Hey!

Chris here. Welcome to Blueprint—the newsletter to help you build a winning engineering team.

I spent 15 years in my 20s and 30s building my first company, BriteCore. By the end of it, I was exhausted and completely spent.

So I did what every burned-out founder fantasizes about: I retired.

And within a month, I was building software for strangers on X just to feel something.

That sounds dramatic, but it taught me a lesson that I think applies to basically every founder and engineering leader: you can hand off the operations, but if you hand off the building, you start to decay.

And slowly, insidiously, you become the kind of leader who’s “technical” in title only.

Let me show you what I mean. 👇️ 

📒 DEEP DIVE

The Lesson I Learned When I Retired From Building

The quiet decay that starts when the making stops—and the cycle I use to keep my edge.

The Retirement Experiment

I told myself this was it. I was done. I had done all the work I needed to do, and now I was going to enjoy the freedom that everybody thinks they want.

And for about a month, it was great.

I read everything I could get my hands on—investment books, business strategy, everything Warren Buffett ever wrote (or had written about him). Every minute of every day not spent making dinner or hanging out with my wife and kids was spent reading.

It was relaxing...until it wasn't.

It got drab quick, and this “what am I doing?” feeling started creeping in.

Of course, it wasn’t that I missed the stress or the chaos. I missed making things.

I basically had a buildup of creative pressure from all that reading, and it needed a release through an output of some kind. I needed to build so bad, I was getting itchy.

So I started making software for random people on X.

I wasn’t trying to build a business. Someone in a little investment community would say, “Man, I wish we knew ____ about this,” and I’d go bake up a program that would rake the entire internet for whatever they needed.

They’d be stunned. And I didn’t even care about the result.

I also remember feeling my talent rotting during that period. It felt like I was going to die if I lost the edge I’ve built. And it wasn’t even a competitive edge—it was just the thing that makes me, me.

That was the first clue that retirement wasn’t really what I was after.

The Trade You Make Without Noticing

You start a company because you love creating things that solve hard problems.

Then the company grows, and your job quietly changes.

At first, you spend your time in the work—building, debugging, shipping, solving. You’re close enough to reality that you can feel what’s true and what’s broken.

Over time, you spend your time around the work—meetings, coordination, reviews, unblocking, decisions. You’re still responsible for outcomes, but you’re no longer the person doing the making.

That’s the trade: you exchange building for leverage.

And here’s the part that tricks a lot of leaders. You don’t notice what you lost because you replace the building with other kinds of output. Those are real outputs that matter to your business.

But just because training and building are both outputs doesn't mean they're equal.

And the only way I’ve found to keep that straight is to run in cycles.

The Cycle That Keeps You Sharp

When I’m deep in a hard problem—a real-world problem using whatever the current tooling is—I have to stay there.

If it’s tough and I’ve got to learn it and dig in, that’s fine. I just need uninterrupted time working on the problem. And while I’m in that mode, I really can’t be training people. Not even my own team.

But when I feel like I’ve made huge strides, then it’s time to go train.

I take what I learned and share it with the team so they benefit from the work I’ve done.

That cycle matters more than most people realize.

Because if all I was doing was managing, my skills would deteriorate. Managing isn’t my favorite thing, and it’s not where I drive the highest amount of value. But more importantly, if that’s all I did, my ability to do it well would get worse and worse over time.

I need to spend time solving real problems with real, current tools, so I actually have something worth teaching.

This is how I keep the team from becoming dinosaurs.

And so I don’t become one, either.

The Constraint

This is the part I think a lot of founders and technical leaders miss.

They hand off the building entirely. They become full-time managers, coordinators, and firefighters. And slowly, the thing that made them effective erodes.

Operations work—the managing, the coordinating, the firefighting—should serve the cycle.

It shouldn't consume it.

The moment your ops load eats all your building time, you’re on the decay curve. You might not notice it immediately, but it's undefeated. It catches up eventually.

What I Know About Myself Now

Here’s what I know about myself, having lived through the retirement experiment.

My ideal state is absolute silence with nobody depending on me and a deep awareness of a problem that needs fixing. And I can just wrestle with it for hours until I’ve got it solved.

That is my idea of heaven.

And the goal I was chasing when I retired wasn't “no work," it was freedom from firefighting and sustained sharpness.

Input creates pressure. Output relieves it. And building is the stabilizer that holds everything together.

BEFORE YOU GO…

If you’re a founder or technical leader and you feel like you’ve drifted too far from the making, acknowledge that and treat it as a serious problem.

Design your role so you can hand off the ops without losing the part that gives you energy and keeps you sharp.

Because at the end of the day, that part's the whole point.

Talk soon,

Chris.