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 tunnels themselves were brief and dark, a few seconds of concrete and then back into the open. What was between them was everything else: cherry blossoms along the roadside in spring, the ocean catching the afternoon light, mountains rising on both sides of the car. Each tunnel was a milestone, a small arrival. The stretches of road between them were where the drive actually happened, and where the anticipation of the next tunnel gave the whole journey its shape.

I think about those tunnels often now, especially as a founder. Building a company is a long drive through the mountains. The milestones are the tunnels themselves: brief, often dark, over before you can fully register them. The first customer. The first hire. The first product that works the way you imagined it. They matter, and they mark progress. But the stretches between the milestones, with all their doubt and craft and strange hours and small moments of beauty, are where the real work happens and where life actually gets lived. The tunnels gave the drive its structure. What was between them was the reason to take the drive at all.

This blog is my way of counting tunnels, and celebrating the stretches of road between them. Welcome to the journey.