the hardest conversations of this year have happened with nobody else in the room.

Sometimes I wake up around two in the morning and the company is there before I am fully awake.

I reach for my phone. I check whether the customer I was waiting on has responded. I think about runway. Before long, I am replaying decisions we made weeks ago and wondering whether I missed something.

Then the questions start.

Are we building the right thing?

Did I miss something obvious?

Was that investor feedback actually right?

Am I being persistent, or am I simply refusing to recognize when it is time to stop?

At two in the morning, those two things can look exactly the same.

I am not doing this alone, which means the decisions I lose sleep over do not affect only me.

By morning, the questions usually look different. We have made progress. The product is better than it was three months ago. People who understand the problem have given us reasons to keep working on it.

Maybe we are closer than it feels.

“Maybe” carries a surprising amount of weight when you are this deep into building something.

“We would love to keep tracking your progress”

Fundraising has taught me a different version of the same lesson.

I have spent hundreds of hours refining the deck, reworking the narrative, researching investors and practicing how to explain in minutes something I have spent thousands of hours thinking about.

Then I get the meeting.

Sometimes it goes well. At least I think it does. The questions are thoughtful. They ask for more material. I leave thinking: maybe.

Then the email arrives.

“We really like what you are building.”

“We would love to keep tracking your progress.”

“But we have decided to pass on this round.”

I have learned to recognize the shape of the message before I reach the final sentence.

I still feel it. Then I ask for feedback. I separate what is useful from what is not. I think about what we should change.

And then I open the deck again.

Pitch. Feedback. No. Adjust.

Pitch. Different feedback. Another no. Adjust again.

The frustrating part is that sometimes the investors are right.

Sometimes the story is weak. Sometimes the traction is insufficient. Sometimes the business does not fit the fund. Sometimes they simply do not believe what I believe.

Their job is not to protect my feelings.

My job is to figure out which feedback should change the company and which feedback should not.

I have to be humble enough to consider that I may be wrong and stubborn enough to continue believing that I may be right.

Then I have to walk into the next room and pitch with conviction.

The customer that could change everything

Customers create a different kind of uncertainty.

There is always a conversation that feels bigger than the others. A company you really want. A meeting that could become a meaningful enterprise relationship. Suddenly every detail matters.

I check the demo again. I make sure the infrastructure is stable. I anticipate the questions. I fix the thing I noticed the night before that nobody else might notice, but I can no longer unsee.

Then the meeting happens.

They ask for something. We deliver it. They ask for another thing. We deliver that too. We answer the questions, make the changes, join the follow-ups and send the material.

Then we wait.

The timeline moves.

I follow up.

Another meeting. Another internal review. Another timeline.

One of the harder lessons of this year has been accepting that holding up my end of the bargain does not guarantee an outcome.

Customers do not owe us a contract. Investors do not owe us a check. Other founders do not owe me their playbook. People with powerful networks do not owe me an introduction.

Nobody owes me rescue.

I chose this. I am responsible for continuing to create opportunities, even though I cannot control what those opportunities become.

Then I open LinkedIn

A startup I had never heard of just raised $20 million.

Damn.

How?

I read the announcement. Great investors. Founder smiling in the photo. Hundreds of congratulations in the comments.

For a moment, comparison creeps in.

They figured it out. Why have I not?

Then I remind myself that I am looking at the announcement, not the journey that produced it. I do not know how many times they were rejected, what introductions they had or what nearly broke along the way.

Sometimes I reach out anyway.

“Hey, congratulations. Would love to hear how you approached the raise.”

Sometimes people respond. Sometimes they do not.

That is okay. Nobody is required to stop what they are doing and teach me how to succeed.

LinkedIn has another way of keeping founders humble. Someone with an impressive title follows me. I click the profile.

Could this be something?

Then the message arrives.

“Hi Jeff, we help founders generate 30 qualified enterprise leads every month…”

Never mind.

Back to work.

The company does not stay at the office

The company follows me to dinner. It follows me on trips. It follows me into conversations. It follows me to bed.

I can be sitting across from someone I care about while part of my brain is somewhere else, thinking about a customer, runway, an investor conversation or something that needs to be fixed before tomorrow.

Building a company does not automatically make that okay.

“I am a founder” is not an excuse to disappear from the lives of people who care about me.

That is something I have had to confront this year.

I have spent much of it living far from home, trying to build something from scratch while managing the rest of my life. Some relationships have grown stronger. Others have become strained. Some have ended.

It would be easy to say that people who leave simply do not understand the founder journey. I do not think that is fair.

Sometimes they should not have to.

There is a cost to being physically present and mentally somewhere else. The company may explain some of that behavior. It does not excuse all of it.

The people who keep showing up

One of the better surprises of this year has been becoming more aware of the people who quietly help keep me moving.

Former colleagues who take a call. Friends who check in. People who make introductions. Someone who reads a deck and tells me what is wrong with it. Someone who gives me advice I did not want to hear but needed.

And especially practitioners who have spent years inside the problem we are trying to solve and are willing to give us their time.

They tell us what works. What does not. What nobody will use. What we are overcomplicating. What we have missed.

When certainty is scarce, honest feedback becomes incredibly valuable.

Sometimes the person who helps most is not the person telling me to keep going. It is the person willing to tell me what is not working.

When do you stop?

A year into this, I think differently about quitting.

I do not believe entrepreneurship should become a religion where stopping is always treated as failure.

Sometimes stopping is the correct decision. Sometimes changing direction is the correct decision. Sometimes taking a job is the responsible decision.

And sometimes continuing is the correct decision.

The hard part is knowing which situation you are in.

There are days when I look at friends with great careers and stable incomes and wonder what it would feel like to return to the equation I understood for most of my life.

Work hard. Deliver. Get paid.

I could go back. Take the job. Rebuild the savings. Sleep more.

Then I ask myself a harder question.

If I stop now, am I stopping because the evidence says this is over, or because I am tired?

Those are not the same thing.

One year later

I think about the kid refilling ink cartridges in my dad’s office.

He would understand the sixteen-hour days perfectly well. Hard work was never the confusing part.

What he probably would not understand is how I could work this hard and nobody pays me at the end.

Neither did I, until now.

I have less certainty than I had when I started, but a much clearer understanding of what the work actually is.

It is not the conference badge. It is not calling yourself a founder. It is not the funding announcement.

It is what happens between those moments.

It is hearing no and deciding whether the no contains information.

It is preparing for the meeting that might lead nowhere.

It is fixing the product before anyone has promised to buy it.

It is opening the deck again.

It is appreciating the people who give us their time.

And it is admitting that I do not know what happens next.

I cannot write the triumphant founder retrospective because I am still in the middle of it.

I do not know whether the breakthrough is three months away. I do not know whether a year from now I will still be building the same company. I do not know whether I am halfway through the tunnel or barely inside it.

Everyone tells you there is light at the end of the tunnel.

Nobody tells you how difficult it is when you have no idea where you are inside it.

What I do know is this:

Today, I still believe in what we are building.

So tomorrow, I will get up and work on it again.

Hi, my name is Jeff.

I’m a founder.

I haven’t paid myself in a year.

And I’m still here.