⏰ Not late, on time.

👋 Hey — Egemen here.

I used to run a countdown in my head. Build the thing, raise the round, exit before 30.

Most of us got handed the same script. Nobody mentioned it was fiction.

Then I went looking at the actual numbers, and the countdown fell apart. Today I’ll be talking about those.

Here’s a snapshot of what’s on the menu today:

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I spent years racing a deadline that turned out to be made up. Here's the data that finally got me to stop.

What I never did was check whether the deadline was real. I just absorbed it, the way we all absorb it, and let it sit on my chest for years. So a while back I went and looked. The clock I'd been panicking against doesn't exist.

Some economists at MIT and the Census Bureau went through 2.7 million US founders. The average age of the people behind the fastest-growing companies, the top one in a thousand, was 45. They also found a 50-year-old has almost double the odds of a 30-year-old when it comes to building something that really takes off.

All the stuff I assumed was holding me back, starting later than I wanted, the years spent doing other jobs first, turns out that's the part that helps.

Sit with that for a second. The founder you compare yourself to at midnight is three or four years into the same grind and probably carrying the same doubt.

When I look back at my early years, I don't regret the mistakes. I made plenty and most of them taught me something worth knowing. What I regret is how much of that time I spent feeling like I was running out of it.

So, feeling late? Feeling behind? Not making progress? It’s OK.

👉 Stop racing a clock that was never ticking. Just don't quit before year ten.

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This post from Greg Isenberg made me question this - is AI having its iPhone moment now? Worth a read!

Cognition has successfully raised $1 billion in a Series D funding round, valuing the company at an impressive $26 billion - it’s the scale of the week!

Cognition is an applied AI lab focused on building autonomous software engineers, headlined by their flagship digital developer, Devin.

Their platform enables engineering teams to offload complex, end-to-end tasks like code refactoring, debugging, and software deployment directly to an AI agent that can reason through problems independently.