Daniel is a former Google engineer turned relentless founder, building the kind of company he wished he could’ve worked at.
Daniel never quite fit into the corporate mold—even when he was deep in it.
“The corporate job for me was anyway temporary. I had a startup before… and it was always like, okay, I'll do like two years at Google and then go back to doing startups. I actually stayed there for like six years.”
He describes his eventual leap as being driven by impatience—not recklessness. He saw staying longer as a slow erosion of momentum. So he quit before he had a firm idea, armed only with a belief in his ability to figure it out.
“Save up some money… and then create that space to properly give it the shot. And it's of course going to take way longer than you thought.”
Daniel doesn’t believe in waiting for the perfect idea. In fact, he’s suspicious of founders who do.
“All these ideas that you'll have early on are most likely wrong, and you have to kind of fix that over time.”
Instead, he urges aspiring founders to orient around the people they want to serve, not the product they want to build. And most importantly, to get out of their heads.
“Stop producing code. Go talk to the people that you think will buy your stuff… If you're not talking to like 20 people a week at that stage, you are doing something wrong.”
That early phase isn’t glamorous. It’s humbling. And lonely.