Single Until Series B.

A founder went viral for posting that he’s staying single until he raises his Series B. The internet lost it. Some people cheered. Some people called it delusional. I’m a mother of 4, a wife, a non-technical founder with a team of 2 on track to hit $500K this year — and I think both sides are missing the point.

If you’ve spent any time on tech Twitter or LinkedIn lately, you’ve probably seen it. A founder — presumably somewhere in Silicon Valley — posted that he’s going to be single until Series B. No girlfriend. No dating. No distractions. Just locking in. Living and breathing his startup every second of every day until the money hits the bank.

And the responses? Predictable. Two camps, zero nuance.

Camp one: “Yes king. Lock in. Cut everyone off. Grind until you make it.” Camp two: “You don’t understand the purpose of life. Relationships matter. You’re going to burn out and have nothing.”

I actually think there’s a third answer. And I think it’s the one nobody wants to hear because it’s harder than either extreme.

What’s in This Post

• The Silicon Valley Delusion
• The Numbers: What I’ve Built Without Sacrificing Everything
• What I Actually Do Every Day
• Life Experience Makes You a Better Founder
• Why Women Founders Are Proving This Wrong Every Day
• The Real Skill Nobody Talks About
• What Obsession Actually Looks Like When You Have a Full Life
• You Can Be Obsessed and Still Be a Whole Person
• The Bottom Line

The Silicon Valley Delusion

Let’s talk about the culture that produces a take like “single until Series B.” Silicon Valley has this mythology around it. It’s a literal utopia of sorts — if your definition of utopia is a place where everyone lives and breathes technology, where your worth is measured by your last round, and where sleeping under your desk is a flex instead of a cry for help.

It’s a little out of touch with reality. I’ll just say it.

The idea that you have to sacrifice every human relationship to build a successful company is not a strategy. It’s a trauma response dressed up as hustle culture. And the people who glorify it are usually the same people who crash and burn two years later wondering why they feel empty after hitting their metrics.

I wrote about this pattern in The Literal Rollercoaster of Building SaaS — the highs and lows of startup life are real, but the answer to the lows is not to eliminate everything that gives you stability. The answer is to build a life that can absorb the hits.

“Saying you need to be single to build a company is not a flex. It’s telling on yourself. It means you haven’t figured out how to prioritize.”

I’m not saying building a startup isn’t consuming. It is. I’m saying the framing is wrong. You don’t need to eliminate everything in your life to focus. You need to learn what actually matters and ruthlessly cut what doesn’t. Those are two very different things.

The Numbers: What I’ve Built Without Sacrificing Everything

Before I go deeper, let me put some numbers on the table. Because I think the “single until Series B” crowd assumes that if you have a family, if you have a life, if you’re not grinding 20 hours a day, you must not be building anything real. Here’s my reality:

That’s the scoreboard. No massive raise. No co-founder. No engineering degree. No Silicon Valley address. A team of 2, a family of 6, and a company on track to do half a million dollars this year. I documented our entire first year in Things I Dreaded My First Year Building Theanna — including the moments where I questioned everything. Not once did the answer turn out to be “cut off everyone you love.”

What I Actually Do Every Day

Let me give you the full picture of who I am because I think it matters for this conversation.

I’m a woman. I’m not an engineer. I’m a non-technical founder building a tech company. I have 4 kids. A husband. 2 dogs. I live in Columbus, Ohio — not San Francisco, not New York, not Austin. Columbus. And I run Theanna with a team of 2 people. Just two of us. We are on track to hit half a million dollars this year.

I am not in Silicon Valley. I don’t have a sprawling engineering team. I raised $285K from Techstars and angel investors — not a $10M Series A. I don’t have a co-founder who handles all the things I can’t. It’s me and one other person building everything.

And here’s what my days look like: I wake up, I take care of my family. I get my kids where they need to go. I feed people. I handle the chaos that comes with a house full of children and dogs. And then every single second that my family doesn’t need me — I’m working. When they’re sleeping, I’m working. When they’re at school, I’m working. When they’re occupied, I’m working.

And even when I’m not at my laptop, I’m thinking about my business. I’m at the grocery store thinking about positioning. I’m on a walk with my dogs thinking about what to build next. I’m watching my kid’s soccer game and an idea hits me and I write it down on my phone. It might not look like I’m grinding 18 hours a day because I’m not visibly coding or on calls every second — but my brain never stops.

