I left for support and ended up in a garage

April 24, 2025 · translated from Russian

My founder story, part five.

I left for support and ended up in an auto repair shop.

November 2024. I left San Francisco.
Until the twentieth I drifted around New York.
I walked the streets trying to breathe air that was not there.
There were people. Businesses. Money. Life.
And inside me, emptiness and the feeling that everything had stopped long ago.

I was not creating.
I was not pitching.
I was not acting.
I was just trying not to disappear.

Then a second Vipassana.
Silence. Ten days.
With a hope that this silence might finally build something new in me.
It did not.
It only showed me that I was completely alone.

After Vipassana I went back to San Francisco.
Yoga in the mornings, the only stable thing.
Everything else was dead.
No product.
No team.
No confidence.
I was not creating, I was surviving.

End of December.
A move to Los Angeles.
A friend put me up in an auto repair shop.
A month and a half.
The shop, dogs, a concrete floor, the smell of petrol.
And the complete certainty that I was very far from who I wanted to become.

I thought America would give me strength.
It showed me my weakness.

January 2025.
The last hope.
I find a co-founder.
He spins up servers, makes promises.
A month later, nothing.
The code does not work.
The product is dead.
I burn out.

February.
The last $2,000 are left.
I spend them purely on not going back.
On not acting. On not admitting it.

When everything is gone, you take on debt.
You buy a ticket.
You go back.

March 2025.
Yerevan.
At my brother's.
Empty. With nothing. No pride, no team, no self.

April.
A move to Tbilisi.
And this is where a new startup does not begin.
A new honesty does.

Not a legend, not a vision, not AI with empathy.
Just Empy as an attempt to come back to myself.
From zero.
Without illusions.
With an appetite for life.