Nothing Was Wrong. That Was the Problem.

When you leave a good job, people assume something went wrong.

A bad manager. A layoff. A fight about money. A project that burned you out.

None of that happened to me. And honestly, that made the decision harder, not easier. It’s easy to leave a job you hate. It’s much harder to leave one that’s fine.

This summer I left my position as a software engineer and team leader at Hitachi Digital Services to co-found Santara AI with a former colleague. This post is my attempt to explain why, to the people who asked, and to myself in a few years, when things get hard and I need to remember.

First, a thank-you

I want to be clear about this: my years in software engineering were good years.

I started as an engineer, writing code and fixing bugs like everyone else. Over time I learned to design larger systems, to review other people’s work, and eventually to lead a team. At Hitachi I learned what it means to be responsible not only for your own code, but for the people around you: their questions, their deadlines, their bad days.

I learned how real software is built inside a large company. How decisions get made. How to explain a technical problem to someone who doesn’t care about the technical details, only whether it will be ready on time.

I would not be able to build Santara without those years. Leaving was not a rejection of that work. It was the next step that work made possible.

The 10-year question

So why leave?

Because of one question I couldn’t stop asking myself:

If nothing changes, what will my life look like in ten years?

When I answered honestly, the picture was comfortable. A senior title. A better salary. More meetings, bigger projects, a nicer apartment. Nothing bad at all.

And that was exactly what scared me.

Not because comfort is wrong. Many people build happy lives on a stable career, and I respect that deeply. But when I imagined myself in that picture, I didn’t feel excited. I felt like I was watching someone else’s life. Someone who had done everything right and still wondered what else was possible.

I realized I was more afraid of that feeling than I was of failing.

Salary is not a reason to wake up

I don’t want to pretend money doesn’t matter. It does. Rent is real. Family is real.

But a salary pays for your life. It doesn’t tell you what your life is for.

When I look back at the moments in my career that made me proudest, they were never about pay. They were the moments when something I built made someone’s day easier. A tool a teammate actually used. A fix that saved someone an evening of manual work. A small feature a user thanked us for.

I wanted more of that feeling. Not once in a while, buried inside a big project, but as the main reason for the work.

I wanted to build something where I could point to a real person and say: their day is a little lighter because of what we made. I believe that kind of work will make me feel better about my life — not richer, necessarily, but better.

Why Santara

Santara helps short-term rental hosts. If you’ve never run a rental, here’s what their mornings often look like: bookings on Airbnb, more bookings on Booking.com, guest messages on WhatsApp, a cleaning schedule in someone’s head or on a piece of paper. Every day, the same work of copying information from one place to another, hoping nothing gets missed.

Santara brings all of that together and gives the host one simple briefing every morning: who’s checking in, what needs cleaning, which messages need a reply.

It’s not a flashy idea. It won’t change the world overnight. But I’ve written before that people don’t pay for features, they pay to do less, and that boring problems often make the best businesses. Santara is me putting my own life behind those ideas.

If a host starts the day calmer because of Santara, that is the feeling I left my job for.

Building with someone I trust

I didn’t start Santara alone. I co-founded it with a former colleague.

That mattered a lot. Starting a company with a stranger is a gamble. Starting with someone you’ve already worked with is different: you’ve seen how they handle pressure, how they react when a release goes wrong at the worst moment, how they treat the people around them. You already know you can disagree and still work together the next morning.

A startup will test any partnership. I wanted to begin with one that had already been tested a little.

We also don’t have to figure everything out by ourselves. Our adviser, William Skelley, was my first real business teacher, and he helps us think through the business side that engineers like us tend to underestimate.

Eyes open about the dark side

I want to be honest about this part, because many “I quit my job” stories skip it.

Startups have a dark side, and I’m walking into it on purpose.

• No guaranteed salary. Some months will be tight. Maybe many months.
• Uncertainty every day. No one tells you if you’re doing it right. Sometimes the market just says no.
• Long hours. I’m already a workaholic. A startup will happily take every hour I give it, and I’ll need to learn when to stop.
• Pressure and hard choices. If we take investors’ money one day, we’ll work for them too. I’ve read enough stories — Adam Neumann, Travis Kalanick, even Steve Jobs — to know founders can lose control of what they build.

I’m not romantic about any of this. Most startups fail. Ours might too.

But I’d rather take a risk I chose, with my eyes open, than drift into a future I never really chose at all.

What I’m actually betting on

I’m not betting on becoming rich. I’m not betting on a big exit or a headline.

I’m betting on three smaller things:

1. That useful, honest work is worth doing, even if it starts small.
2. That I’ll learn faster here than anywhere else. Even if Santara fails, I’ll come out knowing far more about customers, products and myself than staying would have taught me.
3. That in ten years, I’ll be proud of the choice, whatever the outcome.

The third one is the most important. I can’t control whether Santara succeeds. I can control whether I tried.

To anyone thinking about the same thing

I’m not going to tell you to quit your job. For many people, staying is the right choice, and a good, stable career is something to be proud of.

But if you have a quiet feeling that the comfortable path isn’t your path, don’t ignore it. Ask yourself the 10-year question. Answer it honestly. Then decide with your eyes open, knowing both the light side and the dark side of what you’re choosing.

I asked it. I answered it. And here I am, at the very beginning, building something small that I believe in.

I’m not sure this will work.

I’m sure I’d regret not trying.