Somewhere Between Leaving and Arriving

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12. Juli 2026, 05:42 Uhr

There is a phase nobody warns you about. Not in the books, not in the podcasts, not in the founder stories that get told on stages. Everyone talks about the struggle at the beginning and the arrival at the end. Nobody talks about the middle. The part where you have already left but haven't yet arrived. Where you have outgrown the rooms you used to belong to but haven't been let into the ones you are walking toward. That gap has a name. It is loneliness. And it is one of the most disorienting experiences a person can move through. I know it because I lived inside it for years.

When I was sixteen, I was convinced I would be a millionaire before I turned eighteen. The ideas were bad. The execution was nonexistent. But the belief was enormous and completely untethered from reality. I walked into rooms and told people about visions I had no ability to build yet. And the world responded the way the world responds to that kind of unearned confidence. It laughed. Friends smiled to my face and shook their heads behind my back. Family waited patiently for me to come to my senses. And I stood there in the middle of all of it, caught between two questions I couldn't answer. Do they not see what I see? Or do I not see what they see?

What I didn't understand then was that both were true. They couldn't see it because I hadn't built it yet. And I couldn't see myself clearly because I was hiding my fear behind noise. I want to be honest about what that noise looked like. Because it wasn't just confidence. It was arrogance. The kind that doesn't come from strength but from a wound that hasn't been named yet. Every time someone laughed at an idea, I got louder. Every time someone dismissed me, I made bigger claims. I built a version of myself that was impossible to reach and impossible to argue with, because somewhere underneath all of it I was terrified that they were right. That I was nothing. That the thing I felt pulling me forward was just a story I was telling myself to feel special. The arrogance was armor. And like all armor, it kept the pain out and the real connection out in equal measure.

I can look back now and understand the people who kept their distance. I was exhausting. I was performing a certainty I didn't have. And when they didn't believe in me, I made them the enemy instead of looking at myself. To anyone who was on the receiving end of that version of me, I am sorry. Not because the belief was wrong. The belief was always real. But I expressed it in a way that made it about proving them wrong instead of building something true. The hunger was genuine. The way I carried it wasn't always. But I also want to say something about what the wrong environment does to you over time. Because it is not always loud. It doesn't always look like rejection. Sometimes it looks like belonging.

You are in the room. People like you. And yet something in you is slowly being trained to take up less space. Every raised eyebrow at an idea teaches you to pre-apologize before you speak. Every moment of being laughed at teaches you to laugh first, at yourself, before anyone else gets the chance. Every relationship where your ambition made someone uncomfortable teaches you to hide it, to soften it, to present a version of yourself that is easier to be around. And you do it so gradually that you don't notice it happening. You just notice one day that you are smaller than you used to be. That you hesitate before you speak. That you have learned to see yourself through the eyes of people who were never going to understand you anyway. The wrong environment doesn't break you dramatically. It shrinks you quietly. And the most dangerous part is that it can feel like maturity. Like you are finally being realistic. Like you are growing up. When really you are just disappearing. That is what the loneliness of growth actually feels like. It's as if you were sitting at a table full of people who seem to love you or perhaps really do, and yet you feel like a stranger. It is having a version of yourself that is becoming clearer every day, and no one around you can see it yet. It is the specific ache of being in transition, of being between, of not quite fitting anywhere while you are becoming someone who will eventually fit somewhere completely.

The loneliness is not a sign that something is wrong. It is a sign that something is happening. I made my first real company at twenty-five. The first idea I actually saw through. And something shifted. A few people started to show up who didn't look at what I was building and laugh. They looked at it and leaned in. And then something happened that I still think about often. Two messages arrived, almost at the same time. One from someone who had read something I wrote and felt seen by it. One from someone I reached out to because something he was building made me feel the same way.

Those two people are now among the closest in my life. And I want to try to describe what that recognition actually does to a person. Because it is not just warmth. It is something more structural than that. When you spend years in an environment that treats your depth as a problem, you start to internalize that judgment. You become your own editor, cutting the parts of you that got the worst reactions, keeping only what felt safe. And then someone enters your life who doesn't just tolerate those parts but responds to them. Who meets your intensity with their own. Who takes your ideas seriously before they are finished. Who pushes back not to diminish you but because they are engaged enough to care. And something in you that had been bracing for years just releases. You stop managing yourself around them. You think out loud. You go further than you would have gone alone. You become more of what you actually are instead of less.

That is what the right environment does. It doesn't just make you feel better. It makes you better. Not by changing who you are, but by finally giving who you are enough space to truly blossom. Since those people entered my life, everything changed. The work got sharper. The thinking went deeper. My agency grew. I took risks I would have talked myself out of before. Not because I suddenly became braver in isolation but because bravery is easier when someone who understands what you are building is standing next to you. Someone who has seen the version of you that is still becoming and decided to stay anyway.

I don't think success is only something you build. I think it is also something you are held into by the people who believe in it before it exists. The right circle doesn't just witness your growth. It creates the conditions for it. It gives you a place to be fully yourself at the exact moment when the rest of the world hasn't caught up yet. And that is the thing I want to say most clearly. The loneliness is real. The gap is real. The years of feeling like you are becoming someone that nobody around you quite recognizes, that is real too. But it is not the end of the story. It is the part of the story that makes the end mean something. Because when the right people finally arrive, and they will, you will understand in an instant why it couldn't have happened any earlier. You weren't ready to receive it. You needed the gap. You needed the loneliness. You needed to become someone who had stopped performing and started simply being so that when they looked at you, there was actually something real there to see.

The version of you that your sixteen-year-old self dreamed about is not waiting on the other side of more success. It is waiting on the other side of the right room. The right table. The right people who make you feel, maybe for the first time, that who you already are is exactly enough. Keep going. The loneliness is not the destination. It is the corridor. And on the other side of it is something worth every quiet, disorienting, necessary step.

There are three people I want to name before I close this.
Niklas and Andi. You came into my life through two messages that arrived almost at the same time, and I don't think you fully know what that timing meant. I had been in the gap for a long time. Long enough to start wondering if the version of me I was becoming was someone anyone would ever want to be around.

You answered that question without me ever having to ask it. You didn't need me to be further along. You didn't need me to be more polished or more proven. You met me exactly where I was and treated what I was building like it mattered. You still do. I am more because of you. Not just in the work. In every way that counts.

And then there is Moritz. The one who was there before any of this. Before the first company, before the right words, before I had anything to show for what I believed about myself. You were there at sixteen, when the ideas were bad and the confidence was borrowed and the whole thing probably looked like a phase that would pass.

You never laughed. You never waited for me to come to my senses. You just stayed. Through every version of me, including the ones I am not proud of. That kind of loyalty doesn't have a name that does it justice. Most people never experience it once. I have had it my entire life, and it came from you.

Thank you for seeing me before I could see myself.

Marcel