The exit was supposed to feel like an arrival.
I’d been building toward it for over a decade. Started in a barbershop in Newark. Then my kitchen, until the dining room table became the shipping center and the kitchen became a kind of lab. Then a warehouse. Then a real office. We sold on December 29, 2025. I signed my name at the bottom of every page they put in front of me.
I thought I’d feel different.
The first morning after the close I got my son dressed. He woke up smiling. He almost always does. Doug took him to school. I showered. I made coffee. I ate a banana. Between the shower and the coffee, my hand reached for my phone.
The fires had stopped the day before. The hand had not caught up yet.
The chase did not need a company. It only needed me.
It is the question people building something consequential rarely get to ask out loud while they are still building. What is this all for. Not in the abstract. In the specifics. What is the life this work is supposed to deliver. What does the day after look like. What does the person on the other side of this become.
I have been sitting with that question for six months. Before the house wakes up. In the shower. Sometimes past midnight, when the question keeps me awake.
Something is starting to come clear.
The middle is not the holding pen on the way to the destination. The middle is the place. The years of building. The years of becoming. The years where the life is actually happening.
That is not the part you survive in order to get to the good part. That is the good part.
The chase does not end at the outcome. It just moves to the next thing.
What if this is the best it will be. Not the worst. Not the way station. Just this. The actual life. The kids growing. The partner across the table. The work that matters. The people who love you. The body you have. The time you have left.
I’m starting this publication because the conversation I needed during those years hadn’t been written down.
During the years I was building, I kept looking for it and couldn’t find it. Not the optimization. Not the next vehicle. Not even the inner work that comes after the sale. I needed the conversation that happens during. The one that asks what the chase is doing to the person doing the chasing. The one that stays in the room while the chase is still going on.
That is the room.
For founders, operators, and people still inside the years. Still building something consequential. Still inside the chase, before it’s had a chance to deliver or fail. Still living inside the time that will one day be called the time that mattered.
In the Middle is for the ones still inside the years. It is a practice, not a brand.
This is for the hand that keeps reaching because the chase taught it to.
I have been sitting with all of this. Some days carefully. Some days clumsily.
My mother died two years before the exit. She was 57. It was sudden. Four days before Christmas. The last time we talked, we were planning Christmas dinner. She asked if I would be okay with a dish that had pumpkin in it. She knew I did not love pumpkin.
For years I went to her house after work. She would open the door and ask if I was okay. I’d say yes. She would smirk and ask if I was lying.
She fed me.
I had the worst day. I forgot about the worst day.
We did not talk about the day. She gave me rest.
My son was born less than five months later, through surrogacy. He carries her name in the middle. The years that built the company were also the years that took her from me and gave me him, in the same span of months, while my eyes were on the work.
The work I am doing now is quieter than the work that built the company. It moves inward instead of outward. It’s not about arriving at anything. It is about learning to sit inside the life I already have, more gently than I have ever sat inside anything.
Some days I am bad at it. Some days I am better.
The work of In the Middle is learning to stay here, on purpose, instead of leaving for the next thing.
I am not writing this as someone who has figured it out. I am writing it as someone who is in it.
What I am not going to do here. I am not going to promise that the right exit strategy delivers the right life. I am not going to hand you the post-exit playbook as if the playbook is the answer. I am not going to perform peace I have not yet found.
What I am going to do. Write the truest sentences I can. Pay close attention to other people doing the same. Take my time.
The exit was supposed to feel like an arrival.
My mother was gone. My son was here. I just did not know to look up.
The years were already the years.
Here is the part I would say to someone still in it.
There’s no arrival. The day it all pays off and you finally get to live, it doesn’t come. You’ll move the finish line every time you reach it. Most builders do.
Don’t let the outcome hold the life hostage. Put some piece of that life inside the week you’re already in. The dinner. The walk. The hour where nobody gets anything from you.
I’m not telling you to stop. I don’t know how to stop. I’m telling you that the life is not on the other side of the work.
It is the part you keep skipping to get there.
Still in the middle.
