Hey!

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

I need to talk about something most technical founders don't see coming.

You start a company because you're good at building things. You love the craft. There's no better feeling than sitting down with headphones on for a few hours and just creating something from nothing.

Then one day you look up and realize you haven't touched code in weeks.

Your calendar is full of 1:1s, skip-levels, and coordination meetings. The things that used to energize you now feel like distant memories. And the things filling your time? They wear you out in ways the technical work never did.

This is a moment every technical founder hits eventually. And it sucks.

But before you resign yourself to a life of misery, let me explain how you can keep building your business AND doing what you love. 👇️ 

📒 DEEP DIVE

The Technical Founder's Paradox

Why scaling your company inevitably means giving up the work you love.

Early on, you can lead from the front. You can show your team how to balance coding with management. You still get to do some of the work you actually enjoy.

But there's a point in the scaling process where even that stops.

You're no longer able to spend almost any time doing the kind of work you really like to do. The work that made you want to start this company in the first place.

This isn't a sign you're doing something wrong. It's just how growth works.

The more people you have, the more your job becomes about coordination rather than creation. You're spending time growing people, aligning strategy, and making decisions that affect the whole team.

None of that feels like sitting down and creating worlds at your fingertips.

But here's what can make this dangerous: if you completely disconnect from the technical work, you become a dinosaur.

The Risk of Extinction

You might be a dinosaur if you spontaneously start talking about "the good old days" and "the way we used to do things."

Do you look at new frameworks and tools and dismiss them because they're different from what you know? Another tell-tale sign.

And while you can get along as a dinosaur in some fields, it's a death sentence in technology.

The landscape is changing constantly. If you're not growing and learning, you're falling behind. And as a leader, falling behind means you lose credibility with your team and miss opportunities in the market.

So you can't just accept that the technical work is gone and move on. You need to stay plugged in to what's happening in the ecosystem.

How to Separate Your Craft From Your Job

The first step is to accept that your day job is no longer coding.

It sucks, I know. But this doesn't mean your craft has to die.

You need to carve out time—time that's separate from your regular workflow—to stay connected to the technical side.

I do this on Saturday or Sunday mornings, or whenever else I can find space outside the normal rhythm of running the business.

During these blocks, you can work on a personal project, learn a new framework, or build something just because you want to understand how it works.

What matters is that you continue to nurture your curiosity. This is essential to prevent yourself from becoming the person who's out of touch with the reality your team is operating in every day.

The learning time you spend keeping yourself current is what prevents you from becoming irrelevant.

Why The Transition Feels So Bad At First

Let me be honest: when you first make this shift, you're going to hate it.

You'll find yourself doing things that feel unnatural and uncomfortable. Managing people doesn't come naturally to most engineers.

It's like working out for the first time. You're sore, you're a mess, you're not even getting endorphins yet. It just feels bad.

But the longer you stick with it, the more you start liking it.

My advice? Give it time. Don't bail on the transition just because it feels wrong at first. The discomfort is part of the adaptation phase.

Most people quit right when they're about to break through to the other side.

The New Fulfillment You Didn't Expect

Here's what happens if you stick with it: You start getting new endorphins from the role.

You begin to see the value in growing other people into positions where they can do the kinds of things you used to do. And you realize the truth of building a business—you can get more done with 10 hands than 2.

Your job becomes building people who can build things. You're still creating, now it's just people instead of code.

And there's a human aspect to this that's genuinely fulfilling. You're helping someone grow in their career while developing capabilities they didn't have before.

It doesn't feel the same as coding for 3 hours straight. (Let's be honest, nothing does.) But it's good in its own way.

In many ways, it's even more fulfilling.

BEFORE YOU GO…

You have to lose the work you love to build the company you want.

That sentence probably makes you uncomfortable. It made me uncomfortable, too.

But the path forward isn't straight up and to the right. It's evolutions, transitions, and identity shifts.

You can grieve the loss of hands-on work. That's normal.

You can stay connected to your craft outside your day job. That's necessary.

But, eventually, you'll find new meaning in growing others.

And that's how you scale beyond yourself.

The work inevitably changes. But if you handle the transition right, you end up building something bigger (and more fulfilling) than anything you could've created alone.

Talk soon,

Chris.