Am I just wasting everyone’s time?

And what will prove that I’m not?

I had a shower thought at the end of 2016: I should just pass on recruitment events and speaking opportunities to other team members. It began as a small thought. But by the time I finished my shower, my thoughts had spiraled into a much bigger, deeper problem. I was stuck in a loop, and everything was falling apart.

I’ll backtrack to explain how I got there.

In my company’s early years, I used to love going to recruitment events, especially ones for fresh graduates. I used to ramble on panels about my company culture, how we did things, where we came from, and what direction we were going in. I was sharing what made my company special. Even now, Oursky is known for its company culture and project management. I loved telling our local Hong Kong story and our vision, which was to build high quality apps and build a lifestyle-company rather than a high-growth one. Perhaps the audience might have yawned, but I got a kick out of it back then.

We’re in our 9th year now. On the surface, things seem to be going really well. Our team’s just moved to our fourth office and we’re already out of seats because we’ve grown so fast the past two years (and we’re still hiring).

Yet, when we set up our recruitment booths this year, I couldn’t bring myself to say anything. I just stood there, listening to my colleagues introducing the company, I didn’t know if they were being genuine or just doing their jobs. They were so much more earnest than me when they talked about “serious code reviews”, “chill and funny colleagues”, and “freedom”.

Perhaps I don’t do it anymore because I just feel like there’s too big of a gap between my dream and where I am now.

When I graduated, I thought startup life meant writing good code to sell products, which would lead me to friends with common interests and goals, and freedom. Dreams like working 4 days a week were pretty quickly shattered. At the time, it was OK. Even though life was hard, work had plenty of play. Every day I could joke around with my friends (who were also my colleagues) at lunch and have seven-person PS3 face-offs. It seemed like the perfect life — building meaningful things with the people you care about. When I added all the pros and subtracted the lower pay, dealing with demanding clients, and 10-hour work days 7 days a week, things netted out. Life wasn’t perfect, but the goods easily stacked up.

After a few years, some values and ideal best practices were compromised due to practicalities. Best practices are more like compromising my ideal of the best code possible so that our products could ship. Ideals is probably a better word. I still wish we can run a democracy in the company, but I’ve realized it’s not practical. I still try every now and then with things like selecting company-wide benefits. But even my most recent case is making my head explode when you have really divided opinions and then people who don’t want to take the time to decide.

In retrospect, I think I wanted to create a company that proved my values could exist.

Of course, things have improved too. Since 2009, the pay’s gotten better and at one point work got less crazy. I still had a work-life balance. Most importantly, I could still have lunch, afternoon tea, and dinner with friends, have a chill work environment, and do some coding after my client meetings.

But now? I don’t think I’ve even managed five lunches with my team in the last few months. Every day, I can feel more brain cells dying from my mind-numbing meeting schedule. Forget coding. Here and there, I still get a high at night when life feels great. More often, I’m just scrambling to … what am I scrambling towards? I don’t even know anymore.

I’ve realized I’m still hustling. But why hustle when you don’t even have an investor? No one’s chasing after me to deliver figures.

The worst thing is that even though everything’s great, all I feel is a growing pressure. What if next year’s business is bad — should I save more for the company? What terrifies me is that I’ll fail my team. My colleagues put so much effort into their work, invest so much time, and if, in the end, I give them nothing to show for it, I’d kill myself (figuratively).

I also know, this is a marathon. Everyone who joined gave up something to make this commitment. Heck, we have non-founder colleagues who have been with us all these years. They gave up better careers to take a chance on my company then. Everyone now still gave up higher salaries and better titles. We gave up our holidays and personal time. Some of our team members have even become parents and gave up time with their kids. Never mind not having anything to show for their efforts, what if you promised something would happen in 5 years and it’s taken 10? How do you give back the 5 years you robbed them of?

In the end, for the sake of hustling, speed became everything.

For the sake of speed, we couldn’t stop for the view along the way. If you can’t even enjoy the view, what difference is this startup life from any other (overworked) salaried job?

Or, maybe I’ve just gotten older. Once upon a time, I dreamed that when Oursky struck its first pot of gold — we could become a platform — a place where my colleagues and I could just build things together. Some of those things could make a profit, but we could also make things that were worth doing and would never have commercial profit. In order to realize my vision of meaningful work, I needed kindred spirits who shared my values and vision.

But, if I’ve compromised our values and direction, will this company continue to attract new kindred spirits?

If I can’t even promise that the journey is worth it, is there any reason for the the old guards to hang around?

Or … is it time to find another type of balance?

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