Metamorphosis

For four Wednesdays in a row last month, I, founder of Nexubis, walked my own neighbourhood in Melkbos handing out pamphlets to nail salons. Voluntarily.

Nail salons. The little restaurant down the road. The coffee shop on the corner. Real local owners standing behind real counters, looking at the Nexubis-branded pamphlet I handed them and giving me the polite smile that means not for me.

After the last of those Wednesdays I went home, sat down with my COO Laine, and admitted out loud what we'd been circling for a month.

The brand is fine. The audience is wrong.

We've spent years cooking Nexubis into something that wins FinTech/Web3 clients in New York and Web3 booths at Token2049 in Singapore, and I am not going to dilute it because a nail salon in Melkbos can't read it.

So we're spinning out a sister company.

LekkeWeb. A name that means something to a South African grandma and absolutely fucking nothing to a VC in San Francisco, which is the entire point. Local. Smaller budgets, faster turnarounds, every system and tech stack and methodology we cooked at Nexubis, repackaged for the lady running her dad's restaurant on the West Coast. Powered by Nexubis. Grounded in something Nexubis was never going to reach on its own.

That move was pure shedding.

And shedding, more than anything else, is the season I'm in.

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The phases

I've been at this long enough now to recognise the seasons.

There was the divorce-and-retrenchment phase. The lecture-and-leave-it phase. The build-Nexubis-from-zero phase. The scale-it-and-make-the-hard-calls phase. Each one had a version of me attached to it, and each one ended with that version being put down.

What I'm in now is something different.

I've been calling it metamorphosis and it's the right word, because it isn't growth. Growth implies you're getting bigger. Metamorphosis means you're dissolving the previous version of yourself to make room for the next one. The caterpillar doesn't gently stretch into a butterfly. It liquefies first.

In the past two weeks alone I've learned more than I'd learned in the three months before. Real, dense, accelerated learning. The kind where you wake up, hit your desk, and feel actually fucking unstoppable for the first hour, because the world has cracked open by another inch.

The cost of that acceleration is that you have to put down a lot of things to pick up new ones.

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Shedding

I've put down a lot of friendships. Honestly, not coldly. My energy has a finite supply and I stopped pretending it didn't.

I've put down a lot of responsibility. Laine now makes most of the calls I used to make. He pings me for confirmation maybe twice a week, and the rest of the time he doesn't, because he doesn't need to. That feeling is half pride and half relevance-anxiety, and the two are inseparable. The voice in your head whispering they don't need you the way they used to is the same voice that built the company to a point where they don't need you the way they used to. You can't have one without the other.

I've put down cigarettes. One month smoke-free.

I've put down a lot of the alcohol.

I've put down the version of me who used to lie awake at 2am stressing about a problem he now barely flinches at, because that version of me hadn't yet learned what this version of me genuinely believes: there is always a solution, there is always a plan, and I will always find both.

I've put down the version of me who needed to be in every room.

That last one was the hardest.

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The paradox

Nobody tells you that when you fire yourself from your own role, the relief and the grief arrive on the same day.

If I'd stayed deep in Nexubis ops for another quarter, I would have felt very useful and slowly lost the edge. The relevance-anxiety I just admitted to is exactly what's pulling me into building LekkeWeb right now, in a market I genuinely care about, with the entire infrastructure of a behemoth quietly running underneath. Site is live. Co-founder still being figured out. No hard announcement yet.

Mid-flight, on purpose.

That is the next chapter.

Nexubis is going into the big leagues. The clients we're closing now are bigger than anything we've ever closed. By the end of the year I think we'll be sitting on a behemoth, LekkeWeb will be flourishing in its own lane, and present-Hannes will look at year-end Hannes and barely recognise him.

A haircut. Six months smoke-free. Six months further down the road. A quieter head than the one I'm walking around with today.

That's the metamorphosis.

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The reframe

The cliché says change is the only constant.

The version of that line that is actually true is the one nobody puts on a quote-card: you don't grow into the next version of yourself. You shed the previous one. Growth is the part everyone romanticises. Shedding is the part nobody talks about, because while you're inside it, it looks indistinguishable from loss.

A caterpillar doesn't gradually turn into a butterfly. It dissolves first.

In business, the dissolving looks like firing yourself from a role you used to be irreplaceable in, or spinning out a sister company because the brand you built is the wrong fit for the people you actually want to help.

In life, it looks like losing the friendships, the habits, the cigarettes, the 2am stress-loops, the version of you that used to grip the wheel.

Discomfort is the price of admission for the next version of you.

If you're sitting in the in-between right now, in the part that feels like nothing is moving, like the old version of you is dying and the new one hasn't shown up yet, you're not stuck.

You're in the chrysalis.