SF · NYC · Global

Founders Bay Brief

Where builders are showing up this week

In This Issue

Hi all!

I’m writing to you from home, with Liam playing with his brother in the other room. I’m so grateful that I get to experience ordinary moments like this, the quiet, everyday moments we often take for granted.

We have three exciting events coming up this week:

- Tomorrow, we’re hosting our third AI Forum, featuring engineering leaders from 1Password, Meta, Mercor, and You.com.

- We’re also bringing together senior engineering leaders from billion dollar companies for a private Levi Stadium Suite.

- On Friday, we’re hosting a Female Founder Co-working day with pilot.

I’ll be at the You.com AI Forum on Thursday, so come say hi!

✨ New! Feature your event in the Founders Bay newsletter

Want to get your event in front of our community? You can now promote it directly — it only takes a minute.

Feature your event →

New to Founders Bay? Create your free account

Save events, build your founder profile, and connect with the community — free, forever.

Join Free →

This Week's Journal

The Words We Never Said

I’ve been thinking about the words we never said.

The small ones that somehow felt too big.

I care about you.
I miss you.
Stay.
Do you feel this too?

Sometimes we don’t say them because life is complicated.
Sometimes because the timing is wrong.
And sometimes because we’re scared.

So instead of asking, we assume.

If they cared, they would tell me.
If they wanted more, I would know.
If this were real, it wouldn’t be so complicated.

And then we make enormous decisions based on conversations that never actually happened.

Maybe we tell ourselves not to want too much.

Maybe we convince ourselves that because something was never defined, it was never real.

Maybe we walk away toward something else because we don’t believe anyone is asking us to stay.

And then time passes.

We live. We change. We love other people. We lose ourselves for a while and eventually find our way back.

And one day, while we’re dancing through life, we realize the smallest, simplest thing we refused to see before:

Oh. You were there.

You remembered. You listened. You made room for me. You believed in me. You were there when things were wonderful and somehow still there when everything fell apart.

I don’t want to make promises about the future or rewrite the past into something prettier than it was.

I just know now that I made assumptions I shouldn’t have made. That I hurt someone I never wanted to hurt. That maybe I walked away from something because I didn’t understand what it was.

I wish I had understood that sooner. And I’m sorry I didn’t.

Maybe one day we’ll finally have the courage to say all the things we never said.

Until then, I’ll enjoy the time we have, exactly as it is.

Only this time, I won’t make the decision for both of us.

- Mariane Bekker

🖥️ Featured Virtual

Join from anywhere — VIP members attend for free

Founders Bay Virtual Workshop: Build, Integrate, Pitch: Your Founder's Guide to Perfect Corp APIs and the Startup World Cup

📓 Founders Bay Journal — The Words We Never Said | Aug 12

Founders Bay Brief

Reply

Keep Reading