Time & Perspective Quote by Eric Allman

Founding a company is sold as liberation: build the thing you want, on your terms, with your own hands. Allman punctures that fantasy with a quietly brutal tradeoff. The “down side” isn’t risk or failure; it’s success measured in meetings, hiring, fundraising, support tickets, and the endless, unglamorous logistics of keeping an organization alive. The line lands because it’s framed as a personal lament rather than a grand critique, which makes it harder to dismiss as cynicism. He’s not scolding founders; he’s admitting loss.

The subtext is identity drift. For an engineer-scientist, coding isn’t just a task, it’s a way of thinking: direct, testable, intimate with the product. When he says he doesn’t have time to code “any more,” he’s naming the moment the founder stops being a maker and becomes a manager, translator, and bottleneck. That “sadly” matters: it’s an emotional tell that the new role carries status but less joy. The work multiplies, but the work you love gets crowded out by the work that enables everyone else to work.

Contextually, it’s a snapshot of the classic startup maturation curve. Early-stage companies fetishize velocity and craft; later, they demand coordination and scale. Allman’s intent reads as both warning and confession: if you start a company to code forever, the company may succeed precisely by taking that away.