Chasing 17

A note to the company · Camp KOHO ‘26 · Whistler, BC · June 15–19, 2026 Written at the gate · flying home from Camp KOHO

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I’m writing this from the airport, still donning my tux, on my way home from Camp KOHO. The retreat wrapped last night, my flight’s in a bit, and somewhere between the closing session and the gate a question that’s quietly bothered me for two decades finally cracked open. I want to get it down while it’s raw — it’s the most important thing on my mind as we leave this week as a unicorn.

When I was 17, I won a championship nobody saw coming, least of all me. It came a year after a public, humiliating failure. The 365 days between those two — devastating failure to shocking success — are still the clearest, most stable days I’ve ever lived. At 18 I repeated it, then outperformed it. The results kept climbing for two more years, until an injury took it out of my hands. And yet, for all that I matched and exceeded 17, I never again felt what I’d felt that year — the maturity, the strength, the clarity of the one season that followed my worst.

For two decades I assumed 17 had something the later years lost — some edge, some wisdom I’d let slip. This morning I finally understood I had it backwards.

At 16 and 17, I never believed that championship was actually possible for me. So when I pulled it off, I had no idea what came next. I’d never planned for a world on the other side of winning, because I’d never really believed I’d get there. I had no new impossible goal ready. And with nothing new to chase, I did the most natural thing in the world: I let the status quo become the goal. Defend the title. Do more of what worked. Repeat it, beat it.

That’s why 18 felt lost even as the numbers got better. Maintaining a peak is not a mission. Outperforming an old goal is not a new one. The status quo had quietly become the goal — and the status quo, however well you execute it, can’t tell you what you’re for.

Here’s the part that took me twenty years to see: the clarity I keep aching for from 17 was never wisdom. It was the cheap kind — the kind you only get before you’ve won anything. At 16 the floor was on the ground; after a public failure I couldn’t fall any further, and a championship I didn’t believe in cost me nothing to chase. No pressure, nothing to protect, a goal handed to me by circumstance. Of course it felt clear. I was unburdened. By 18 I had everything to protect and nothing I’d chosen to chase — a floor with no target, a clear way to lose and no way to win. No wonder it felt like drifting.

You don’t get the cheap kind of clarity back. And that — though it never feels like it in the moment — is the good news. The next goal won’t be obvious, and it won’t be handed to you. You have to write it yourself.

I’m telling you this because it was never just my trap. It’s the one waiting for everyone who manages people, and it’s the one waiting for KOHO right now.

01 · If you lead people

If you lead people here, you’ll get a clearer signal than I ever did at 18 — so learn to read it. It shows up the day your team hits the goals you set together. It shows up when you can take a real vacation, phone off, and come back to nothing on fire. And it shows up as a quiet, disorienting thought: they don’t need me for what they used to. It can feel like being made redundant by the people you trained.

From there, every instinct pushes you toward one of two moves, and both are the trap. You relax into it and start polishing the status quo. Or you panic and make yourself necessary again — invent fires, claw the work back, hover over shoulders. That second one is the sneaky one: it doesn’t look like a trap, it looks like helping, and you’re good at it. But reaching back down for the old work isn’t contribution. It’s nostalgia for a time when the goal was obvious because something else supplied it. It feels like relief, and it costs you months.

That feeling is not a problem to fix or a hammock to lie in. It’s the clearest signal you’ll ever get that you’ve done something you didn’t plan for and haven’t yet named what comes next. A team outgrowing its need for you isn’t the end of your job — it’s the start of the next one. More than that, it is the job; not the soft edge of it, the center. Grow your people until their old goal is behind them, then see the blank page coming before they do and help them author the next one. The best leaders don’t hand over the answer — they build the room where someone writes their own. And your own “what’s next?” is the same move, one floor up.

02 · And now, the company

None of this is only personal. It happens to companies on exactly the same logic. We crossed into unicorn territory, and a unicorn is just a company that hit a stupidly legible goal: get to a billion. For years a number like that can drive everything — every hire, every roadmap, every late night has an obvious why. Then you cross it, and the why can go quiet.

The gravity on the other side of that number is exactly what pulled at 18-year-old me: protect what we built, keep doing what got us here, defend the valuation. It will feel like ambition. We’ll be busy. We may even outperform. And if that’s all we do, we’ll feel lost anyway — because we’ll have let the status quo become the goal. The corporate version of chasing 17 is just as seductive: romanticize the scrappy early days, try to recapture the old hunger, back when the goal was simple and the fire lit itself.

But you can’t be hungry for a billion dollars twice.

The real work — harder than the thing we just pulled off — is the 18-year-old’s work at scale: decide, on purpose, what matters now that the obvious target is behind us, and generate the will to chase something we chose rather than something we were handed. Not run the last race faster. Pick a new race — before the status quo picks it for us.

So if you’re standing in that blank right now — restless, a little unmoored, sure you’ve lost something — look again. The 17-year-old, the manager whose team outgrew them, the company that just hit its number: same person, three sizes. None of them lost their edge. They finished their goal. The clarity they ache for was never the earned kind; it was the cheap kind, handed over by circumstance, and it was always going to run out.

I don’t have our next impossible goal for you this morning — that’s a conversation, not a memo. But I finally know the failure mode, because I lived inside it for two decades without a name for it. It took me until 40 to name the lost feeling I had at 18. Let’s save ourselves the 22 years.

A finished goal doesn’t leave a void. It leaves a blank page. Don’t mistake one for the other — not for yourself, not for your team, not for KOHO.

See you on the other side of the flight.

— DK