2025: The Year I Bet on Myself

On December 30th, 2024, I finished my last day at IBM. It was the kind of ending that looks simple from the outside, but internally it carried years of thought and a lot of quiet pressure. I wasn’t leaving because I hated the work, and I wasn’t leaving because something broke. I was leaving because I could feel myself outgrowing the comfort of a structured path. IBM gave me discipline, exposure, and a solid environment to sharpen my skills, but I kept feeling a stronger pull toward building something that was mine. I wanted to make decisions that mattered, take responsibility for outcomes, and see whether I could carry the full weight of creating something from zero. When you’re inside a big company, you can become extremely good in your area, but you’re still part of a larger machine. I wanted to step outside the machine and build the machine. That’s what that day represented. It wasn’t just a job change. It was a choice of identity, a choice to be the person who owns the problems, not only solves tasks.

When 2025 started, the first thing I felt was freedom, and the second thing I felt was responsibility. Freedom is exciting, but it becomes intense when you realize there’s no roadmap waiting for you, no manager to define success, no team that automatically gives your week structure. Everything becomes your job. Your schedule, your priorities, your momentum, your accountability. I quickly learned that being a founder is a daily decision. Some days you wake up full of energy, feeling like you can move mountains. Other days you wake up and you don’t feel it at all, but the work still needs to happen. That’s when you learn what discipline really means. In a normal job, discipline is supported by the system. In a startup, discipline has to come from inside you. The days that shaped me most in 2025 were not the days where everything went perfectly. They were the days where nothing felt clear, but I still moved forward anyway.

I used to think learning was mostly something you do before the real work starts. You study, you plan, you prepare, and then you execute. 2025 flipped that completely. It taught me that the real learning happens during execution, and usually after you’ve made mistakes. It’s the type of learning that sticks because you paid for it. And I paid for it in time, in energy, and sometimes in ego. I built things that made perfect sense in my head and then didn’t land the way I expected in the real world. I had moments where I was convinced a direction was right, then a few honest user conversations showed me the problem was different, the workflow was different, the pain was different, or the timing was wrong. That forced me to stop being attached to my assumptions. It forced me to respect reality more than my imagination.

A big lesson of 2025 was that the market is always honest. It doesn’t care how passionate you are. It doesn’t care how hard you worked. It doesn’t care how clean the code is or how impressive the features look. The market only cares whether what you built solves a real problem in a way that feels obvious and valuable. That was a humbling lesson, but it was also liberating, because once you accept it, you stop trying to be “right” and you start trying to learn quickly. You stop protecting your ideas and you start testing them.

Working on startups forced me to become more complete as a builder. It wasn’t enough to just build features. I had to think about who the product is for, how it fits into someone’s day, what words make it click in their brain, how to get it in front of the right people, how to make it easy to trust, and how to create something that people return to. Startup life forces you to stretch. You become a product person, a marketer, a salesperson, a strategist, and sometimes customer support, all in the same day. The work is not just technical, it’s psychological. It’s learning how to make decisions with incomplete information, learning how to prioritize when everything feels important, learning how to accept tradeoffs, and learning how to ship without overthinking.

One of the biggest challenges I faced in 2025 was learning the difference between motion and progress. In the early stages, it’s easy to stay busy doing tasks that feel productive but don’t move the business forward. You can spend hours polishing something that doesn’t matter yet. You can spend days improving details before you’ve proven the core value. 2025 taught me to become ruthless about focus. It taught me to ask myself constantly what actually moves the needle. Not what feels good. Not what looks impressive. What truly moves things forward.

Not everything worked in 2025, and that’s the truth. Some directions didn’t land. Some ideas sounded strong until I tested them. Some approaches were too early. Some attempts were built well but weren’t positioned clearly enough. There were moments I had to accept that I was solving a problem that people weren’t willing to pay for, or that I was targeting the wrong group, or that my messaging didn’t make the value obvious. There were times where I realized I was trying to do too much at once, which diluted execution. And there were times where I had to rebuild things, not because I wanted to, but because I learned what “good enough for the next stage” really means.

