I thought it would be hard because someone else built it.
That was the fear I’d carried through every interview — that I would sit across from the people who were doing the thing I’d failed to do, and it would hollow me out. That every Slack message, every product meeting, every line of code would feel like a reminder of what I wasn’t.
It didn’t.
From the very first day — technically the day before my first day — I felt something I hadn’t felt in a long time. A kind of aliveness.
When I signed the contract, I told them my start date would be in three weeks. But I also told them: the moment my computer arrives, let me know. I’ll come in before my official start date to set up and get familiar with the codebase. I didn’t want to walk in on day zero and spend the first week finding my feet.
They called two days before I was supposed to start. The computer was there.
I got there before anyone else. Made myself tea. Started setting up my machine. At some point, Noy arrived.
Noy — who I’d met years ago at the LayerX Series A party. We’d bonded over being Bnei Israel Indians, over Indian food, over salsa. Over the coincidence that I knew her cousin from the same dance floor
I didn’t recognize her.
She had to remind me. “It’s Noy.”
I wanted to disappear into the chair.
She and Elay were handling an incident from the night before. Some production issue that needed their full attention. So she perched on a small cabinet next to Elay’s desk, focused on a screen, and I continued setting up. The office was quiet. Every now and then we exchanged a few words. It was nice.
Eventually I asked Guy for something to work on. He gave me a task. I opened the codebase, started reading, started building. By the afternoon I had plans, so I left.
That was the -1 day. I was already coding.
Something woke up in me when I joined Anchor.
I know now that I was still running on borrowed energy — the burnout hadn’t gone anywhere, it was just waiting. But I didn’t feel it. I felt the opposite. I’d wake up early, get to the office, make tea, open my laptop, and disappear into the work.
I love a principle I’ve carried for years: leave the code a little better than you found it. I didn’t follow it at Anchor. I left it a lot better. Every file I touched, I cleaned. Every component I worked on, I tried to understand all the way down before I changed it. The dashboard was a mess — I redesigned it. I gave visibility into what was actually happening inside the browser agents. Things that had been invisible became legible.
I wasn’t trying to prove anything. I just couldn’t help it. I cared.
About a week in, the launch was coming.
Anchor had a new product — B0. Its purpose was to generate deterministic scripts that could run on Anchor’s browser infrastructure. They were about to announce the company to the world: new funding, new product, all of it.
I could see, pretty quickly, that no one person was steering the launch. There was no product manager, no one holding all the threads together. So I offered to help.
That week was the hardest I’d had in months.
Long hours. Long nights. Decisions made in pieces — a founder here, a founder there, each with a slightly different opinion about what the product should say and how it should look. I was rebuilding the entire frontend of the application. I am not a frontend developer. I know enough — I’ve learned a lot from a close friend who is one of the best at it — but I know enough to also know the limits of my knowing. Every small change required a conversation. Every conversation required three.
But we got there.
The launch landed well. People noticed.
The product wasn’t ready. I’d said so before we shipped. Sometimes you just need to launch anyway, and I understood that. But it still stung a little, watching something go out into the world that I knew wasn’t finished.
I went home at 8 PM that night. For that week, that was early. I needed it.
Later, Idan sent me a message. He thanked me for helping build something they could be proud to announce. It was a kind message.
I read it and felt almost nothing.
Maybe I was too tired. Maybe I was already a little disappointed. But mostly I think it was this: I believe appreciation should come from wanting to give it, not from needing to. During that week — through the late nights and the hard calls and the refactoring sessions that went until midnight — there had been silence. And then, after the launch, when the dust settled, the message arrived.
I’m not saying he was wrong to send it. I’m saying it arrived too late to feel like it was for me.
A few weeks in, I initiated 1on1s.
One with Guy, the CPO who was also effectively running R&D. One with Idan. They became regular. I could speak openly, raise what wasn’t working, say what I was actually thinking. Guy listened well. Idan seemed genuinely interested in having someone who would push back.
I started joining customer calls. This had been part of the deal from the beginning — I’d told every company I interviewed with the same thing: I wanted to understand how a company works from every angle. Not just the engineering. The sales, the support, the customer relationship. Idan let me in.
But the thing I didn’t expect was Gil.
Dor’s brother. I wasn’t sure at first what he was doing there. He was helping with customer emails, writing documentation, setting up integrations. Not the flashy stuff. The stuff nobody else wanted to touch.
One evening I could sense he was down. It was around 6 PM, dark outside. I sent him a message and asked if he wanted to take a walk.
He said yes.
We walked for a while. Talked. And the more he talked, the more I could see it — there was someone in there. Someone with real drive, real curiosity, genuine care about doing things well. He’d trained as a software engineer but no one had invested in him, so he’d drifted sideways into work that didn’t ask much of him. He wasn’t unconfident because he was incapable. He was unconfident because no one had ever treated him like he was.
