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AI Native OS
Built In Austin Texas
Built In Austin Texas
It's a new baby in the family. Except this baby isn't cute. Nobody wants to hold it. Everyone hates it.
After my last exit, I took time off. A lot of time.
To be a good dad and husband. Or at least dad.
I went to every soccer game. Every dance recital. I was there for bedtime. I cooked dinner. I did the fucking school pickup.
I taught myself to code something other than PHP, because I've always known engineers were the coolest people in the room.
Then I decided to build Cerebral.
And I forgot how much startups suck.
You know what a startup is?
It's a new baby in the family. Except this baby isn't cute. Nobody wants to hold it. Everyone hates it.
Even you hate it sometimes.
The kids hate it because dad's always working.
My wife hates it because I'm physically sitting at dinner but mentally debugging why the Context River is dropping mandatory SOPs.
I hate it because it's 2 AM and I'm rewriting the execution engine for the third time because LLMs don't follow fucking instructions.
But you can't abandon it. Because it'll die. And you'll have wasted six months of 15-hour days and your kids will barely remember what you looked like during Q3.
Here's the problem with building complex interconnected systems:
You have to hold the entire architecture in your head.
All 16 services. How they communicate. What depends on what. Where state lives. How memory flows through the context river. Which service owns which data.
You lose that thread, you're fucked.
Someone asks you a question—even something simple like "Can you help with homework?"—and you lose it.
That mental model you've been building for three hours while writing the governance engine? Gone.
Now you need 20 minutes to reconstruct it. Find your place. Remember what you were doing. Get back to flow.
So you have two choices:
1. Look up when they talk to you - Be present. Answer the question. Help with homework. Be a dad.
Lose the thread. Spend 20 minutes getting back to where you were. Realize it's now 11 PM and you haven't finished what you needed to finish. Work until 2 AM. Wake up exhausted. Repeat.
2. Don't look up -Keep coding. Hold the thread. Ship the feature. Make progress.
Your daughter asks for help with math and you grunt "Ask mom." Your son wants to show you something and you say "Not now." Your wife asks what you want for dinner and you don't even hear her.
You're there. But you're not there.
Both choices suck.
Look up → You're falling behind. The platform isn't done. Customers are waiting. You're burning runway (even if it's your own money). Every day you don't ship is a day competitors might catch up.
Don't look up → You're a shitty dad. Your kids will remember that you weren't there. Your wife is handling everything alone. You're missing their childhood for a company that might not even work.
There's no winning.
I'm writing 250,000+ lines of production code while raising three kids.
15-hour days. 7 days a week.
I wake up at 6 AM. Kids need breakfast. School dropoff. Then code until they get home. Help with homework (if I can pull myself away). Dinner. Bedtime. Then code until 2 AM.
Weekends? Same thing. Except the kids are home all day so the interruptions are constant.
Soccer game at 9 AM? I'm there. But I'm on my laptop during halftime fixing a bug.
Birthday party? I'm there. But I'm thinking about how to implement dry-run approval workflows.
I'm physically present. Mentally absent.
"You came out of retirement for THIS?"
She's not wrong.
We were comfortable. I'd sold a company. We had money. I could've just... not done this.
Instead, I'm grinding 15-hour days to build infrastructure for synthetic labor while she handles three kids, the house, everything.
She calls herself a "trophy wife." I call her "the reason this company exists."
Because without her handling everything I'm not handling, this doesn't work.
"Dad, can you play?"
"Not right now, buddy."
"Dad, watch this!"
"Uh huh." (I'm not watching.)
"Dad, can you help me?"
"Ask mom."
I'm the dad who's always working.
They don't understand what I'm building. They don't understand why it matters. They just know dad is always on the laptop.
Because I think this is the biggest opportunity I'll see in my lifetime.
Synthetic labor is going to be a multi-trillion-dollar market.
Not AI assistants. Not productivity tools. Actual labor replacement. AI employees that do the work instead of humans.
Somebody's going to build the infrastructure for that.
I think we can be the ones who do it. But only if I ship the platform before someone else does.
So I'm grinding. Every day. Weekends. Holidays. While my kids are asleep. While my wife handles everything.
It's fucking hard.
Here's what I tell myself:
Right now, I'm a mediocre dad.
I'm there for the important stuff. I show up. I'm present for bedtime. But I'm distracted. I'm working. I'm not fully engaged.
If this works, I can be a great dad later.
Not because of the money. Because I'll have built something that doesn't require me to grind 15-hour days forever.
Infrastructure scales. Once it's built, it runs. You maintain it, you improve it, but you're not in flow state 15 hours a day holding the entire system architecture in your head.
That's the bet.
Grind now. Build the foundation. Get it to a point where the company can run without me coding every feature.
Then I can be present. Actually present. Not physically-there-but-mentally-debugging-Redis present.
Ask me in two years.
Right now, I'm exhausted. My kids think I'm always working. My wife is a saint for putting up with this. I haven't had a real day off since August.
But we're shipping production infrastructure that processes real customer operations for a $150M company.
We survived their Q4. We handled Black Friday. We proved it works.
So maybe it's worth it.
Or maybe I'm just justifying the fact that I can't stop even if I wanted to.
If you're thinking about starting a company while you have young kids:
It's going to suck.
You will miss things. You will be distracted. You will feel guilty. Your spouse will carry more than their share. Your kids will ask why you're always working.
And you'll do it anyway.
Because you think this is your shot. This is the one. This is the opportunity you can't pass up.
Just know what you're signing up for.
It's not the glamorous founder life you see on Twitter. It's 2 AM debugging sessions. It's missing soccer games mentally even when you're there physically. It's your wife reminding you that you haven't had a conversation with her in three days that wasn't about the kids' schedule.
It's fucking hard.
But if it works, you'll have built something that changes an industry while your kids were young enough not to fully remember that you were always working.
And if it doesn't work, at least you'll have tried.
That's the bet.
I'm all in.
Even if it means I'm a mediocre dad for the next two years.
Even if my "trophy wife" has to remind me that I have a family.
Even if my kids grow up thinking dad was always on the laptop.
Because somebody's going to build the operating system for synthetic labor.
And I think it should be us.
So I'm grinding.
15 hours a day. 7 days a week. While my kids are asleep.
Building the plane while flying it. With three kids and a wife who deserves better than this.
But she married an entrepreneur.
Her dad is an entrepreneur.
Her grandad is an entrepreneur.
She is an entrepreneur.
And with any luck, her kids will be entrepreneurs too.
So here we are.
Ben Jenkins
Founder