What I Got Right #2: I Stayed a Full Person

Nine days of mistakes. Now what I got right. I never lost myself - I discovered and re-discovered myself over the years.

I watched founders I knew lose themselves to their companies. Happens all the time.

Not dramatically. Gradually. The hobbies went first. Then the friendships got harder to maintain. Then the family became another thing to manage. Then one day the company hits a wall and they had nothing else. No other identity. No other source of who they were. The company’s bad year became their bad year in a way that was genuinely hard to watch.

I thought about that a lot during the hard stretches of my own journey. I came close enough to that edge, especially in the year I wrote about in Mistake #9, to understand how it happens. I never wanted to be one of them. The reason was simple. At Microsoft, I was a full person - I wrote, I spent time with family, I vacationed, I had my me time, I did many things. I wanted to stay the same.

I wanted to stay a full person.

Writing

I cannot not write. This has been true since before Hyperleap, before the MBA, before I left Microsoft.

The 10x Software Engineer came out of COVID. The world stopped and I finally had the uninterrupted space to write something I had been carrying for years, everything I had observed about what separates good engineers from great ones across more than a decade at Microsoft. Nobody asked for the book. I just wrote it.

The Second Order AI Substack is the same instinct in a different season of life. This series you are reading is not a content strategy. It is how I make sense of what I have been through. Writing every week, finding the honest version of each story, not reaching for the comfortable framing, has given me more clarity about this journey than almost anything else has.

When things were hard, writing was not an escape. It was a way of staying tethered to how I actually thought, separate from how the company needed me to think. That separation mattered more than I realised at the time.

Reading

Broadly. Not just AI papers and startup content.

I am not going to pretend I have a perfect reading habit or a system. Some weeks I read a lot. Some weeks I barely read at all. But the commitment to reading things that have nothing to do with the company has stayed.

The unexpected connection, the insight from a domain that looks nothing like mine, the book that reframes a problem I have been stuck on for a month, these things have happened enough times that I stopped treating reading as a luxury and started treating it as work.

Speaking and Teaching

I speak at events. Salesforce Design Days, HubSpot startup events, T-Hub sessions, large business gatherings, among several others. Not as many as some people in this space, but enough that it is a regular part of my life.

I kept being asked why I do this, given everything else on the plate. The honest answer is that I get more out of it than I give. Teaching or even talking about something forces you to know what you actually believe. The questions that come from the room, expose assumptions I had not examined. Some of those questions have directly changed how I think about Hyperleap.

Giving back is part of it. Staying sharp is a bigger part.

Side Projects

I build things I have no business building given how much is already on my plate.

Waitroom, the agent coordination layer I have been building. Various tools and experiments that have taught me things even when they went nowhere. Supporting Asvini as she built Beyond Time. There’s a temple website I took up and worked on for an hour here and there. Finished in no time.

Some founders treat side projects as a problem to manage, a distraction from the main thing. I have never been able to see it that way. The compulsive building is not something I do despite the startup. It is who I am independent of it. Keeping it alive through the hardest years kept me connected to why I started in the first place.

Family

Asvini runs her own product - a tiny mobile app. We are both founders. We understand each other’s world in a way that I am genuinely grateful for.

Two kids. The realisation I wrote about in Mistake #9 was partly a health moment and partly a family one. I looked at who I was becoming and thought about what my kids would grow up knowing about their father. That thought changed something permanently and it has not changed back.

The Thailand trip in January was decided months before we went. Not spontaneous, not convenient, not something that happened because there was finally a gap in the calendar. It was in the plan and nothing moved it. The world continued while we were gone. I removed the SIM card while I travelled. Nothing burned down. What I came back with was worth more than four days of pushing through.

I did not always protect family time this well. But I learned, and the learning stuck.

Friends

HPS, class of 2000. College. Microsoft. ISB. Four sets of friendships that predate everything I have built professionally.

These people knew me before the startup. They have no investment in the startup version of me. When I spend time with them, nobody asks about metrics or funding or product roadmap. Some of them invested in the startup, and even they don’t ask. They ask how I am, and they mean it.

I have not been perfect about maintaining these friendships. The distance, the busyness, the years, all of it takes a toll. But I have shown up enough that the relationships are still real. That is one of the things I am most glad I did not let slide completely.

What I Actually Believe About This

This is not a work-life balance that I am trying to achieve. I genuinely do not know what that phrase means for someone building a company. The separation it implies does not match the reality I live in.

What I believe is simpler. Founders who collapse everything into the company become fragile. Not because they worked too hard but because they stopped being a full person. When the company has a bad day, and it will, there is nothing else. The self and the startup have merged completely. A hit to one is a hit to the other.

I have had bad stretches at Hyperleap. Things that did not work, bets that did not pay off, years that were harder than they had any right to be. What got me through was not resilience in any abstract sense. It was the writing and the reading and the side projects and the family and the friends and the speaking and the practice I found through Inner Engineering.

All of it outside the startup. All of it holding me while the startup did what startups do.

The company is still here. So am I. I do not think those two things are unrelated.

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The bottom line: Keeping an identity outside the startup is not a luxury or a work-life balance achievement. It is structural support for the long haul. The things you hold onto outside the company are what hold you when the company gets hard. Do not let them go.

What do you hold onto outside the work? I’d genuinely like to hear.

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I’m Gopi Krishna, founder of Hyperleap AI, where we build enterprise-grade conversational AI for small and medium sized businesses across the globe. Subscribe to Second Order AI on Substack to follow along.