Always Protect the King

I started coding around my early twenties. The first company I put a name to was Teckare Online - not a software shop, not really. We were hardware-and-software people. We'd go around to different schools and see if we could beef up their systems, so to speak. It was a good learning experience, and it taught me the first half of a mantra I still carry: keep evolving, keep adapting to the situation.

Then came the web work - WordPress at first, then more. And in 2015, at twenty-nine, I started Mashed Potato Studios.

If you'd asked me then what I was searching for, I'd have had a hundred answers and none of them right. That's the thing about starting young. You think the struggle is finding the thing. It isn't. The struggle is everything that happens after you've already decided to build.

The struggle was never the code#

At Mashed Potato Studios we have a rule: you must evolve with code. That came straight out of Teckare. The technology moves, so you move. Easy to say about frameworks. Harder to say about people.

Because the real struggle of building a company young wasn't technical. It was two things.

The first was being too ambitious. Wanting more than the moment could hold. That's a kind of debt you pay for years.

The second was betrayal. Me and my partners - we've had people who should have been in our corner turn and stab us in the back. More than once. The friend cycle. People change over the course of years, and some of them changed right out of your life. That's part of business, I guess. You learn it the hard way, and then you keep walking.

There's a particular kind of tired that isn't exhaustion. It's the realization that sometimes it isn't what you know - it's who you know. The shadiness of business. The politics. The rooms you aren't in. That's essentially what betrayal is: someone choosing the room you aren't in over the one you built together.

I won't pretend it didn't sting. But here's what I'll tell you plainly: the never-quit attitude didn't hurt me. It's been in my family for years. It's been a driving factor for the Bennett name. My name is important. Family is important. The track stayed the same for me while the company changed, while friends changed, while business partners changed. I kept on going.

What drives me now#

What drives me most now is my daughter. I believe I should provide for her everything I didn't have, and more. That's the cleanest fuel there is - not the young-founder ego, not the chase, but the quiet certainty that something I build outlives me in her.

And that's the part people get wrong about "finding your place as you grow older." They frame it like a crisis. Like at some age you're supposed to panic and wonder who you are. I don't. The drive didn't fade and it didn't turn on me. It just got aimed at the right thing.

I stopped searching#

Here's where I am at forty.

We're not searching anymore - me, the team, the company. Everything we have as a team, everything we have built, we're not out looking for a missing piece. We just want the opportunity to put forward what we have.

Everybody gets the same opportunity to put something forward. It's fair that way. But it requires a little luck, and a little persistence. I've got the persistence. The luck is the only thing left to meet us halfway.

So no - I'm not searching. I'm getting ready. There's a difference, and it took me most of my thirties to feel it.

Always protect the King#

If there's a single thing that makes any of this real, it's this: always protect the King.

For a long time I thought the King was me - my vision, my company, my name. That's the young-founder mistake. The King isn't you.

The King is the person in front of you. The person around you. The client, the teammate, the partner, the stranger in the room. You protect them. And if you do it right, they should see you - the person who is me - as a King too. Not above them. Beside them. Sovereign, and owed the same care you just gave.

That's the creed I try to lead with at all times. It goes past core values. It's how I show up. Because everything I do touches the three things that actually shaped me: the ambition that nearly sank me, the betrayal that taught me who was really in the corner, and the daughter who gave the whole engine a new reason to run. You protect the King, and all three of those fall into place behind it.

King in the moment#

The mantra evolved. It had to.

King in the moment. Different times, different points in your life - in that moment, you are the King. You are the person. You are him - the one who did what you did. Not the one who will act, not the one who should have. The one who acted, right there, in the moment that already happened.

That's the difference between the twenty-nine-year-old who started Mashed Potato Studios and the forty-year-old writing this. The young one was protecting a King he thought was out there somewhere - a future, a unicorn, a version of himself he hadn't met. The older one knows the King was the person in front of him the whole time, and that in each moment he was already the King who had to show up.

I didn't find my place. My place found me, the way it finds anyone who refuses to leave the track. The code evolved. The partners came and went. The friends cycled. The betrayal came and the persistence outlasted it. And through all of it, the rule held:

Protect the person in front of you. Be the King in the moment.

That's the whole post. That's the whole company. That's the whole life, if you let it be.

Now we just need the luck to put it forward. And I've got time.