I use tools like Claude Code and Lovable to build faster than should be possible for a non-technical founder. I wrote about my exact process in How a Non-Technical Female Founder Builds Frontend Using Claude Code. The point is: I’m not working less. I’m working smarter. And having a life forces me to do that.

What Obsession Actually Looks Like When You Have a Full Life

There’s a version of founder obsession that the internet celebrates: the monk mode. Delete social media. Cancel plans. Sleep 4 hours. Eat the same meal every day. Remove all friction from your life so the only thing left is work.

And then there’s the version I live: obsession that coexists with a full life. It’s not the absence of everything else. It’s the presence of your company in everything you do.

I’m making dinner and I’m thinking about a new feature. I’m driving carpool and I’m mentally drafting a blog post. I’m lying in bed at midnight and I pull out my phone to write down a positioning idea before I forget it. I don’t have to schedule “focus time” because my default state is focused. The business lives in my head 24/7.

That’s what real obsession looks like when you’re also a parent. You don’t stop thinking about the company. You just learn to hold both things at once. And honestly? I think that’s a harder skill than monk mode. Monk mode is simple — remove everything. My version requires holding complexity. It requires discipline. It requires being fully present with your kids at 6 p.m. and fully present in your codebase at 10 p.m.

“Obsession doesn’t mean the absence of everything else. It means the presence of your company in everything you do.”

Life Experience Makes You a Better Founder

Here’s what the “single until Series B” crowd doesn’t get: life experience makes you a better founder. Full stop.

You know what gave me the perspective and drive that makes me dangerous as a founder? Not a Y Combinator batch. Not a Stanford CS degree. It was my daughter getting extremely sick as a newborn.

That experience — the terror, the helplessness, the fighting for someone you love when the outcome is uncertain — shaped everything about how I build. It gave me a pain tolerance that most founders will never have. It taught me what actually matters under pressure. It made me someone who does not quit because I’ve been through worse than a failed product launch or a bad sales quarter.

“The trauma I experienced with my daughter getting sick as a newborn had a massive impact on my ability to push harder as a founder. It gave me perspective that no accelerator ever could.”

Relationships, family, hardship, joy — all of it feeds into who you are as a builder. The founders who isolate themselves from every human experience are not becoming sharper. They’re becoming narrower. And narrow founders build narrow products for narrow markets because they’ve lost touch with how real people actually live.

Your mental health matters. Relationships are a massive part of mental health. Nurturing different sides of yourself — as a parent, a partner, a friend, a human being — makes you a more complete person. And more complete people build better companies. That’s not soft advice. That’s a competitive advantage.

I talked about this in If We Don’t Open the Spaces, Entrepreneurship Dies — the startup world is too narrow. It rewards one type of person, one type of path, one type of sacrifice. And the people it excludes are exactly the people with the life experience to build things that actually matter.

Why Women Founders Are Proving This Wrong Every Day

Here’s what nobody in the “single until Series B” discourse is talking about: women have been building companies while managing full lives forever. This is not new for us. It’s only shocking to people who think the default founder is a 24-year-old man with no responsibilities.

Women founders don’t have the option to “cut everything off.” Most of us have families, caregiving responsibilities, and entire lives that don’t pause because we’re building a company. And we’re still shipping. We’re still growing revenue. We’re still building products that people pay for.

In our last cohort, 17 women built and launched real products in 12 weeks. Not pitch decks. Working software. Multiple founders got their first paying customers. One built a HIPAA-compliant platform by herself. Another was selected for NVIDIA Surge 2.0. These are women with full lives who showed up, built, and shipped.

I watched 25 women build products in 54 hours at Startup Weekend Women Columbus. Moms. Career changers. First-time founders. Women who had never written a line of code. They built real products in a single weekend while the internet was debating whether you need to be single to build anything at all.

The data backs this up too. Women-led startups generate 78 cents of revenue for every dollar of funding, compared to 31 cents for male-led startups. We do more with less. That’s not in spite of having full lives — it’s because of it. When you’ve never had the luxury of infinite time and resources, you learn to be efficient. You learn to execute. You learn to cut what doesn’t matter.

“Women have been building companies while managing full lives forever. This is only shocking to people who think the default founder is a 24-year-old man with no responsibilities.”

