I don't like being a startup founder

The short version: I actually want to be a startup founder. I want to build a real company, raise money eventually, grow it, compete and take the whole thing seriously.

What I do not like is being a startup founder when there is almost nothing about the situation that makes you look like one. I am sixteen, I am doing Bachillerato, kleosvic is small, and Kleos Music is one public app with a relatively small number of users. There is no funding round, no office, no large team and no impressive revenue graph.

From the outside, calling it a little project is completely understandable. That is also the part I find frustrating.

The little project

There is a particular stage of building something where the way you see it and the way everyone else sees it are almost impossible to reconcile. You can be spending your evenings building the product, thinking about what comes next, deciding what to kill, testing ideas and trying to work out whether there is actually a company somewhere inside all of it.

Someone else sees a sixteen-year-old with an app. So they ask how the little project is going. I do not think people mean anything bad by it. Most of the time they are just describing what they can see. It is small because it is small, and it is early because it is early.

But internally, I am not treating kleosvic as a school project. I am trying to build a company. That distinction is difficult to explain because, at this stage, the main difference is intention.

I actually want the startup game

There is a temptation to say that I do not care about being a founder. I could say I am just building things, that I do not care about titles or funding or growth, and that I am only interested in making good software.

Some of that is true. But the larger story is not. I want to raise money eventually. I want kleosvic to grow. I want to compete seriously. I want to see what happens if I take one of these ideas much further than I can take it alone.

I want the company. I want to play the startup game. I just do not want to pretend I am already winning it.

And that is what makes the situation difficult. I am not trying to build kleosvic casually while getting good grades on the side. I also do not want to treat school as something I will just get through while I build the company.

I want to do both properly. That is a much harder problem.

The problem with being sixteen

Being sixteen makes the whole thing stranger. I am old enough to have very specific plans for what I want to build, but young enough that almost everything around me is still organised around school.

That is not unreasonable. School is important, and I am not trying to escape it. In fact, I want to do extremely well. My ESO average was 8.3 out of 10. I started Bachillerato this September, and my first Bachillerato exam was a 5.75 out of 10 in Philosophy.

I also did not study very much for that exam. It counts for roughly 30% of my Philosophy grade this trimester, so, basically, I fucked up. I am not going to pretend otherwise or turn the 5.75 into some dramatic story about how difficult the exam was.

At the same time, 5.75 is still 5.75. My target for university admission is roughly 12.8 out of 14. That is not a vague ambition where being reasonably good is enough. It requires me to become substantially better academically than I am right now.

So the conflict is not really school versus kleosvic.

The conflict is that both have a standard I care about, and I currently do not have enough time to meet both standards comfortably.

The numbers do not care about the story

It would be easy to turn this into a story about a young founder who is already doing a lot. I do not think that would be particularly useful. The reality is less flattering.

I have a 5.75 on my first Bachillerato Philosophy exam, I did not study very much for it, and that exam represents roughly 30% of the trimester grade. I have a company that is still tiny. I have an app that is still being improved. I have spent money on the project without making that money back, and I have been working on it practically every day for months.

The uncomfortable part is that neither side can simply be dismissed.

If kleosvic were just a hobby, the answer would be easy. Study more and work on it when there is time. If school were just something I had to pass, the answer would also be easy. Put in the minimum and spend the rest of my time building.

But neither is true.

I want roughly 12.8 out of 14 for university. I also want kleosvic to become a real company. I cannot honestly call one of those goals unimportant just because the other one is inconvenient.

There are only so many hours

This is where the idea of balance starts becoming less useful. People talk about balancing school and a project as if the solution is simply to organise your time better. Maybe it is partly that, but there are only so many hours in a day.

If I spend three more hours studying, those are three hours I cannot spend building. If I spend three hours fixing something in Kleos Music, those are three hours I am not studying. Sleep takes time too, which is inconvenient but apparently necessary.

And there is another problem. These things do not just require hours. They require attention.

You cannot always take the two hours left after school, split them between mathematics and product development, and expect both to get your best work. Sometimes one thing needs a concentrated evening. Sometimes an exam needs several days. Sometimes a product problem is sitting in your head and you know you should solve it now.

There is no productivity system that creates another six hours at the end of the day. At some point, something gets less time.

That is the part I do not have an answer for.

The strange part about ambition

This is what makes being called a little project so strange. I am not claiming that kleosvic deserves to be treated like a serious company because I have already achieved something enormous. I have not.

The company is small because it is small. I am early. The products are still being tested. There are things I have built that I stopped building because the underlying idea was not strong enough. There are things I have spent too much time on. There are things I still do not know how to do.

That is normal. The mistake would be thinking that wanting to build a serious company means I am entitled to be treated as though I already have one. I am not.

If I want people to take kleosvic seriously, eventually the company has to give them a reason to.

The same thing applies to school. Wanting a 12.8 does not make me a 12.8 student. A 5.75 on an exam is much more useful evidence of where I am right now.

That is probably the most annoying part of all of this. Ambition is cheap. The timetable is not.

I don't want to skip the boring part

There is another reason I do not want to complain too much about this. Being underestimated is not a particularly interesting problem when you are sixteen.

The more uncomfortable possibility is that people are sometimes right to see something as small. kleosvic is small. I am early. The products are still being tested. I have stopped building things when the underlying reason for their existence was weak, and I have spent too much time on things that probably did not deserve it.

The mistake would be confusing ambition with evidence. Wanting to build a serious company does not make it a serious company yet.

If I want people to treat kleosvic differently, eventually I need to give them something they can actually see.

And if I want a 12.8, eventually I need to give the university something more convincing than a 5.75.

What I actually want

I do not want kleosvic to stay a little project. I want to find products worth building, build them properly, get them into people's hands and see whether they can become a real business.

Eventually, I want to raise money. Eventually, I want other people working on the company. Eventually, I want kleosvic to be competing for something rather than simply existing.

I also want to get into the university I am aiming for. I want the grades. I want to be good at the subjects I am studying. I do not want to look back and realise that I sacrificed an academic goal I genuinely cared about just because building a company sounded more interesting at sixteen.

That leaves me with a problem I cannot solve by writing a nice conclusion.

Right now I am a sixteen-year-old student with a company that is still tiny. I have a 5.75 in Philosophy, a target of roughly 12.8 out of 14, and a finite number of hours between now and both of those things becoming real.

If I spend more time studying, kleosvic gets less of me. If I spend more time building, my grades get less of me. And if I try to give both everything, eventually there is not enough of me left to sleep.

I do not know which one will give way first.

If you do not hear much from me over the next few weeks, that is probably why. I have a Maths exam on Wednesday and a Chemistry exam on Friday, and I have not even opened the book yet.

So, yes, I probably should stop writing this article and start studying.

Also, I am fairly sure almost nobody reads these articles anyway, which means the Journal is basically my diary with better typography. The difference is that my diary has SEO metadata.

I do not know yet what it will cost to make all of this work. I only know that I genuinely want both, and there are only so many hours in which to prove it.

And if I disappear for a few weeks and come back talking about Philosophy instead of startups, you will know what happened.

Either I finally figured out how to make both work, or Bachillerato won.

And judging by the fact that I have not opened the Chemistry book yet, I would not put money on the first one.