Pride and Uncertainty in Equal Parts. I Turn 20 in 2 Days With a Company, Mexico in My Pipeline, and More Questions Than When I Started.
It's not the celebration I imagined. It's better than that. It's the real mix of what it feels like to turn 20 while building something.
Project App
Engineering Team
In 2 days I turn 20. I've been thinking about what to write for this moment for a while. I wanted it to be honest. Not a highlight reel. Not a 'look how far I've come' post. Just what it actually feels like to arrive here. And what it actually feels like is: mixed. Pride and uncertainty in equal parts. Not one more than the other.
The pride part
ProjectApp had its best semester ever in the first half of 2026. 78 million pesos billed. A team that delivers without me needing to be in everything. Mexico in the pipeline with one prospect still very much alive. A client who this week asked for AI explicitly, which means the market is starting to pull what we can offer instead of us pushing it. A trip to Europe that changed how I think about the size of what we can build. These are real things. They happened. And I'm genuinely proud of them.
- Best semester in ProjectApp history.
- First international prospects.
- A team that operates without depending entirely on me.
- A client who asked for AI - the market is catching up to what we're building.
The uncertainty part
And at the same time - I don't know exactly what comes next. I don't know if the international expansion is going to accelerate faster than I expect or take longer. I don't know how to position AI in our offer beyond what we're already doing internally. One of the two Mexico prospects went cold this week. These are also real things.
"The uncertainty isn't a sign that something is wrong. It's a sign that the path is big enough to matter."
— What I'm telling myself before turning 20
What 20 means and what it doesn't
I've been thinking about what actually changes at 20. The honest answer: not much, on paper. But there's something in how the world reads you that shifts. The invisible safety net - 'he's 19, he's learning' - starts to disappear. The decisions weigh more. The expectations, your own and others', rise. And that pressure, even though it's exactly what you want as a founder, is worth naming rather than pretending it doesn't exist.
What I'm taking into my 20s
The prologue is over. What comes now is the real story. And I'm more ready for it than I was at 19 - not because I have more answers, but because I've gotten better at moving forward without them.
Key Takeaways
Key Takeaways
- 1Turning 20 with a company doesn't feel like arrival - it feels like the beginning of a harder, more interesting chapter.
- 2Pride and uncertainty coexisting is not confusion - it's an accurate reading of a real situation.
- 3The invisible safety net of being 'young and learning' goes away. That's uncomfortable and exactly right.
- 4The questions you don't have answers to at 20 are the ones worth building toward.
In 2 days I turn 20. I'll celebrate it properly. And the day after, I'll go back to working on what matters most to build. Not because it's discipline - but because that's exactly where I want to be.
If you're building something young and want to talk about what that looks like from the inside, write to me. Those are the conversations I enjoy most.