It Wasn't About Time
I went looking for clarity on how I use my time. I found something about entrepreneurship.
In 2020, after six years of entrepreneurial journey, I sold my first startup, Onyo. If there’s one thing that closing an intense cycle like that makes you think about, it’s how you really want to use your time going forward. Or at least, in your next cycle.
It’s not a trivial decision. And at 40, I felt the value of time differently than at 30, when everything in life still feels like possibility.
I don’t have all the time in the world, and from that moment on, I felt my time needed to be used in a way that had meaning. What does that mean? That I use most of my time for what truly matters to me. When you look back and evaluate your recent years through that lens, self-judgment arrives alongside a responsibility toward your commitments going forward.
The Commitment of Entrepreneurship
A few years ago, a founder in his mid-twenties came to pitch me. It was a company delivering cold drinks for pre-party gatherings, before that market had matured. I asked him: “Can you see yourself motivated spending your Saturday nights on this business ten years from now, maybe newly married, with young kids?” The business wasn’t necessarily bad, but everything depended on that answer.
I often say that founding a company is a commitment of at least ten years. The journey might be shorter. It might be longer. But if the founder isn’t willing to dedicate ten years to it, it’s better not to start. Trust me, you don’t want to find yourself in the middle of the journey, exhausted, because it’s running twice as long as you expected. On the other hand, if you’re energized for a decade, sometimes it passes and you still want more.
Far be it from me to discourage my fellow entrepreneurs. On the contrary, I’m a strong believer in entrepreneurship. I believe in the transformative power of every entrepreneur in this world. There are many ways to express your essence, to deliver your potential to the world. Each one requires a specific vehicle. For the writer, the vehicle is text; for the musician, music; and for the entrepreneur, the company. And while writing a book or composing a song takes time, building a company demands a significantly greater commitment. For me, it was the one that made the most sense. And it still did, so much so that I decided to found another startup, Pannacotta.
The Day-to-Day Commitment of Time
While a big decision like entrepreneurship involves dedicating the next years of your life, making it meaningful involves smaller decisions. Using your time intentionally is about what you do with it every month, every week, every day, every hour.
This was so present for me that it became Pannacotta’s purpose: helping people make the best use of their time and potential.
The form it took was a calendar plugin that helped our users connect what was truly important to them with the events in their calendar, so they could see how much of their time they were dedicating to each of their life priorities. It was fascinating to watch hundreds of people define their priorities, and how the clarity of thinking about what mattered to them helped them actually prioritize.
But we ended up being a product for personal use, and our intention was to serve companies, so the fit wasn’t there, and we pivoted and eventually shut the product down.
Missing the Clarity
After we shut down Pannacotta’s first product, I missed that clarity. Or maybe what I missed was using my time with a purpose as meaningful as the company’s.
In any case, if there’s one thing that doesn’t make sense today, it’s missing something that software can deliver. So I decided to rebuild roughly what Pannacotta’s product did, using Vibe Coding. Since we had learned more about how people actually wanted to use the product, I incorporated those learnings along with improvements we never got to make.
It was a mix of feelings, getting live in a few days the features that took us months to build.
I called this new product Fullfeel, and it’s available for Chrome and Google Calendar users here. It was built with no server costs, so it can be free forever. I hope it’s useful to you.
What I Learned from This Experiment
What this experiment showed me of greatest value was not about building product with AI, nor about clarity in the use of time. It was that a company is so much MORE than a product that can be built with AI in a few prompts. It has an essence and carries a reason to exist. The product is part of the vehicle, the machine that carries those things into the world.