I talked to Guy. I asked to bring Gil onto the biggest project I was working on — the main problem browser agents had, the one I’d been thinking about the most. Guy agreed.
And that was the first time at Anchor I wasn’t working alone.
Gil had no experience with what we were building. He didn’t need it. He had drive like I haven’t seen in a long time. He listened, absorbed, asked the right questions. I held him to a high standard — higher than what existed in the rest of the codebase. He didn’t flinch. He met it and kept going. I gave him feedback the way I wish someone had given it to me when I was starting out. He took it with both hands.
Working with Gil was one of the genuinely good things about my time at Anchor. I’d love to build something with him again someday.
I want to be careful here, because it’s easy to make a list of grievances and sound unreasonable. I’ll try to be honest.
Shir joined us as our office and people manager. It was good to have her there — Noy had relocated to Portugal, and the office dynamic had gotten very male, very insular. Shir brought something different.
But she had a habit of touching people. Not aggressively — casually. A hand on the shoulder, a pat on the arm. For some people, that’s warmth. For me, being touched without permission has always been difficult. I don’t fully understand why. It just is.
I escalated it to Guy and Idan and asked them to speak with her.
They did. And I think — I hope — they were gentle about it. But Shir didn’t take it well. After that, things between us were colder. I’d wanted to handle it quietly so we could move past it. Instead it created a wall. I understood why, I think. Being told your natural warmth makes someone uncomfortable is hard to hear. It was hard for me too, to lose the ease we’d had before.
Then came the new hires.
Gilad was Idan’s friend from home. That’s how he came in — not through a job posting, not through a recruiter, but through a personal connection to the CEO. Amit’s path was more accidental. He and Gilad had worked together before, and when Anchor was doing reference calls for Gilad, Amit was one of the people they spoke to. On that call, Amit asked if they were also looking for more engineers. They were. That’s how he ended up there — a referral from a referral, arriving before the person who’d referred him.
They joined within a few weeks of each other. And because the office was tight, they reshuffled us. I arrived one day to find my spot had been given to Gilad, and my things had been moved to the back of the other room.
Not moved carefully. Just placed somewhere out of the way.
I know it was a small thing. I do. But I was a founding engineer at this company. I’d been there since before day one, technically. And the way it was handled — without a conversation, without a heads-up — said something I tried not to let myself hear too loudly.
The other room had Dor, Shir, Idan, and Gil. No other engineers. The engineering work was happening in the first room. I was physically separated from it.
I found the good in it. I was closer to Idan, which helped with the customer calls. I was next to Gil. Those things were real. But I also felt, more and more, like I was on the outside of something I am a part of.
Amit and Gilad were friends before joining — a referral that arrived ahead of schedule, and then the one who made it happen. I wanted to believe the team was growing stronger. But as the weeks passed, Elay, Gilad, Amit, and Ben formed their own quiet unit. They’d go out to smoke together, a small ritual that became a daily one. Not once did they invite Gil or me.
I don’t think it was intentional. People find their people. Shared cigarettes become shared language. I wasn’t part of that world, and neither was Gil.
But when you’re already starting to feel like you’re orbiting instead of belonging, small things land differently.
I raised the bar where I could. I pushed for code reviews, for test coverage, for observability, for retrospectives. I tried to turn individual effort into something more collective. Amit took ownership of the observability project — it felt like the right thing to give him, something to sink his teeth into, something to prove himself with. It dragged on for months. The feedback cycles were long and difficult. Every round of review ended the same way: “If it’s so important to you, you do it.”
I heard that a few times. And each time, I had to remind myself: I wasn’t there to mentor. I was there to learn about sales and customers and how companies actually work. I stepped back. I gave everything to Guy and let him handle it.
Guy is a good person. He had real drive to build something excellent. But managing — knowing how to give hard feedback, how to hold someone accountable, how to deal with the gap between where someone is and where they need to be — that’s a skill. It takes time to develop. He hadn’t developed it yet.
I don’t know exactly how to write this next part.
Gilad and I had been circling each other for weeks. He had potential — I want to say that clearly. But he didn’t take feedback easily, especially not from someone who wasn’t his manager. I’d learned that, and I’d mostly stopped trying to give it directly, routing everything through Guy instead.
One afternoon, I was in a meeting room with Elay. We were working quietly. I called Gilad in to explain why something he wanted to deploy couldn’t be deployed — a technical issue, nothing personal. I started explaining.
He snapped.
Not raised his voice — snapped. The shift was instant, like a switch. One moment I was mid-sentence explaining a deployment issue, and the next he was coming at me with something that had clearly been waiting for an outlet. He said I wasn’t his manager. That I couldn’t talk to him like that. That I had no right.
