I built my first company, Nengao Computer Technology, from nothing to 90+ employees with global market presence. I had full P&L responsibility, closed enterprise deals, managed strategic partnerships, and built a culture that kept people around.
I was in my twenties.
Looking back from the other side of dual doctorates, Fortune 500 architecture leadership, and three more ventures, here’s what that experience actually taught me.
The Best Education I Never Got in School
No degree teaches you what it feels like when payroll is tight and a key client is slow to pay. No textbook prepares you for the conversation where you have to let someone go who gave you their best but whose role no longer exists. No MBA case study captures the 2 AM realization that your growth strategy has a fatal flaw.
Running a company taught me that leadership is not a title. It’s a weight you choose to carry. And it’s heaviest when things are going well, because that’s when you have to make the decisions that determine whether “going well” becomes “sustainable” or “a peak followed by a fall.”
Culture Is Not a Slide Deck
We achieved high retention at Nengao, and people always asked how. The answer was boring: I cared about the people, and they knew it. Not in a corporate-values-poster way. In a “I know your kid’s name and I noticed you’ve been quiet in meetings this week” way.
Culture isn’t built in offsites. It’s built in the thousand small decisions that signal what you actually value. Do you promote the brilliant jerk or the reliable team player? Do you celebrate shipping fast or shipping right? Do you admit mistakes publicly?
Every answer to those questions is a brick in your culture. And the building is being constructed whether you’re intentional about it or not.
Growth Is Expensive in Ways You Don’t Expect
The financial cost of scaling is obvious. The hidden costs are what get you:
- Identity cost: The company you built for 10 people doesn’t work for 50. The company you built for 50 doesn’t work for 90. Each phase requires you to let go of what made the previous phase work.
- Attention cost: The more people you lead, the less time you have for the work that made you want to start the company. You go from builder to manager to executive, and each transition kills a part of what energized you.
- Decision cost: Early on, bad decisions are cheap to fix. At scale, a bad hiring decision or a wrong strategic bet can take months to unwind and leave scars.
Why I Left, and Why I’m Still Building
I left Nengao to go deeper. To get the doctorates. To architect systems at Fortune 500 scale. To understand technology at a level that running a company hadn’t required.
But the builder instinct never left. Hanalyzer, SynvIQ, LawSchoolKit: these ventures exist because I can’t stop creating. The difference now is that I build with two decades of context that my twentysomething self didn’t have.
I don’t regret starting young. I’d tell anyone with the drive to do the same. Just know that building a company doesn’t just build a business. It builds you. And the version of you that emerges on the other side will be someone the person who started wouldn’t recognize.
That’s the point.