Moichor started in a kitchen.
Not a lab in a kitchen. There was no lab. There were no customers either. There were three of us, Shevy, Thanh, and me, with renderings of a lab that didn’t exist yet and a very long list of things we hadn’t figured out. Eventually, that turned into a full production lab.
Here’s the strange part about the in-between. At no point did the work feel dramatically harder than the month before. But every few months, one of us would look up and ask the same question: what was I even doing six months ago? The days back then felt full. The days now felt full. What counted as a full day had quietly doubled, and neither of us could point to the week it happened.
It took me a long time to realize that feeling has a name.
The oldest program there is
Legend has it that Milo of Croton, a six-time Olympic wrestling champion in ancient Greece, built his strength by lifting a newborn calf onto his shoulders every day. The calf grew a little each day, so the weight grew a little each day, and Milo grew with it. Four years later he was carrying a bull.
Lifters call this progressive overload: do slightly more than last time, recover, repeat. Every serious training program is built on it. And the legend only works because Milo did both halves. He showed up every day, and the weight kept going up. Skip months and the calf outgrows you. Carry the same weight forever and you stop growing at all.
Founders talk a lot about consistency. What we talk about less is that consistency is only half the program.
Start with things that don’t scale
There is one place the gym version misleads you, and it’s right at the start. A new lifter begins with the empty bar and works up slowly. A new founder should not.
The best early-stage advice is still Paul Graham’s: do things that don’t scale. His essay is a catalog of founders starting heavy on purpose. The Airbnb founders going door to door in New York to recruit hosts and fix up their listings. The Collison brothers setting up Stripe on a founder’s laptop on the spot instead of emailing them a link. Our version was less glamorous: a kitchen, some renderings, and brute-force figuring out what a production lab would even need to be. This kind of work is heavy for what it produces, it’s uncomfortable, and it breaks constantly. That’s exactly why it works. You’re learning very quickly and breaking things very quickly, and every broken thing tells you what to fix next.
The gym has a version of this too: beginners progress fastest. A new lifter can add weight almost every session, while a veteran fights for months to add five pounds. Your first year as a founder works the same way. You will never adapt as fast as you do at the start, so starting from zero and pacing yourself politely wastes the steepest part of the curve. Load the bar heavier than feels reasonable.
Nobody assigns your reps
Here’s what makes all of this harder for founders than for lifters. In the gym, you choose the weight. In a company, the weight mostly chooses you. Customers show up with problems you haven’t solved before. The team grows past the point where you know everyone’s week. The invoices gain zeros, and so do the mistakes. The company is the calf, and it doesn’t check whether you’re ready before it grows.
So the question isn’t whether the load will increase. It will. The question is whether you’ll be under it every day while the increments are still small, or whether you’ll look up one quarter and meet the bull all at once.
That’s why habits matter so much here. Nobody assigns your reps. No boss, no syllabus, no review that shows up on time. The only accountability a founder gets is the accountability they build, and habits are how you build it. James Clear’s line is that you don’t rise to the level of your goals, “you fall to the level of your systems.” The founders we’ve seen last the longest aren’t the most motivated ones. They’re the ones who stopped relying on motivation at all.
The warning
Now the part that made us want to write this.
Muscle adapts to a fixed weight in a few weeks, then stops changing. Founders adapt the same way. If your weeks have looked identical for months, same tasks, same conversations, same size of problem, be wary. You’re not compounding anymore. You’re maintaining.
The dangerous part is that maintaining feels like discipline. You’re showing up. You’re working hard. Nothing about it feels like quitting. Bezos was pointing at the same thing with Day 1 and Day 2 at Amazon: “Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death.” He was talking about companies, but it starts with the founder, and it never announces itself. A plateau just feels like a routine that finally works.
The readout we trust is the look back. Every stretch of real growth at Moichor ended with that same disoriented question: wow, what was I even doing before this? So run it in reverse. Look at what filled your days six months ago. If it doesn’t seem small from where you’re standing, worry. It’s one of the first things Shevy and I check as investors now too. When we meet a founder a second time, a few months after the first, the real question under the update is whether the problems got bigger.
What to do when you catch it
Say you run that check and the answer is bad. Your weeks are on repeat. In the gym the fix is simple: add weight. For a founder, the move has two parts, and this is the most practical paragraph in the essay.
First, the task you’ve mastered doesn’t get heavier. It leaves your plate. Molly Graham’s version is “give away your Legos”: the job you finally got good at is exactly the job you should hand to someone on your team, even though it stings. And in 2026 the bar is lower than a hire. If you’re doing the same task the same way every week, that’s no longer your job. That’s a workflow, and you should be automating it with AI.
Second, take the capacity you just freed and point it at something you’re currently bad at. That’s the full cycle: master a rep, hand it off or automate it, pick up a heavier one. Delegation isn’t a reward you earn at scale. It’s how a founder adds weight to the bar.
The other failure mode
Exhaustion is the opposite signal, and founders read it exactly backwards.
In the gym, nobody confuses pain with progress for long. If your joints ache for weeks, you added too much weight too fast, and the fix is built into every real program: deload. Pull back, recover, then keep going. Rest isn’t a break from training. It’s the half of training where the muscle actually gets built.
Founders treat burnout as proof of commitment. It isn’t. It’s information, and what it’s telling you is that the increments got too big, or that you kept the starting pace long past the start. The unscalable sprint works in year one because everything is small, including the cost of your mistakes. Keep sprinting like that under a much heavier load and something tears.
I don’t have a formula for the right increment. I’m not sure anyone does. But it’s smaller than your ambition wants: one conversation above your weight class, one ask earlier than feels comfortable, one system built this week instead of a task repeated. Naval likes quoting his weightlifting coach, Jerzy Gregorek: “Hard choices, easy life. Easy choices, hard life.” Pick the slightly heavier week on purpose, then actually recover from it.
The gut check
Paul Graham’s definition of a startup is a company built to grow fast, steered by one number: the growth rate. That’s the external readout, and it’s a good one. But you’ll feel a plateau long before any chart shows it, so here are the internal checks we’d actually run:
Does what filled your days six months ago look small from here? If your old weeks look the same size as your current ones, the weight stopped going up.
Are the problems getting bigger, or just more numerous? New categories of problem mean the overload is working. The same problems at higher volume is a plateau.
What did you hand off or automate this quarter? If the answer is nothing, you’re hoarding reps you’ve already adapted to.
Is anything on your plate slightly out of reach? There should always be one thing you’re currently bad at. That’s the new muscle.
Which kind of tired are you? Tired from heavier work recovers. Tired from the same work doesn’t. One is training. The other is a warning.
Keep carrying it
So that’s the program. Show up daily, because the calf grows whether you do or not. Start heavy and unscalable while breaking things is still cheap. Hand off the reps you’ve mastered, automate the ones a machine can do, and keep one thing on your plate you’re still bad at. Read exhaustion as data, not proof.
Our calf was a set of renderings in a kitchen. The bull was a full production lab. In between, the effort never felt like it changed, and that’s the part nobody tells you: growth doesn’t feel like growth while it’s happening. It mostly feels like Tuesday. That’s how you build the muscle.
Carry the calf. It’s growing either way.