The title is a bit provocative, I know. But I mean it.
This piece is about the dream most people are quietly chasing, and what it actually feels like on the other side of it.
Leave a comment if you liked it!
Best,
Xaver
PS: New here? Every Tuesday I share honest reflections on selling a company for €60M and building two AI startups. Every Thursday is for paid subscribers - all frameworks, templates, and the full stack I built along the way. Click here to see full benefits.
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Mine was simple: be financially free, and be young when it happens.
I knew a salary wasn’t going to get me there. Not impossible, but slow. The only path I could see was to start a company and sell it.
So I started e-bot7 in university. Worked myself into the ground for five years. Missed birthdays, weddings, most of my twenties. Built a team of 130+ people, raised $10M, opened five offices across Europe.
And then one day I sold the company, and a number I had been imagining for years actually showed up in my bank account.
After that came months of burnout. I also stayed employed at the US company that bought us for another two years.
So overall, it took me around two years before I could really start enjoying my financial freedom.
And then I did what probably a lot of people would do.
I bought the Porsche. I bought watches. I went on what felt like an eternal holiday and stayed in luxury hotels. I bought designer clothes and rented a penthouse in Munich. The rest I invested.
A lot of it genuinely gave me pleasure. I loved driving the Porsche. I loved collecting watches. Spending time in beautiful hotels is, objectively, awesome.
But here is the thing.
If I compare my happiness before and after the exit - and I mean after the burnout years (once I was actually free to enjoy anything), working on something meaningful in my first company outweighs the financial freedom by 10x.
Back then I woke up feeling needed. I walked into the office because I genuinely wanted to solve the next problem.
Two years after the exit, I just felt empty. It was a shallow kind of happiness. I needed to buy another thing every couple of weeks to keep the feeling topped up. It wasn’t sustainable.
You could call it a fake happy life with no purpose.
So I did what a lot of founders do. I started another company, because I wanted that feeling of purpose back. Built the product, got investors on board, did the whole thing again.
The difference? From the moment I started it, the purpose wasn’t there. I was chasing the feeling, not the work.
My body caught on before my head did, and the burnout symptoms came back.
I left.
After that I spent a lot of time in South Africa, mostly focused on myself. I sat with the questions I had never really asked: what do I actually want, and what is this all for?
When I came back, I started writing. I wanted to share what founders actually go through, because almost nobody talks about this part honestly.
I didn’t know writing would become my purpose when I started, but somewhere along the way it rebuilt an identity that had been there since I was a kid.
I was always prudent growing up. Saved every cent. After the exit I felt like I was throwing money out of the window, and some part of me was quietly uncomfortable the whole time. The watches, the Porsche, the designer clothes - they don’t fit who I actually am. So I’m getting rid of most of it.
I think this is how most dreams work, if you’re honest about it. You dream about a car. You get the car. A few months later it’s just the thing in your driveway. You dream about the promotion. You get it. A few weeks later it’s just your job.
The dream delivers exactly what it promised, and then quietly stops mattering.
What I keep coming back to is that the dreams worth having might be the ones you can’t actually finish. Living a life that feels full. Being someone your friends want to call. Doing work that means something to you on a Tuesday morning when no one is watching.
You don’t arrive at those. You just keep showing up for them.
Maybe that’s the part nobody tells you about getting what you wanted.
I think about this a lot now when I coach founders.
Most of the people I talk to are chasing some version of what I was chasing. The exit. The number. The moment they can finally exhale. And I don’t want to talk anyone out of building something - building a company is one of the most interesting things you can do with your life.
But I do want to say the quiet part out loud: the exit is not going to fix the thing you’re hoping it will fix.
If you’re building because you love the work, the people, the problem, the exit is a bonus. A nice one. You’ll be fine on the other side.
If you’re building because you think the money will finally make you feel okay about yourself, or prove something to someone, or buy you a version of a life you can already mostly access without it, you’re going to land on the other side and feel cheated. Not because anything went wrong. Because nothing did, and it still wasn’t enough.
The founders I see struggling most after an exit are the ones who never asked themselves what they actually wanted the money for. They just assumed having it would answer the question.
It doesn’t. It just removes one of your excuses for not answering it.
Opening one coaching slot for May. DM me here if you want it.
I met my dream lifestyle by chance, not on purpose.
I travelled to Central America for a month to recover from a very stressful period scaling my company - yes, I burned out -, and I realized how much I loved my days over there, no matter what I was or wasn't working on.
12 years after, I'm living in Costa Rica with my family (since 2020), I go surfing almost every morning, and still enjoy my time in & out of office - my home desk.
I still have dreams to realize, but feel like I'm living my best one, so far.
Incredibly real. As a striver, you will never be happy “when” you reach a goal. You will be content for a moment and simply set your sights higher. It really IS about the journey and about thinking critically about your WHY in life.
I met my dream lifestyle by chance, not on purpose.
I travelled to Central America for a month to recover from a very stressful period scaling my company - yes, I burned out -, and I realized how much I loved my days over there, no matter what I was or wasn't working on.
12 years after, I'm living in Costa Rica with my family (since 2020), I go surfing almost every morning, and still enjoy my time in & out of office - my home desk.
I still have dreams to realize, but feel like I'm living my best one, so far.
Incredibly real. As a striver, you will never be happy “when” you reach a goal. You will be content for a moment and simply set your sights higher. It really IS about the journey and about thinking critically about your WHY in life.