Five years

The company was two or three years old when I joined it. Still young enough to feel fast, which was part of the appeal. The problems were real, the people smart, the direction mostly clear. For the first couple of years that was enough, and it was good.

Then things shifted. Crypto has its cycles and its cultures, and somewhere around the halfway mark, ours became something I didn't fully recognize. The priorities drifted toward the noise. What had been rigorous started to hollow out, and what replaced it was louder and worse. You can call it the typical arc of a company that runs too long inside a hype cycle. You can call it other things. I watched it happen and told myself it would correct.

At some point I realized I was giving more to the company than it was giving back. I felt it clearly and didn't act on it. That part is on me.

The reason I stayed longer than I should have doesn't compress neatly. Part of it was attachment — to the people still there from the earlier version, to the hope that things might recover. Part of it was that this company had run in parallel with a lot of changes in my life. Five years is a long window. Major things happened inside it. You don't extract yourself easily from something that's woven into a period like that.

My family carried a real cost during those years. They made sacrifices to let me be fully inside a place that demanded full attention, in a world that doesn't keep normal hours or normal stakes. I got to live the experience — the good years and the bad ones — because they absorbed the weight of it. That's a debt worth naming out loud.

The leaving wasn't quiet. It came after a long calculation I'd been running in the background longer than I admitted to myself. When I finally made the call it was clear — not easy, but clear. I was lucky to have lived through the whole arc, good and bad. I'm not interested in pretending it was something it wasn't, but I'm also not interested in reducing it to the worst version. It was complicated and it was mine.

What I want back is specific. I used to read a lot — books, real ones, long ones, the kind that need quiet and patience. I used to be funnier, or at least feel funnier, which is probably the same thing. I used to pay more attention to the moment I was actually in. Sustained intensity changes what you notice and what you stop letting yourself notice. I'm looking forward to stealing that back.

What you carry from five years at a place like that is mostly the layer underneath the specific knowledge — how to think about systems that can't fully stop, how to hold a bar without making the bar the only conversation. That part travels. I don't know exactly what comes next. The direction is clearer than the destination, and for now that feels like enough.