His whole body changed. He stepped toward me. I was sitting — he was standing — and he leaned over me, finger pointing, close enough that I could feel the aggression in the air between us. Not just anger. Something more physical than anger. Something that made a small, quiet part of my brain start calculating exits.
I don’t scare easily. I’ve been in difficult conversations, high-pressure rooms, situations where people lost their temper. But this was different. This wasn’t frustration. This was someone who had decided something about me, and the technical question was just the excuse.
I genuinely didn’t know what he was going to do next.
I rolled my chair back. I raised my voice — not to attack, but to create distance, to make someone else aware that something was happening in that room.
Idan walked in.
He walked in at the worst possible moment — after Gilad had already backed away, while my voice was still raised. He didn’t see what had preceded it. He saw only me.
He pointed at me and said this wasn’t how we talk in a workplace.
I don’t think he was a bad person for reacting that way. But what I needed in that moment — what I think anyone would need — was for someone to walk in, look at the room, and ask what happened. Not assume. Not point. Just: what’s going on here? Give both people a chance to speak. That’s all. A moment of curiosity before a verdict.
He didn’t have the context. And Gilad is his friend — of course that made it harder to be neutral. I understand that. But the absence of that one question, that pause before judgment, was what cut deepest.
Something in me broke.
It touched something old and deep, being accused of the thing I’d been trying to protect myself from. I had a nervous breakdown in that meeting room. The first one I’d had since I was eleven years old.
I won’t describe it in detail. I’ll just say: it was real, and it was bad, and everyone left the room except Idan, who sat with me and tried to understand.
I don’t think he ever did.
I couldn’t sleep properly for weeks after that. I had nightmares about Gilad. Not because I think he’s a bad person — I don’t know what was going on for him. But because I was afraid of him in a way I’ve rarely been afraid of anyone. That kind of fear leaves a mark. I still have nightmares about him to this day.
In the days that followed, I spoke to Elay.
The conversation we had in the park wasn’t really a conversation.
He kept steering me toward Gilad’s feelings. Toward how my behavior had affected him. He kept saying Gilad hadn’t crossed any real line, but I had. At some point he told me that Gilad felt like no one had his back. That he’d felt exposed, unsupported, and that the way I’d spoken to him had confirmed something he already feared.
And that, I realized later, was the whole point of the conversation. Elay wasn’t there to understand what happened. He was there to make sure Gilad didn’t feel alone in it. To be the person who had his back — even if that meant I had to carry more than my share of what went wrong.
And the more he talked, the more I found myself agreeing, even about things I’m not sure I should have agreed with. He knew me well enough to know I’d internalize it. And I did.
At some point I started crying. Not quietly — properly. The kind of crying that comes when the weight of something finally finds a way out. I wasn’t performing. I was just broken.
He kept going.
He didn’t soften. Didn’t pause. Didn’t ask if I was okay. He kept making his case, kept adding to the pile, kept pressing on the bruise. I was sitting there crying and he was still talking about Gilad’s feelings, about what I’d done, about what I needed to understand.
He left. I stayed on that bench and cried.
After Elay left, Guy came to find me. He sat down and told me I was being too hard on myself. That what had happened wasn’t entirely on me, that I wasn’t the person I was making myself out to be in my head. He meant it kindly.
He was right. But I’d gotten to that place because someone who knew me had spent an afternoon steering me there. I’d internalized Elay’s version of events so completely that I needed someone else to pull me back. That’s how it works when someone knows exactly which lever to push.
Shortly after, Elay went to army reserve. A month away.
Looking back, I think some of what happened in that park had roots in something I didn’t fully see at the time. Elay had been at Anchor from the very beginning. He’d been away on reserve once before, and when he came back, things had changed. The codebase, the product, the team. You leave for a month and return to a different company. That kind of thing stays with you, even if you don’t say it out loud.
When Elay came back from reserve this time, things had moved again. The codebase had evolved. New features had shipped. He was assigned a task and presented it in a meeting with the founders. Idan was direct with him — the meeting hadn’t landed well. At some point Idan said, almost plainly, that he thought Elay was envious. That while he was away, I’d thought of things and built them, and coming back to that wasn’t easy.
I think about that a lot. Because what came next made more sense once I understood it.
Around that time I ran a postmortem — a structured engineering process I’d been trying to introduce at Anchor. A space to look at what went wrong technically, without blame, and figure out how to do better. The kind of culture I believed in.
I set it up. I wrote the incident doc. I ran the meeting.
The technical part went fine. The human part started going wrong almost immediately.
