I am preparing a 20 minute pitch of our business to the incubator review committee for tomorrow (day 60 of the 90-day program), weighed down by the reluctance of my distant cofounders, figuring out how to keep the love of my life by my side, enjoying the brief visit by her sister and boyfriend, moving to a new place, and determining a big picture of where everything should be by the end of the year.

I just had an instant in my dream that disturbed me from my deep sleep to consciousness:

My cofounder, casually tossed that our social media platform was not vision, that the entire concept we were developing was merely a combination of things that already existed and that nothing we were doing was revolutionary.

There was an advisor from the business plan competition at school that had announced that an accelerator-type program for young entrepreneurs was being put together. I showed up to the info session and found other young kids full of energy and angst with ideas that I couldn’t clearly understand the values of. A deck of cards that showed the news –you had to print a new deck for each day but it summarized each section of the newspaper in 52 cards– cool but what problem does that solve? Another guy had some mirror for makeup kits. I was thinking, “where is tomorrow and how do I get there?”, because it surely did not feel like it was in that room.

My dream is fading from me now, but I do remember the advisors meeting with us in a dusty old office and having us pitch our ideas to them to which I replied a bleak and worn-out answer of: “I’ve been working on this app for almost a year now and I’m kind of sick and tired of it but I see the potential it has to grow and become a huge phenomenon” to which they responded “wow, that’s not the spirit we are looking for” as my bitterness had eaten away my hope over the past year of struggle and strife. The general sentiment that woke me up was that I currently have doubts about my ability to transform this thing into a feasibly sustainable business and it is encouraged by my persistently uncreative and pessimistic cofounders. Ever since I spared some time to appreciate a 5-day vacation with the love of my life, their view of me has changed. The infallible CEO had made a shift in priorities for a brief moment in the history of the company and the cofounders saw that as a weakness and a blatant disregard for the future of the startup. Regardless of whether they were right, they now openly express their disbelief in me. Because of my recent advances in our business, they are entertaining the idea that I, alone, could commercialize our product with their input on where we should go next. They expect me to make this startup grow without much further work from them but their unspoken anticipation is that I will shutdown this journey when I reach a complete burn-out. When I suggest a direction, there is a strong pushback that stems from the pessimism and criticism that comes with too many years in academia coupled with resentment. The resentment has grown from the grudge of passed opportunities and the deception endured by us all. I feel guilty that I am running out of enthusiasm for the app because my cofounders do not hold this venture as a priority anymore while I have my future wife who has risked everything to be here with me.

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In conjunction with these developments, I have become increasingly worrisome of the impact of this company on my personal relationship with the woman of my life. Although a relationship might be a closed system, it is never an isolated one. The stresses coming from the imbalances of the environment within which we are living are creating tension and strain in our relationship and with those around us. The energies that we experience are not felt in isolation, we both feel each other’s mood.

I need to take a step back and see how to break down the big picture into simple digestable pieces. This will take the pressure off of me when I can clearly see what needs to get done, and what can be dealt with at a later time. I need to maintain a loose but measurable priority list that I can follow to reassure me into a soothing slumber at night. No coding at night anymore. No more midnight cookies, I need to refresh my browser.