For me, the most fulfilling period of my entrepreneurial journey was when it was just the two of us (and this is NOT meant to discount the joy I get working with my team).
Back when we were building side by side. Married co-founders, working out of the same room, bouncing every idea off each other.
Now? People hear “married co-founders” and gag a little. They picture their own relationship in that setup. They assume the only way it works is if we keep things siloed.
But for us, the opposite has always been true. The best work we have ever done has come from being in it together.
We were small, just two people, raising two little kids. We had to make cutthroat tradeoffs. Every thing we did, we both had to know, with confidence, was the right thing to do.
It’s so much harder now. The business is bigger. The team is bigger. Too much to manage, too many people to support. Enough people to let them run their own playbooks sometimes and report back on how it went.
We don’t get that same closeness by default anymore.
But what I’ve learned? You can intentionally recreate it. You can carve out ‘just us’ projects. You can build “special ops” crews inside your team. You can run experiments in small groups.
Big team dynamics matter. But so does protecting the way you actually love to work.
You can have both.
