The startup narrative has a natural shape: launch, grind, scale, exit. It is a sprint with a finish line, and the physical and psychological demands of the sprint are part of the story — the late nights, the intense focus, the personal cost that gets retrospectively reframed as investment once the outcome is known. Bootstrapped businesses without exits, built to run indefinitely at sustainable pace, have a completely different temporal structure. There is no sprint. There is no finish line visible from where you’re standing. The relevant question is not “how hard can I push for eighteen months” but “what can I sustain for twenty years.”