How I'm Escaping the Startup Grind Before Burning Out (At 21 With 2 YOE)
Hi, I’m Francisco Luna, Full - Stack Engineer. Let me tell you how I almost lost myself because of the startup grind and what you can learn from it.
The sword Of Damocles
July 2025. I had just finished university. Stable job, hobbies, freedom, a social life. It was all “good”. Yet I felt like a bird in a cage; exhausted, uninspired and trapped in routines that weren’t even mine.
I started to lose my passion for building outside of work. Tasks and tickets mixed together. I was in an emotional limbo. My family asked if I was okay. I wasn’t. I was documenting every lesson learned at work: From public speaking, leading complex refactors to handling life changes; all at once.
Then I came across the book Buy Back Your Time by Dan Martell. One quote hit me like a lightning bolt:
“If your business depends on you, you don’t own a business—you have a job. And it’s the worst job in the world because you’re working for a lunatic!”
All of a sudden it clicked. I was undervalued. My skills, my creativity, my ownership; they weren’t mine. They were borrowed. And when the startup stalled, so did I.
The Startup Illusion in 2025
The first 5 months (Heaven):
Built our payment system from scratch
Scaled real-time features to 1K+ concurrent users
Designed our Redis caching layer
This was pure flow state and why I fell in love with coding.
Then reality hit:
Renaming variables just to “do something”
Sitting through two hour compliance meetings
“Refactoring” perfectly working code
What kind of engineering was this? My passion was just dying.
The Wake-Up Call
That week, I realized:
Skills stagnating
Creativity dying
Passion fading
Worst of all, I’d stopped building for myself
If I only built at work, my growth was limited by the company’s pace, bureaucracy, and whatever stage the startup was in. I had to reclaim my ownership.
The Escape Plan
To start claiming back my freedom I launched Veelo, a browser extension that:
✓ Captures ideas instantly
✓ Organizes technical notes
✓ Preserves brilliant “shower thoughts”
It started as a prototype in May 2025 when I opened a white IDE and I had a crazy idea. It gathered 21 users the first day, which doesn’t sound like a lot. But it meant my work was helping other people somehow.
The best part? No stakeholders. No pointless meetings. Just me solving real problems for myself. Coding was fun again. And I remembered why I started building in the first place: curiosity, ownership and mastery.
That’s when I felt alive again after months
Next Plans
Veelo was just the beginning. I want to keep building meaningful projects, solve problems I care about, and push my skills beyond the 9 to 5.
I’ll share the wins, the failures and the messy middle. Because potential isn’t something your employer gives you, it’s something you own.
Work will stall and bureaucracy will slow you down. But the things you build for yourself? They’re yours. They grow you. They teach you, and set you free.
Thanks for reading. I only want you to keep this simple reminder in mind from now on:
Don’t ever go hollow building someone else’s empire only.
