Jensen Huang, founder of the world's most valuable company, once said he wouldn't start Nvidia if he had to do it over again. Not because it wasn't worth it. Because he now understands exactly how hard it was going to be.

I think about that a lot.

I've spent thirty years starting things in places where the degree of difficulty was not fully visible from the starting line. A pharmaceutical manufacturing platform built from scratch inside a Caribbean free trade zone. Blast-resistant structures designed to keep soldiers alive, tested at two Air Force bases under a formal program with the U.S. Air Force. A reconstruction framework presented during the Second Gulf War to an Iraqi Deputy Minister in Baghdad's Red Zone. Post-earthquake reconstrruction in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Navigating fourteen government agencies in a third-world country during Covid before we could manufacture a single product.

Would I do it all again? Yes. But I understand Huang's point. You have to be a little naive - and very determined - going in. Knowing the full picture would stop most people before they started.

Every June since 1997 I've jumped into roughly 58-degree water to start the Escape from Alcatraz Triathlon. Twenty-eight years in a row as of 2025, through everything life has thrown at me, I have finished the race. I keep coming back for the same reason I keep starting companies in hard places. Some things are worth doing precisely because they're difficult.