From the moment we sat down, Elay was off. Faces. Small dismissive reactions to things being said. The kind of body language that poisons a room slowly, that makes everyone slightly more guarded, slightly less willing to speak. I noticed it early and kept going anyway, trying to hold the space together.
At some point it became impossible to ignore. The meeting was getting personal — from his side — and I decided to stop it. I called it. Said we should wrap up and continue another time if needed.
Everyone agreed. Except Elay.
He asked why. Said he wanted real feedback. So I told him — calmly, directly — what I’d been observing. The faces, the dismissiveness, the way he’d been engaging.
He said I was the one who looked down on people. That this meeting, the whole thing, was more of the same.
I asked again to end the discussion. Everyone else filtered out. Elay stayed.
He kept going. Each time I asked him to stop, he found another angle, another thing to press on. He knew — I believe he knew — that if he kept pushing long enough, something would give. Gil came back to the room at some point, sensed what was happening, and tried to get us to wind down. I agreed immediately. I asked Elay again. And again.
Then he got personal. Said I needed to take a hard look at what I was saying and what I was bringing into these rooms.
I told him it wasn’t relevant to the discussion and asked him one more time to stop.
I started crying.
He left. Walked out of the office and went home. I was still in the meeting room, mid-anxiety attack, alone.
Guy came. He sat with me. He didn’t have to, and I won’t forget that he did.
A few months later, a war broke out.
I stayed home. For me, working from the office was less safe — the geography just worked out that way. Most of the team went back after a short time, because for them it was the safer option. For Gil and me, remote was it.
Already feeling disconnected, we were now fully outside. The team that had formed over shared cigarettes was in the office together. Gil and I were on screens.
I got sick. Nothing serious, just sick enough to stay in bed for a week.
No one reached out. For days. I messaged Guy — the person I’d spoken to almost every day at work. Nothing. Near the end of the week, Idan checked in. Gil checked in. Noy, still working from Portugal, checked in.
Guy did not.
I don’t know what happened there. Maybe he was busy. Maybe something had shifted between us that I hadn’t fully registered yet. But silence from someone you trust has a texture, and that one was thick.
Idan wanted to talk.
He was recording the call. I noticed that early on. He said he wanted to hear how I was doing.
What followed was an hour that didn’t feel like curiosity. He said my output had dropped since the incident. I believed, and still believe, that wasn’t true — if anything I was working harder, trying to hold everything together. He mentioned I hadn’t liked any of his LinkedIn posts. That I hadn’t listed Anchor on my profile.
Those details. The LinkedIn posts.
He pushed me to open up, to say what I was feeling, what was working and what wasn’t. So I did. I tried to ask questions too — to understand what he actually needed from me, what would make the situation better. He didn’t engage with the questions. He circled back to his own. At the end of the call, he told me to think about what I wanted. He wanted an answer by the next day.
The call ended.
An hour later, I spoke to Guy.
He said the opposite. He told me my output was strong. That he trusted me. That he didn’t see what Idan was describing. Two conversations on the same day, about the same person, reaching completely different conclusions.
I asked Guy to join the call the next day. If there was a contradiction that significant between the two of them, I wanted it in the same room. I wanted to understand what was real.
The next day, we got on the call — Idan, Guy, and me.
Idan was different this time. Less open. He didn’t give me much space to ask the questions I’d come prepared with. Every time I tried to get to the contradiction, to understand the gap between what he’d said and what Guy had said, he redirected. He was hostile. Patient in the way someone is patient when they’ve already decided where the conversation is going to end.
I kept my composure. I found my way to some of the questions eventually.
Then he told me to choose. Today. Not tomorrow. Today.
I thought about the year. The launch week. The customers I’d sat with. Gil. The code I’d written that was still running. The person I’d been trying to be in that office, even when it was hard.
I said I would leave.
He said goodbye and ended the call.
Guy had been in the call the whole time. He hadn’t said a word during the hour. He said nothing before he left.
I sat with that for a long time.
Guy is a good person. I still believe that. Idan had vision and built something real. Elay was carrying things I didn’t fully understand. Gilad was probably struggling with something I’ll never know. Everyone in that room was a person trying to do something hard, in a difficult environment, under real pressure.
But I needed something from that place that it couldn’t give me. Not because they were bad. Just because the fit was wrong in ways that only revealed themselves over time. And by the time they were visible, the cost of staying had become higher than the cost of leaving.
I left with no job lined up. No next chapter. No plan.
After everything — the burnout, the startup that broke apart, the rejection on Rothschild, the job search, the launch nights, the good months with Gil, and the hard ones that came after — I left with nothing but the decision itself.
And maybe that was the only thing I could trust at that point.
Not a direction. Just a clear sense of when to stop.
I left with no journey in sight.
But maybe that’s the journey.