There is a particular sentence in our marriage that should probably come with a warning label. “You know what we should do?” Nothing financially conservative has ever followed it.
My husband, Stephen, and I have been married for 28 years. Long enough to have raised children, lost things, rebuilt things, moved, struggled, succeeded, changed careers, started businesses, raised an unreasonable collection of animals and discovered that nearly everything you believe about your future when you’re young is adorable.
And now we’re starting a company together. It’s called Camwyn & Co. This isn’t the first business either of us has touched. But it may be the first one that makes sense of everything that came before it.
It took us almost three decades to recognize the pattern.
Stephen and I have very different brains. He is a systems person. He looks at something and wants to understand how it works, where it breaks, what is inefficient and how it could work better. I am almost constitutionally incapable of looking at something only as it currently exists.
I see connections. Story. Opportunity. The thing behind the thing. I can walk into a messy idea and immediately start pulling at threads. What is this really? Who needs it? Why would they care? What else could it become?
Stephen wants to know whether we can actually build the damn thing. This has occasionally made marriage interesting. It turns out it might also make a pretty good company.
Camwyn didn’t begin with a product.
It began with all the times one of us looked at something and said: There has to be a better way to do this.
We’ve done it with farms. Technology. Construction. Marketing. Food. Business operations. Products. Community problems. Our own problems. Other people’s problems.
Some people can encounter an irritatingly inefficient process and simply continue with their day. I admire those people. We are not those people. We start talking about it. Then somebody gets a notebook. Then there are diagrams. Then I name it. Then Stephen starts figuring out whether the thing I have just enthusiastically named can actually exist. And suddenly it is 1:00 in the morning.
Eventually we realized something: Maybe the ideas weren’t the distraction. Maybe they were the pattern. Maybe they were the point.
So we’re giving them somewhere to live.
That’s Camwyn & Co. Not a startup built around one precious idea. Not an agency pretending to be everything to everybody. Not a grand declaration that we’re about to disrupt twelve industries before breakfast. A home for useful things. Businesses. Products. Systems. Technology. Consulting. Ideas that solve actual problems.
Some may grow into companies of their own. Some may never make it past the kitchen table. That’s important too. Because I’m no longer interested in pretending every idea is a good idea just because I had it. That’s one of the benefits of getting older. You become slightly less impressed with yourself.
We’re starting this one differently.
I’m 47, Stephen is 55. We aren’t twenty-something founders eating ramen in an apartment while somebody writes a breathless article about our hustle. We have a mortgage. A farm. Animals. Family. Bills. Responsibilities. And enough experience to know that “follow your passion” is incomplete advice.
Passion does not make payroll. A logo isn’t a company. An idea isn’t a business. Inventory isn’t income. Potential isn’t profit. And being incredibly busy is not evidence that you’re building anything worthwhile. We’ve learned some of those lessons the expensive way. So the question behind Camwyn isn’t: Could we build this? We can build all sorts of things.
The better questions are: Should we? Does anyone actually need it? Will they pay for it? Can it support itself? Does it make someone’s life meaningfully better? And maybe most importantly: Do we want the life that comes with building it? That last question didn’t occur to me often enough when I was younger. It matters enormously now.
Because I don’t want to build another job I can’t escape.
Camwyn & Co
I don’t want entrepreneurship as performance. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life proving how hard I can work. I’ve already conducted that experiment. The results are conclusive.
I can work very very hard. What I want to know now is whether experience can make us smarter. Can we build businesses around our lives instead of sacrificing our lives to businesses? Can we make useful things without turning growth into a religion? Can two people combine technology, systems, strategy, story and an almost pathological inability to leave a solvable problem alone—and turn that into something sustainable?
I don’t know.
That’s the experiment.
And I’m going to write about it before I know how it ends.
That’s the part I’m most excited about. Business stories are usually told backward. Once something succeeds, everybody cleans up the beginning. The uncertainty disappears. The near misses become strategy. Luck becomes foresight. Wrong turns become part of a brilliant master plan. Suddenly the founders apparently knew exactly what they were doing from Day One.
Bullshit.
I want to document this one forward. While we’re deciding. While we’re filing paperwork. While we’re figuring out what belongs inside Camwyn and what doesn’t. While we’re deciding which ideas deserve money and which deserve a dignified death on a legal pad.
If something fails, you’ll know. If we change our minds, I’ll tell you why. If something makes its first dollar, I want you there. If we build something unexpectedly wonderful, you’ll know what it actually took to get there. Not because I think we’re experts in building the perfect company. Quite the opposite. Because I think there might be value in watching two ordinary, experienced people try to build something intelligently in the middle of a very real life.
This is what starting over looks like now.
Except I’ve decided I don’t believe in starting over anymore. We’re not starting from nothing. We’re starting with everything.
Twenty-eight years of marriage. Decades of work. Technical knowledge. Creative knowledge. Businesses. Failures. Parenthood. A farm. A house fire. Money mistakes. Good decisions. Terrible decisions. Things we built. Things we lost. Things we would never do again. And a growing understanding of what actually matters to us.
That’s not starting over. That’s starting informed. So yes…I’m starting a company with my husband. God help the man. God help me. God help whoever has to process the paperwork.
But mostly— let’s see what we can build. Welcome to Camwyn & Co. And welcome to the beginning.