The biggest shift I made in 2025 was changing how I see failure. I stopped treating it like a personal hit and started treating it like feedback. That shift sounds simple, but it changes everything. When failure is personal, you hesitate. You protect your ego. You delay shipping. When failure is feedback, you move faster. You test quicker. You adjust without drama. You become stronger. In 2025, I learned to love that loop. Build, ship, learn, refine. That loop is the founder’s real superpower, and once you embrace it, you stop fearing the hard moments.

Somewhere in the middle of 2025, I realized I wasn’t just building products, I was building myself. My thinking changed. My standards changed. My relationship with time changed. I became more focused on outcomes instead of activity. I became more honest with myself about what matters. I became more comfortable with uncertainty. And I started to understand that startups aren’t won by intensity, they’re won by consistency. Your best day doesn’t define you. Your average day does. The real skill is showing up repeatedly, doing the work even when motivation is low, staying consistent with quality, and continuing to improve through repetition.

I also learned that confidence as a founder is not something you “have” all the time. It’s something you build through evidence. Every time you ship, every time you handle a setback, every time you get feedback and adjust, you grow stronger. That’s what 2025 gave me. Evidence that I can operate in uncertainty, learn fast, and keep moving.

2025 wasn’t only about one single project. It was a year where I explored, built, and learned through multiple startup directions. That experience taught me how to evaluate ideas better. It taught me how to quickly identify what’s real and what’s just excitement. It taught me how to move from concept to prototype quickly, and how to test assumptions early. It taught me that the best founders aren’t the ones with the most ideas, they’re the ones who can turn one good idea into a real system, a real product, a real business.

And it also taught me that your identity changes when you build. When you work for a big company, your identity can attach itself to the brand, even if you don’t notice it. When you build, your identity attaches to your output. That’s scary at first, because it exposes you, but it’s also empowering, because it forces you to be real, to be accountable, and to earn progress the hard way.

One of the most meaningful parts of 2025 is that it wasn’t only struggle and learning, it was also momentum. One of the startups I’m working on is moving toward raising, and I’m genuinely grateful for that. Fundraising is not just about money. It’s about trust. It’s about other people seeing what you’re building and believing it’s worth backing. It’s about responsibility, because when people invest, they’re not only investing in the product, they’re investing in you as a founder, in your judgment, and in your ability to execute.

I’m grateful for every conversation that sharpened the vision, for every person who gave advice, for every challenge that forced refinement, and for every moment where things didn’t work because it pushed me to become better. I’m also grateful for the people who believed early, because early belief is rare and powerful. It’s easy for people to support you after success. It’s different when they support you in the messy middle.

If 2025 was my learning year, 2026 will be my execution year. The difference is that I’m going into 2026 with a stronger foundation. I know what slows me down. I know what distracts me. I know what “busy work” looks like. I know how important focus is. I know how valuable speed-to-feedback is. I know how to build with clarity, not only with ambition.

Execution means turning lessons into systems. It means turning momentum into results. It means being consistent even when things are quiet. It means shipping, iterating, and building trust through action. It means less talking and more building. It means letting outcomes speak.

I’m not expecting 2026 to be easy, but I’m ready for it, because 2025 taught me how to stand in the fire and keep working. It taught me that building is not about perfect plans. It’s about making progress, adjusting quickly, and staying consistent for long enough that your work compounds.

Leaving IBM on December 30th, 2024 wasn’t just leaving a job. It was choosing a path. 2025 proved to me that the founder journey is demanding, humbling, and deeply rewarding in a way that’s hard to describe unless you’ve lived it. I’m proud of what I learned, honest about what didn’t work, grateful for the momentum building now, and genuinely excited for what comes next. 2025 was the learning year. 2026 is the execution year. And I’m ready to make it real.