Every founder dreams of changing the world. What they do not tell you is that on the path to doing so, you will spend an equal amount of time just trying to keep the lights on.
One hour I am speaking on a global stage about how emotional biometrics can reshape healthcare; the next, I am in the trenches figuring out how to make payroll. That is the paradox of building something big; you are simultaneously thinking about the next thousand years and the next seven days.
Living at Two Altitudes
Building inTruth has forced me to operate at two vastly different altitudes.
At a macro level, I am crafting a vision for a technology that could rewrite how humanity understands its inner world.
At a micro level, I am handling the grind, hiring the right people, negotiating with investors, fighting fires and stretching every pound.
These two realities pull on each other constantly. If you stay too high, you lose touch with what is actually happening on the ground. If you stay too low, you lose sight of why you started.
It is a delicate balance, one I am still learning to walk.
Vision Versus Survival
In the early days, people asked me, “Why do you not just build an app like everyone else? Something simple. Something safe.” But simple and safe were never the point.
The vision was always to standardise emotion in the way we have standardised time and language, so that individuals, teams and entire systems could make more conscious decisions. The stakes were too high to play it small.
Yet vision does not pay salaries. It does not sign contracts. The tension between building something world-changing and surviving as a start-up is relentless.
Some days you wonder if the world is ready for what you are building. Other days, you wonder if you are ready.
The People Problem No One Warns You About
The hardest part of this journey has not been technology. It has been people.
Finding the right executive fits took me years – not because there are not brilliant engineers or scientists out there – there are – but because brilliance without vision does not cut it. I’ve needed those who can be both hands-on and visionary.
It is the same across the board. You need people who thrive in ambiguity, who see chaos not as a threat but as a creative force. People who are not triggered when challenged, who can hold their own perspective while building something bigger than themselves.
That combination is rare. Especially in a world that outsources it’s thinking constantly to machine. Even finding a resume that wasn’t GPT generated is difficult in today’s market.
Agility Over Perfection
As a founder, you quickly learn that perfection is the enemy. The world does not wait for your perfect product. You have to ship, learn, iterate, and repeat.
Our early prototypes were clunky. Some investors dismissed us outright, saying, “If this was possible, it would have been done already.”
But here is the thing: every breakthrough looks impossible until someone does it.
What got us through was not perfection, it was agility. It was the willingness to launch before we felt ready and to let the data, the users and even the failures shape our next move.
The Emotional Side of Leadership
People talk about resilience as if it is a business strategy. I have learned it is emotional.
When investors say no, when timelines blow out, when you are staring down the runway and it is shorter than you would like, your nervous system takes the hit. If you cannot regulate your own emotions, you will make reactive decisions that ripple through your team and product.
That is why emotional regulation is not just part of our technology, it is part of our culture. The ability to feel everything without losing yourself is the skill every founder needs.
Building Ethically in an Unethical Market
There is a darker side to building a category-defining technology: pressure to compromise.
Investors want quick returns. Competitors cut corners. The temptation to monetise data in unethical ways is everywhere.
For us, ethics is not an afterthought, it is a non-negotiable. We are building federated learning infrastructure so user data stays on the device. We are open-sourcing our ethics frameworks. We are partnering with policymakers to protect emotional data before it is too late.
Because the future we are building is not just about what is technically possible, it is about what is right.
Legacy Thinking in a Short-Term World
Start-ups often get stuck chasing vanity metrics, user growth, funding rounds, PR hits. None of that matters if you are not building something that lasts.
Legacy thinking asks different questions:
- What world will this technology create?
- Will humanity be better off because we existed?
- Are we making decisions that hold up one hundred years from now, not just in the next funding cycle?
The choices we make today about AI, about data, about the role of technology in our lives will define the next thousand years. That is not hyperbole; it is reality.
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