I've built a handful of companies. The ones that actually worked all followed the same shape — and it's close to the opposite of what most founders are told to do. Build the thing. Set a foundation under it. Hand it to someone who can scale it. Then go do it again. For years I thought the handoff was me failing. You start something, pour yourself into it, and then… you leave? It felt like abandonment. Now I think it's the whole point. My job is to make something exist and make it stand on its own — not to be the reason it keeps standing. There's research that reframed this for me. Studying 200+ startups, Noam Wasserman found that founders are most likely to be pushed out right after their biggest wins. Not their failures — their wins. Because hitting the milestone changes the job underneath them. Inventing and scaling reward different instincts, and the thing that made you great at the first often makes you the bottleneck in the second. So I stopped treating my exit as a threat and started treating it as a design requirement. If I build it right, it shouldn't need me. Durability doesn't come from a founder's presence — it comes from the people, process, and structure that outlast any one person. The test I use now is simple: if I stepped away for 90 days, what would quietly break? Wherever the answer is "everything," that's not a vacation problem. It's a design problem. If you stepped away for 90 days — what would quietly break first?