Meri Nova

Imposter syndrome almost destroyed me in 2025.

When I got to 100k followers on Linkedin and $100k months, I thought I was finally “there.”

Doing what I loved. Leading a team. Building something that excites me.

But deep down, I felt completely out of place.
I wasn’t a Stanford/Berkeley PhD grad or a FAANG senior engineer.
Just a self-taught founder with a business degree, keeping up with the fastest-moving field on earth - AI.

I started working nonstop to prove I belonged.
I'd take adderall in the AM and thc in the PM, just to stay focused.
Some nights I barely slept.

My life was my work.
The more “successful” things looked from the outside, the emptier I felt inside.
At one point, the burnout got so bad I didn’t want to get up from my bed at all...

I had to stop chasing a version of success that was slowly destroying me and my will to live.

That’s when I realized something had to change.
I’m grateful to my business partner Hai, who stood by me through the chaos — and helped me find a better way.

And I’m proud of what we built together, 100s of students whose lives changed through this program.

But moving forward, I want to do things differently.
- not from fear.
- not from constant self-criticism.
- not from unrealistic pressure to fit in.

But from self-respect, inspiration, and devotion for the work itself.

You don’t need to prove your worth through exhaustion.
You don’t need to earn your place by running faster.
You already belong here.

Life is not a race.

So build slowly.
Build with heart.
And be kind to yourself.


#mentalhealth #impostersyndrome

- If you don’t manage LLM context, you'll send 50k-token prompts instead of 10k.

- If you don’t know model pricing, you'll pay $3,000 instead of $300.

- If you don’t run evals, you'll ship with 60% success rate instead of 95%.

- if you don’t simulate edge cases, you'll fail 1 in 4 users instead of 1 in 100

- if you don’t log everything, you'll debug for 8 hours instead of 15 minutes.



Anyone can build a demo.
It only has to impress once.

Real agentic applications?
They must deliver every user, every time.