When I was six years old, my family lived in Yokohama, Japan. On weekends, my father would drive us to the naval base in Yokosuka, a route that wound along the coast and through the mountains. The road threaded through tunnel after tunnel, each one carved into the rock, each one swallowing the car in darkness before spitting us back into daylight.

To keep me entertained on the drive, my father invented a simple game: count the tunnels. There were nine of them. I would press my face to the window and call out each number as we passed through. One. Two. Three. The darkness and light alternating like a heartbeat. By the sixth or seventh tunnel, I could feel the excitement building. The ninth tunnel meant we had arrived.

It was not a complicated game. But somewhere in the counting, in the rhythm of dark and light, I learned something that has stayed with me for decades. The journey is not just the destination; it is every milestone along the way. Each tunnel was its own small arrival. The stretches of road between them, with the mountains and the sea visible through the windows, were their own kind of progress. The anticipation between tunnels mattered as much as reaching the ninth one.

I think about those tunnels often now, especially as a founder. Building a company is a long drive through the mountains. You pass through dark stretches where you cannot see what is ahead. Then you emerge into daylight and can see the landscape clearly, if only for a moment. The milestones matter: the first customer, the first hire, the first product that works the way you imagined it. But the road between milestones is where the real work happens, and where the real growth lives.

This blog is my way of counting tunnels. Welcome to the journey.