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Hi all!

Still recovering from the burn but excited to host our first NYC hackathon tomorrow with You.com, Daytona, Crew AI, CDA and One: https://luma.com/agentic-hackathon-ny

Love,

— Mariane Bekker

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This Week's Journal

The Answer I Found at 2 A.M.

I went to Burning Man looking for answers.

Who am I now? What actually makes me happy?

After divorce, I had to figure out who I was again.

I’m a mom.
I’m a woman who loves technology and building things.
I’m also someone who can dance until sunrise, disappear into music, chase adventure, and feel most alive under flashing lights in the middle of nowhere.

Sometimes I feel like I don’t quite fit into any category.

Am I supposed to settle down?
Do I want a partner?
Do I want to fall in love again?
Do I want freedom?

Can I have all of it?

So I brought those questions to the playa.
And Burning Man has a funny way of stripping everything else away.

No titles.
No LinkedIn.
No expectations of what your life is supposed to look like.

Just miles of dust, music, art, stars, strangers, and a lot of time with yourself.

I kept waiting for some profound answer about love.
Or relationships.
Or who I was supposed to become next.

It never came.

Then one night around 2 a.m., I asked that question out loud.
The music was somewhere in the distance.
The sky was completely dark.

And somehow, in the middle of everything, the answer became incredibly simple.

** I want to be the best mom I can possibly be to my boys. **

That was it.

Not the answer I had gone looking for.

But maybe the one underneath every other question.

I can love dancing.
I can love technology.
I can build companies and communities.
I can travel.
I can fall in love, or not.

I can have a partner someday, or choose a life that looks completely different.
Those things are chapters of my life.
They are not the center of it.

Leo and Liam are.

And strangely, realizing that didn’t make the rest of me feel smaller.
It made me feel freer.

For years, I thought happiness might be something I still had to find.
Maybe another person.
Another version of myself.
Another life.

But at 2 a.m. in the middle of the desert, I realized I wasn’t missing anything.
I already had my answer waiting for me at home.

My two boys.

- Mariane Bekker

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📓 Founders Bay Journal — The Answer I Found at 2 A.M. | Sep 10

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