I don't want to win a game that forces me to live a life I don't want

For a long time, I never questioned the path for building a company. I thought about applying to Y Combinator. Raising money. Being as ambitious as possible. Maybe one day appearing in an article about how we had raised one, five, or ten million dollars. Growing the team. Raising again. Keeping going.

That was my first instinct because it was what I saw everyone else doing. If we were building a startup, that had to be the next step. Why not?

It also fit me perfectly. I had always thought of myself as a very ambitious person. In high school, I wanted the best grades. At university, the same. Then I wanted to do research, get a master's degree at MIT or Stanford, and go on to a PhD. Every stage came with a slightly harder goal waiting after it.

When the chance to start a company came along, I brought that same logic with me. If I had once wanted to get into the best university, now I wanted to get into Y Combinator, raise money, and build a billion-dollar company. To me, doing my best and going as far as possible were almost the same thing.

Then I started having a lot of conversations with Tomi, and my perspective changed completely.

The conversations we kept having

Tomi came at it from a very different place. When we talked about the company, he never asked how much money we could raise or how big it could become. He asked why we wanted to build it. How it would help us be happier. What made me happy and what made him happy.

So Tomi and I never talked about Maspeak only as a product we wanted to scale. Whenever we got together, we ended up talking about ourselves too. How we wanted to live, what we needed to be happy, and what we did not want to lose along the way.

We spent a long time having those conversations. We got to know each other, figured out what each of us needed, and tried to understand why we were doing any of this in the first place.

During one of those talks, Tomi said something I still remember more or less like this:

“

Look, I don't care how successful Maspeak becomes. If I feel like I've lost myself in the day-to-day, that I'm no longer the same person, or that I've stopped enjoying what I do, then no matter how successful the company is, I'll step away.”

That made me think a lot. I did not want Tomi to reach that point and leave, and he did not want that to happen to me either. If we wanted to build Maspeak together for many years, we had to make sure we both kept choosing to be there.

My natural way of looking at almost anything had always been to ask how I could make it better. How to get a higher grade, reach a better university, work harder, or make something grow. As soon as I reached one goal, the next one appeared. I rarely stopped to ask how I felt along the way.

Tomi saw things differently. Before asking how to go further, he asked whether he actually wanted to go in that direction. Will this make me happier? Is this what I really want? How do I want to feel while I do it?

I was not used to asking those questions. I was not someone who paid much attention to his emotions or thought of taking care of himself as part of a decision. My instinct was to keep going, improve, and optimize. If something could be better, I felt it had to be better. Maybe later there would be time to see how I felt.

At first, I thought this was something Tomi needed and I had to learn to respect. Over time, I realized he was also talking about something I needed, even if I had never found the words for it. Learning to understand him helped me understand myself and see my own life differently.

Tomi did not make me stop wanting to improve. He taught me to put one question first: improve for what? I started to see that growing or optimizing something would not always make our life better. Sometimes it could do the exact opposite.

That way of thinking kept bringing us back to the same conversation about the company: why did we want to build Maspeak?

One answer was obvious. We wanted to make a great product, work with many hotels, and build a big company. That is still true. But another answer mattered just as much: we wanted Maspeak to be a way to enjoy our life more, not something we had to survive for years in the hope of enjoying life later.

We both felt that life was much bigger than reaching a major exit. The idea of giving everything up for work, going all-in for an indefinite number of years, and trusting that the sacrifice would eventually pay off did not appeal to us much.

We wanted to enjoy the ordinary days of the company. Working together, solving a problem, talking to a hotel, meeting people, and thinking about the product. We wanted Maspeak to have our touch, our personality, and the care we put into the details.

When we picture the company we want, we see ourselves working with people we genuinely want to know. Learning their story, understanding how they experience their work, visiting their hotel, and sitting down to talk. We like the thought that some of those relationships might become friendships, and that we can choose to surround ourselves with people whose company we enjoy.

We want to understand their problems and get involved because helping them matters to us. We also want to celebrate together when something we built makes their day a little easier. If we care about what we do and about the people we work with, we hope they can feel it too. That is the kind of company where we would like to spend our days.

In those conversations, I began to separate two things I had always mixed together. One was my ambition, my desire to improve and do things as well as I could. The other was the idea that ambition had to lead to investment, growth at any cost, and a major exit.

My ambition was mine. The way I imagined proving it, maybe not so much.

