Giuuunta! Motivating yourself when you're not in startup mode

This podcast is hosted by transistor dot f m. Hey, and welcome back to Build Your SaaS. This is the behind the scenes story of building a web app in 2024, And I'm Justin Jackson, and I've got a guest on the show today, Dave Junta. As listeners will know, Dave has been a fixture on the podcast for many years. His name is presented in the aforementioned dramatic fashion every episode. Dave was VP of engineering at Home Chef for over eight years and just recently left that position and is currently exploring new opportunities. And Dave and I, believe it or not, we recently found ourselves in a bar in Guatemala. We had a great conversation, and then we promised that we do a follow-up call when we got back home. And that follow-up call just happened. And I said, Dave, why don't we record this and maybe publish it? So we decided to record it last minute so you get to listen in. In our call, we discussed the challenge of maintaining motivation once your business has made it, how remote work and different working styles affect motivation, the difference between early stage motivation where every decision you make feels consequential versus late stage motivation where you have to actively seek out things that energize you. And this is all in the context of starting a business, of course. How working with junior devs can reignite motivation, the importance of understanding individual team members and what motivates them, why Dave decided to leave Home Chef after so many years, and giving yourself space to explore and transition between different phases of your career. The whole thing was great And now I give you Dave Giunta. I was gonna ask if this goes back to, the conversation we were having in Guatemala about, like, maybe I don't know. I don't maybe maybe I'm misremembering some of that conversation. I was remembering it being a little bit about, like, motivation and having a team and a and a bunch of people who are sort of, like, at different levels of motivation. I think we were mostly talking about, like, what to build next. Right? But I wonder if this isn't sort of, like, another symptom that sort of, like, falls out of that. Like, the day to day has become the day to day, and it's not something that you're really spending a lot of time thinking about and crafting as the you know, as what you're doing. Yeah. I've been thinking I mean, I'm constantly thinking about this because there are moments once so once you've built the thing, building the thing, getting the airplane into the air is so much work and is usually preceded by multiple crashes. So, you know, it's like, I've been trying to get an airplane up in the air since I was 15 years old. And I've had multiple airplanes, I've had multiple flights, and a varying success. And then you get …