The Truth About Startup Life Nobody Tells You with Joseph Kim

By Michail Katkoff , a founder, investor, and ex-hustle addict who once thought grinding harder was the answer. Spoiler: it wasn’t. Last week, I recorded a podcast with my good buddy Joseph Kim.

The plan was to catch up on industry news, games, monetization, team structures, that kind of thing. But what actually happened was something more real, more revealing, and frankly, more useful: we ended up talking about the parts of company-building that don’t show up in pitch decks or post-mortems. The stuff people don’t post about on LinkedIn.

We discussed what it costs, physically, emotionally, and psychologically, to try and build something from nothing. Joe and I have both been through the founder's crucible.   We’ve raised capital, managed teams, navigated investor pressure, and dealt with the isolation that comes from pretending you’re okay when you’re anything but.

We’ve ridden the emotional rollercoaster of thinking, this might actually work, only to find ourselves awake at 3 AM asking, what the fuck am I doing with my life? 🎧 You can listen to our full, unfiltered conversation here . And if I’m being completely honest, I think that second feeling, the emptiness masked as drive, is far more common than anyone wants to admit.

Hustle or Hiding? Before I had kids, I worked six days a week, and I wore that like a badge of honor. That was my cheat code.

Just work more. Outlast, outgrind, outperform. “That was essentially how Deconstructor of Fun was built,” I told Joe.

But what I’ve realized, now that I’m a father of two young daughters, is that all that work wasn’t just about ambition. It was also about avoidance. Avoidance of discomfort.

Avoiding asking myself harder questions about who I wanted to be outside of work. Modern hustle culture rewards relentless output, but what starts as ambition often morphs into avoidance. For a lot of high performers, work becomes a place to hide from broken relationships, fragile identities, or just the fear of stillness.

You feel useful, so you must be doing something right. But really, you could be just moving fast enough to drown out the doubt. Sacrifice Without Alignment Is Just Waste During the podcast, Joe opened up about spending months away from his family while building LILA Games in Bangalore.

” He wasn’t trying to avoid the most important people in his life. He just… forgot. That’s how deeply immersed he was.