What Four Months Apart Does to a Founding Team

By Deborah Lee | Co-founder of Glintz

There’s a kind of stuck that doesn’t feel dramatic.

It’s not a crisis. It’s not a fight. It’s the quiet weight of doing the same things every day: reaching out to users, nurturing the waitlist, following up with investors, sending messages that mostly go unanswered, and not seeing anything move. We shipped MVP v2 on April 13. That was real. But the day after shipping, the to-do list looked almost identical to the day before. The milestone arrived and left, and the work just kept going.

That’s where I was before I flew to Taiwan.

Zoey and I hadn’t been in the same room since November. Five months. We are not exactly far apart. Hong Kong to Kaohsiung is an hour in the air. But five months passed anyway, the way months do when you’re both moving fast and convinced the next video call is enough. We sync two to three times a day. We know each other’s work schedule better than most roommates know each other’s coffee order. But somewhere in those five months, something had started to feel slightly off. Not broken. Just not quite right. I couldn’t name it.

I met her at the airport. Within ten minutes we were talking about the YC application.

Not “how was your flight.” Not “are you hungry.” Straight into the work, the same way we start every morning call. Except we were sitting next to each other, and something about that felt immediately different. Her concern before I arrived, she told me later, was that it might feel strange. That five months of distance might make us awkward. It didn’t. We warmed up in minutes. Almost instantly.

The first day we coworked in the same space. The other days we each went to separate spots and came back together in the evenings. But that first day, the back-and-forth happened in real time. A question, an answer, a pivot, a decision, all over coffee. No lag, no lost thread, no waiting for the right moment to bring it up. You could follow a thought for twenty minutes without interruption, line by line, in a way that remote work has never quite managed to replicate.

It felt unreal to me. Like a business trip I hadn’t fully registered I was on.

We talked for hours. About the company, yes. But also about everything else: AI, politics, what we’re each reading, how we feel about where things are heading. And somewhere inside those hours, we started asking questions we hadn’t said out loud yet.

How long do we want to do this? Have we ever seriously thought about giving up? What does our product actually mean in this market, right now, with everything changing so fast? When do we launch a company LinkedIn page?

That last one sounds small. But we'd each been wondering about it separately for months without just sitting down and deciding. That's exactly what in-person catches: the things that aren't urgent enough to schedule a call for, but too important to keep quietly deferring.

On giving up: neither of us is choosing that. Zoey doesn’t see it as an option. For me, it’s been scenario planning, not despair. Running the scenario, lightly, the way any founder probably should, but not as something I actually believe is coming. That’s just what building something hard actually is. You hold the possibility of quitting exactly as close as you need to in order to keep making a clear choice not to.

Those conversations cleared something. By the end of the first day I could feel the stuckness starting to lift. Not because anything had changed on paper, but because I knew where she stood, and she knew where I stood, and that turned out to be the thing I’d been missing.

The YC deadline was May 4. We worked on the application at night in Zoey’s bedroom, sitting side by side, laptops open, going through every section of the form. We were a little paranoid. The application looked slightly different depending on who was logged in at what time, and we kept second-guessing whether what we’d written was good enough. We both know “perfect” doesn’t exist in a startup. We submitted anyway.

It felt like a university dorm. But with monitors, and maybe slightly better chairs.

One evening, the coworking space closed at 6pm. We went to a traditional market nearby, bought groceries, and came home planning to cook. Zoey’s sister got back from work and cooked for us instead, which was lucky, because we are genuinely not good cooks. I had bitter melon soup, a dish I make at home all the time. Sitting there in Kaohsiung, in someone else’s kitchen, at the end of a long day, eating something that tasted exactly like home. That evening I remember clearly.

There’s something Zoom doesn’t give you, and it took five months apart to name it.

On a call, you don’t know if the other person can go on a detour right now. You don’t know if they’re mid-thought or mid-lunch or five minutes from their next meeting. In person, you know where they are. You can say something half-formed and watch their face and decide in real time whether to keep pulling at the thread. That speed of knowing, the ability to just talk without scheduling it, is worth more than I’d realised.

Before any of this, the three of us lived under the same roof in Vancouver. Zoey, me, and a Taiwanese housemate who became a friend the way housemates do, over late nights and kitchen table conversations. We reunited again in Taiwan, her home, and it felt exactly like those Vancouver days. The same ease, the same willingness to follow a thought wherever it goes. Glintz didn’t exist yet at that kitchen table in Vancouver. In Taiwan, it did, and we were still talking the same way.

I came back from Taiwan with more clarity than I left with.

Not because we solved everything. We didn’t. The waitlist is still being nurtured. The fundraise is still moving. The messages still sometimes disappear into silence. But I know where Zoey stands. I know where I stand. And when you’re building something that takes years, knowing you’re on the same page, on the company, on each other, on how long you’re willing to go, that’s not a small thing.

We’re building this in the open, toward something we both believe in. Some days move faster than others. Taiwan was a reminder that the foundation holds, even when the daily numbers don’t show it yet.

Glintz is live at app.tryglintz.com, if cross-border money is something you deal with, take a look.