The Real Skill Nobody Talks About

Here’s what I think the real unlock is, and it’s something that the “single until Series B” crowd has completely backwards.

When you have non-negotiable priorities — like, I literally cannot not feed my children — you learn something that founders without those constraints never learn: how to recognize what actually matters.

I can’t waste three hours on a meeting that should have been a Slack message. I can’t spend a week “researching” a decision I could make in 30 minutes. I can’t say yes to every coffee chat, every networking event, every “quick call.” I don’t have the luxury of filling my calendar with things that feel productive but aren’t.

I wrote about this in Stop Tracking Everything: Signal vs. Noise for Early-Stage Founders — most founders confuse busyness with progress. They track 47 metrics when 3 matter. They take 12 meetings when 2 would move the needle. Having constraints forces you to find the signal in the noise.

Having bigger priorities forces you to cut the noise. It forces you to identify the 20% of work that drives 80% of results. It forces you to be ruthlessly honest about what’s moving the needle versus what’s just making things busier.

The founders who have infinite time? They often fill it with busyness. More meetings. More “strategy sessions.” More late nights that feel like progress but aren’t. Having constraints is not a disadvantage. It’s a forcing function for clarity.

Here’s what I’ve cut from my life as a founder that most people waste hours on every week:

• Coffee chats with no agenda — if there’s no specific outcome, it’s a no
• Networking events — I build relationships by shipping in public, not standing in hotel ballrooms
• Meetings that should be async — if it can be a Loom or a Slack message, it should be
• Vanity metrics — I track the 3 numbers that matter, not 30
• Perfectionism — I ship fast, learn fast, fix fast. I wrote about this in Vibe Coding: What Actually Shipping Product Looks Like
• Comparison scrolling — I don’t have time to watch what other founders are doing. I’m too busy building
• Decision paralysis — I make decisions in minutes, not weeks. When you have 4 kids, you learn to move fast

“When you can’t not feed your kids, you learn real fast what’s actually important and what’s just making things busier.”

You Can Be Obsessed and Still Be a Whole Person

Let me be clear about something: I am obsessed with my company. I think about Theanna constantly. I care about it more than most people care about anything. It is not a job to me. It is the thing I am building with every ounce of energy I have.

And I’m also raising 4 kids who are thriving. I’m in a strong marriage. I go on vacation. I enjoy my life. I have a full, rich human experience outside of my startup — and that experience makes me better at building it.

These are not contradictions. The idea that you can’t have both is a lie told by people who haven’t figured out how to do it. Or worse, by people who tried to do it the “single until Series B” way and failed, and now they need everyone else to believe it’s impossible so they don’t have to confront what they gave up for nothing.

You can hustle extremely hard and still be present for the people who matter. You can be ambitious beyond measure and still take care of your mental health. You can build a company that’s on track to do half a million in revenue with a team of 2 while also being a mother, a wife, and a person who goes outside sometimes.

The secret is not giving everything up. The secret is loving what you’re building so much that it doesn’t feel like sacrifice. I don’t work this hard because I’m punishing myself. I work this hard because I’m obsessed. Because I genuinely cannot stop thinking about how to make Theanna better. That kind of drive doesn’t require isolation. It requires purpose.

I documented what this obsession actually looks like in practice in The Literal Rollercoaster of Building SaaS and Things I Dreaded My First Year Building Theanna. The highs are insane. The lows are brutal. But having a family to come home to doesn’t make the lows worse. It makes them survivable.

The Bottom Line

“Single until Series B” is a catchy line. I’ll give it that. But it’s bad advice wrapped in bravado.

You do not need to eliminate every relationship from your life to build something great. You do not need to be in Silicon Valley. You do not need to be an engineer. You do not need to fit the mold of what a founder is “supposed” to look like.

What you need is to be obsessed with the problem you’re solving. What you need is the discipline to cut the things that don’t matter so you can go all in on the things that do. And what you need is a life full enough to give you the perspective, resilience, and empathy that actually makes you dangerous as a founder.

I’m a mom of 4 in Columbus, Ohio. I’m not an engineer. My team is 2 people. We’re on track to hit $500K this year. My kids are thriving. My marriage is strong. And I’m just getting started.

You don’t have to be single until Series B. You just have to want it badly enough to figure out how to have both.