I should probably explain myself.

I ran a web hosting company from 2009 to 2024. Fifteen years. I built it from scratch — set up the servers, wrote the support tickets, handled the billing, managed the customers. The company was profitable. It paid my bills. And it never, ever grew.

I tried. I sold capital shares. I brought in partners. Over the life of the company, three different ownership structures came and went. I thought fresh money and fresh perspectives would be the thing that finally pushed us past the ceiling. None of it worked. The revenue line stayed flat. The customer count stayed flat. The company stayed exactly the size it was the year I started it.

I closed it in 2024. Not because it was failing — it was still paying the bills. I closed it because I ran out of belief that it could become something bigger.

So why does a guy who could not grow a hosting company spend his evenings writing about Elon Musk and Reed Hastings?

The Book That Started It

A few years ago I picked up Ashlee Vance’s biography of Elon Musk on a friend’s recommendation. I expected a typical tech-bro hagiography. What I got instead was a story about a kid in Pretoria who got beaten so badly at school he was hospitalized for a week, who left South Africa at seventeen with two thousand dollars, who cleaned boiler rooms for eighteen dollars an hour — and who, two decades later, was building rockets.

That gap between the boiler room and the rocket fascinated me. Not the rockets themselves — I can read about Merlin engines on Wikipedia. What fascinated me was the decision-making. Why did he put $12 million into X.com when he could have retired at 27? Why did he stay calm when the board fired him on his honeymoon? Why did he split his last money between SpaceX and Tesla when putting it all in one would have been safer?

I kept comparing his decisions to mine. He bet everything on an idea. I kept six months of expenses in reserve and called it prudent. He hired the best engineers he could find and paid them whatever it took. I hired whoever was available and affordable. He burned through three rocket failures and built a fourth. I watched my revenue stay flat for five years and told myself stability was the same as success.

It is not. I know that now.

What Sarajevo Teaches You About Founders

There is something about growing up in Sarajevo that makes Silicon Valley founder stories land differently. This city was under siege for nearly four years in the 1990s. I was a child during the war, and I do not write about it often, but it shapes how I read about adversity.

When Reed Hastings talks about Netflix almost going bankrupt, I understand the feeling of systems collapsing around you. When Musk describes his darkest year in 2008 — SpaceX failing, Tesla bleeding, his marriage ending — I recognize the emotional texture even if the scale is different. People in Sarajevo rebuilt their lives from nothing after 1996. We understand what it means to start over.

That is probably why the Musk family migration story grabs me more than the SpaceX launches. A mother packing up three children and moving to a country where she has no job, no network, and no guarantee of anything — that is a story I have heard versions of my entire life, from my own family and from my neighbors.

But Sarajevo also gave me something less useful: a deep gratitude for stability. When you grow up watching buildings burn, a steady paycheck feels like a miracle. I carried that gratitude into my hosting company, and it became a problem — because I was so grateful the business was stable that I never pushed it to become unstable in the way growth requires.

What My Hosting Company Taught Me

Fifteen years of running a company that never grew taught me things that no biography can. I know what it feels like to be the only person in the building who cares whether the servers are up at 3am. I know what it feels like to watch a competitor launch a feature you have been thinking about for two years but never built. I know what it feels like to bring in a new partner full of optimism and watch that optimism curdle into the same stuck-ness within six months.

I also know what it feels like to avoid the conversations that matter. I never fired anyone. Not because everyone was great — because I could not stand the confrontation. I never raised my prices. Not because they were fair — because I was afraid of losing even one customer. I never asked for help from someone who had built something bigger. Not because help was unavailable — because asking felt like admitting I did not know what I was doing.

The founders I write about on this site did all of those things. They fired people. They raised prices. They asked for help and took money from strangers who believed in them. That is not a personality difference. It is a decision difference. And decisions can be learned.

What I Am Trying to Do Here

Every article on this site comes from a book, an interview, a court filing, or a primary source. I do not make things up and I do not present other people’s reporting as my own. If I quote Elon Musk, I tell you which book the quote is from. If I get a date wrong, I fix it and leave an editor’s note.

But I am not writing as a neutral journalist. I am writing as someone who tried to build something, could not make it work, and is now studying the people who did — trying to figure out what they understood that I did not.

Every article I publish is partly a report and partly a mirror. When I write about Musk betting $12 million on X.com, I am also asking myself: would I have done that? The honest answer is no. When I write about Hastings firing a third of Netflix to increase talent density, I am also asking: should I have done that at my hosting company? The honest answer is probably yes.

I do not know if understanding these stories will make me a better founder if I try again. But I know that not understanding them is part of why I failed the first time.

If you have ever run a company that paid the bills but never grew — if you know the specific frustration of watching something you built stay exactly the same size for years — then this site is for you. I am writing the articles I wish I had read in 2009, when I was twenty-something and thought building a good product was enough.

It is not enough. But it is a start. And starting is the only thing I know how to do well.

Sources

• This one is just me.