I wanted to be happy too. I also wanted a full life and to enjoy what I was doing while I was doing it. I had assumed that success had to come first and that life would follow. Talking to Tomi made me see that we could think about the company the other way around: begin with the life we wanted and build Maspeak inside it.

Then something began to scare me more than failing: winning a game that, if I had stopped to think about it at the beginning, I might never have chosen.

I realized that the further I moved toward a goal, the harder it became to stop and ask where that goal had come from. Every achievement became another reason to keep going.

Since then, I have tried to ask myself a question I almost never used to ask:

If no one could see the outcome, would I still want this life?

Choosing which game to play

Those conversations also helped us name a very concrete decision. We could build Maspeak with outside investment and try to grow as fast as possible, or we could bootstrap it, grow with our own revenue, and keep control over its direction.

We chose the second path because it looked much more like the company we imagined together. We wanted the freedom to choose our pace, the problems worth our time, and the people we wanted to work with. We wanted to know every customer, get genuinely involved, and care for the details that make Maspeak feel like ours.

There is uncertainty in that decision. We may be wrong, and some things will certainly go badly. Today, with what we know about ourselves and the life we want, it feels like the best path for us.

That is why we talk about building Maspeak at our own pace. Sometimes that pace is intense. We can spend hours on a problem because it excites us, follow an idea because we are curious, or work incredibly hard to get something the way we want it. At other times, we will slow down, change direction, or give time to another part of our life.

We want our decisions to come from what we want to build and how we want to live while building it.

Does this mean I lost my ambition?

I have asked myself that question. While other founders appear in the news because they raised five or ten million dollars, we chose another path. From the outside, someone might think I became less ambitious.

I feel the opposite happened.

I used to measure ambition by how far I could go in a single direction. Now I think about it across my whole life. If we ever sell Maspeak for 500 million dollars, but getting there means we no longer recognize ourselves, neglect the people we love, and lose our health, our youth, and the things we enjoy, we would not call that success. It would be a very expensive failure.

For a long time, I thought about excellence in almost one direction. If the company was doing better, if I was going further, or if I achieved something harder, I assumed that meant I was living better too.

I see it differently now. You can be excellent at work and fairly mediocre in the rest of your life. We want to try something harder: to be just as ambitious about our whole life.

Our ambition is to build an excellent company and bring that same pursuit of excellence into our own lives. We want to do good work, truly help people, and create a product we are proud of. We also want to take care of our bodies, our relationships, our hobbies, and our curiosity about things that have nothing to do with Maspeak.

Two ideas from Greek philosophy help us explain this. One is areté, usually translated as virtue or excellence. It is about developing our abilities and shaping our character through practice. The other is eudaimonia: a full life, one that feels worth living when you look at it as a whole.

That is what ambition increasingly looks like to us. Tomi wants to grow through music and really enjoy it. I want to run, play volleyball, go to the gym, and feel good in my body. We want to eat well, care for our relationships, meet people and learn their stories, and keep learning new things. We want each of those parts to have a real place in our days.

Tomi has a very particular way of putting it. Often, when we are together, he gets up, looks at himself in the mirror, and says:

“

This is going to be the best day of my life.”

What matters is that he says it at the start of the day. He does not wait for something extraordinary to happen or for a KPI to change. He decides it first, then does everything he can to live the day that way. It reminds us that enjoyment cannot sit behind Maspeak's next metric. It has to happen now, while we build.

That is the kind of ambition we want now: to wake up excited to live the day we have built, do things as well as we can, and reach the end of it still feeling like ourselves.

We don't know what will happen

The truth is, we cannot be certain about any of this. Maybe with investment Maspeak would have gone further or moved faster. Maybe in a few years we will look back and think we should have chosen differently. This path could also take us somewhere we cannot imagine yet.

What we do know is how we want to live while we find out. We want to enjoy our days, work with people we care about, and put care into what we do. We want to wake up, as Tomi says, believing that this can be the best day of our life, then do our best to make it so.

The outcome matters, of course. We want Maspeak to become a huge company and do incredibly well. But our happiness cannot depend on a metric moving first, an investment arriving, or a major exit happening.

If everything works out the way we dream, we will enjoy it enormously. And if the result turns out differently, at least we will know we did not spend those years waiting to start living.

Our dream is to build Maspeak this way and share this way of living with the people we meet along the way. We hope the care, energy, and excitement we bring to the company reach them too. Whatever the outcome, this feels like the best decision we can make today.