Today, I'm shutting down my startup, Sturbon. Unfortunately, you don't choose a decision like this. You don't wake up one morning and decide to close something you have carried for three years. You get forced into it. In August I posted that my startup had been accepted into a fund, and I left it there. What I never said in public is that shortly after, we were accepted into a second one. Together those two funds put us in front of over $42K in funding. Both have since fallen through, for reasons that had nothing to do with us. So let me say what Sturbon was, since I never got to. Sturbon was mental health support for young people in Africa who feel alone. Most teenagers who are struggling here never say a word to anyone. They want help, and there is nowhere to send them. Therapy costs money their families don't have, and in most schools the subject is never raised at all. We worked on that in three ways. The first was free counseling, with no fee and no waiting room. The second was mentorship: every young person was matched with someone who had been through the same thing and come out the other side, because advice lands differently from a person who has lived it. The third was school outreach, where we went into classrooms and talked about it openly, so that the quiet kid at the back would know it has a name and that help exists. It wasn't a company at first. It started in 2023 in my community as an effort called Save the Youth, with no money and no plan beyond showing up. Over the next two years it expanded slowly but steadily. In three years, all of it paid for out of my own pocket, we reached over 100 young people across states and sat with them for 150+ hours of counseling. This year it became Sturbon, and the plan was to put all of that into an app. A young person could open it and reach a counselor and a mentor from their phone, without needing us to be physically in their town. The funding was going to ship that app to the states we already serve, train and pay our first mentors, and take the school visits further than I could reach alone. That's the part that ended. The work that came before it was real, and it still counts. I won't write the usual lines about what running a company(ish) taught me. Truthfully, I'm glad it happened. Somebody read this and said yes to it, twice. I'll keep that. Thank you to everyone who gave their time to this, and to everyone who answered when I asked whether I was a startup founder now haha. For six weeks, I was. But the title was never the point. What I care about is building things that work and putting my hands on problems bigger than me. That's what I'm going back to. Lately most of my hours have gone into open source (yes, darkblooommm), alongside people at Eigen I've learned a lot from. More on that soon. It was a good run. Back to building.