Slide 47

When we are kids the hero’s journey is all around us. We read about Frodo’s journey through Middle Earth, we watch Luke realize his father is Darth Vader, we follow Luffy as he unlocks his hidden powers throughout the Grand Line. And everything is an adventure when you’re a kid. The playground is a colorful castle. A family trip is always to somewhere new and novel. Teenage angst is part of the beauty of growing up.

But then you grow up. You graduate. You find a real job that pays the bills. You go into the same office every day, eat the same food, drink the same coffee. You get into routine. You work your way up the corporate ladder. You have a mortgage, bills, spouse, and kids to worry about.

Where did the time go?

I remember the exact moment I knew I was slowly dying. Week ten at a pharmaceutical company in central New Jersey. Another Wednesday. I was eating Farmer’s Fridge again, a small Caesar wrap dispensed from a modern millennial vending machine, for the fourth time this week because that was the best option at the cafeteria. My laptop displayed slide 47 of a deck titled “Organizational Synergies Post-Merger.” I was adjusting the formatting on a text box about “leveraging cross-functional capabilities.”

This was it. This was what twenty-four years of preparation had led to. A very prestigious purgatory. I was making $100K a year to slowly transform into furniture.

I originally chose consulting because I thought it was the adventure. Fly around the world. Give advice to some of the top F500 executives. Work with some of the smartest people around.

All true.

But also what was true was endless slides, endless meetings, and endless optimization. I had this nagging feeling I wasn’t… building anything real.

Maybe this was just modern life? And I’d have to get used to it? Maybe the fantasies I had as a kid of galactic exploration, horseback rides through the vast plains, pitched battles with mysterious foes was just that… fantasy.

Call it idealism or call it naiveté but that’s why I moved to California. To chase the modern gold rush. To work in gaming, a literal fantasy. I wanted to answer the call to adventure.

What I wasn’t prepared for was the struggle, the pain that is required for any adventure. I was always prepared to work hard, but I wasn’t quite ready for the market turning for the worse, the uncertainty about what to do next, the lack of meaning, the depression, the feeling of inadequacy, the responsibility of carrying important decisions.

The hero’s journey always has that moment. When Frodo stands at Mount Doom. When Luke faces Vader. When you’re three years into the California dream, unsure about what’s next, wondering if you made a catastrophic mistake leaving everything you knew: friends, family, job, safety, and home.

And then recently one of my founders said to me: “Speedrun feels like summer camp. Three months of crazy adventures and now we’re all going home.”

And what I realized over the last year was that my journey here in California was about helping others realize their journey. To build a structure, program, capital, and community to enable others to make it through.

See, what actually kills adventures isn’t the dark lord. It’s the Tuesday at 2 AM when you’re alone, your runway is shrinking, and nobody understands why you left your tech company to do this crazy idea. It’s the isolation and self doubt.

But when you’re with five other people that are all having the same Tuesday at the same time? That’s different. Someone’s been there. Someone has an idea. Someone reminds you why you started.

The specifics matter less than the shared struggle: whether it’s debating human behavior until 2AM at the Airbnb, or that moment when a founder from Zurich realizes a founder from New York is dealing with the same customer challenges, or when someone gets their first 1M in revenue and the whole cohort celebrates like they just summited Everest.

We built speedrun to be base camp for the greatest adventure of our time: creating something from nothing. Every three months, a hundred people remember that the ten-year-old who thought they could change the world wasn’t wrong, just early.

So to all those still sitting in their corporate companies, adjusting text boxes on slide 47, eating the same chicken Caesar wrap:

The adventure isn’t gone. It’s waiting.

It will cost you everything comfortable.

You will lose sleep, money, and certainty.

You will become someone your current colleagues won’t recognize.

But the alternative is worse. It’s 3 PM on a Tuesday in ten years, and you’re on slide 48, and the wrap tastes exactly the same, and the ten-year-old version of you has stopped trying to get your attention because they know you’re not listening anymore.

My hero’s journey ended where it was supposed to begin: helping others start theirs.