What happened in 2025? A note from Tim

This is a bit more personal, disorganized, and a brain dump, and I’m sure it’ll still not cover even close to everything I have on my mind.

2025.

It was supposed to be a good year. We had so much lined up, so much hope and potential.

Then, things started to fall through, one by one. At the beginning of the year, even, we had a big shuffle of people on the team, and then behind the scene supply chain problems from that, and then the tariff situation, and so on, and so forth.

And by the end of the year, a lot of people have cycled in and out, and I’m exhausted.

Every time we lose someone, and gain someone else, there’s struggles. There’s training that I need to do, and mistakes the people will make as they learn-- which is normal, and expected, and yet...

With how tight things are, and with how difficult things are, all I can feel is dread and despair every time that happens.

I think, often, people will tell me I’m being way too lenient and nice to people. I probably am. But talk to the people who have been let go, and I’m sure you get other stories about how terrible of a boss I am. And from their point of view, it might seem so as well.

Managing people, I think, is the thing I struggle with the most, and probably no wonder, considering the neurodivergence combo of autism and ADHD. I write a ton of documentation to try and help people, and am told it’s overwhelming and too much, too many pages, somehow both too detailed and not detailed enough-- I try to spend what time I can personally training people, but then they’re unable to function without me.

One of the worst feelings is to work so hard, and only to barely make it back to the starting line where you were before-- or, even a bit before. Life, global events, people’s personal circumstances just keep knocking any progress we made in 2025 back, over and over and over again.

If something puts us ahead, I can be excited, I have energy and motivation, but to constantly put out fires and fix problems...

Well, even chefs with fireproof hands will eventually burn.

I think, when I collaborate and work with people who are just as excited about the concepts and things we’re doing as I am, then I gain energy, and can work on something basically forever. But, when I’m faced with people being scared, or not wanting to do things, not engaging, just skimming, doing the bare minimum for compliance...

I, too, will eventually get discouraged.

It sucks, y’know? Like, I like to think I work really hard at everything. And objectively, I think, I do, with the amount of hours I put into things, the thought and intentionality and research and everything. But when you climb a mountain, and you’re excited and talking about the mountain’s history and the trees and wildlife and then you turn around... and most people are still meandering far below you, having not heard a thing you’ve said, and you have to stand there, waiting for them, watching the daylight tick away, and try to repeat what you said before, but now not as excitedly, and they’re too tired to really care, and maybe remember the general gist of it, and sometimes not even, and then the ones who could keep up with you had to move into different paths away from you to make sure the paths were clear all around and you watch them from afar, and...

And here’s the thing.

I have so, so many things that are coming up that I want to be excited about. But sometimes... I just feel like I’m being excited into the void.

And I genuinely just... don’t know how to talk about them right, write synopsis or summaries or updates...

And by the time I think I do, I’ve done so much more, and then I’m back at square one.

And man, the NDAs. A lot of NDAs, y’know? And approvals, and just...

I find myself with dozens of concurrent projects, unfinished, never to see the light of day.

More, probably.

Because the thing is, I don’t like being sad. I don’t like being burnt out. I love being excited about things, I love creating things, I love collaborating and making things that none of us could make on our own, where the sum of the whole is greater than the parts.

But in 2025... It just didn’t happen.

I am grateful for the things we did manage to get out and do with vtubers and other partners. From IRyS to Dokibird to Dandyfloss to Merryweather to Tomoe to Zentreya to Hazumi... we did do a lot of cool stuff.

But even as they happened, I struggled to train new people, reassign tasks from those who left, to keep things afloat from the inside, to untangle the supply chain, update our backend systems, deal with everything that global events have brought onto us.

One of the greatest mistakes I’ve made, I think, is being a little too people oriented. That is to say-- My systems, that I spend a lot of time designing from the ground up, were tailored for specific people in their specific roles. I’d work with them on figuring out what methods worked best for them, create tons and tons of documentation... but therein laid the problem itself. They were not agnostic in their creation, which means that if someone who wasn’t that specific person was to take over, the system would be wobbly, and not work as well. Which, also meant that if the specific person the system was built for didn’t like it, didn’t use it, or didn’t follow it, then more problems arose.

Once upon a time in the earlier days of Vite, I did create more agnostic systems, meant to be used by anyone who read the documentation. However, as more and more people complained about the systems, I’d nod, and say I understood, and trying to be a “good boss,” work to change them as much as possible for those people.

If you’ve done management roles before, you know exactly why that doesn’t work.

My autistic brain thought that if I simply listened to people, and designed elegant systems that fit people like a glove, then they would be enabled to do their best work, and things would run smoothly. I thought that problem and solution were inherently linked, one to one, and believed when people said that if they just had this, or that, then it’d all be good, and certainly, their problems were a static checklist that could be solved like a math problem.

But, as it turns out, there is no perfect system. There will always be grievances, always be things that are problematic, always things that don’t quite work right and cause frustrations... Because the thing is... It’s a job. It’s still work. There’s always going to be things that are painful and not enjoyable about it. I think anyone who says “love what you do and you’ll never work a day in your life” are severely deluding themselves.

I mistakenly thought that my role as the boss was to ease as many of those bumps as possible so that my team could move as smoothly as possible.

It’s true to some extent, sure, but... I think, even now, I’m still trying to figure out what my role as a boss really is supposed to be. I just don’t hold that idea of being the “boss” or “ceo” or whatever as a form of self-identity, and still find it really weird when people call me that. But now, at least, I understand more and more of what it’s not supposed to be-- I’m not here to make everyone’s lives as easy as possible. I’m not here to make people happy in the traditional sense.

As far as I can tell, my purpose is to build, and make systems that are people-agnostic. It sounds strange as a company who’s people over profit, but the truth is that an organization of any sort must have the ability to run without specific people. As much as it might be strange to say, people NEED to be replaceable in some way for work...

Because that’s actually how you create people over profit in the right way. If someone is irreplaceable, then they by definition, can’t leave work, and can’t ever fully unwind and relax, knowing that someone else will be able to cover for them without a problem when they’re not working. I think I’m the best example of this. I am crucial to Vite, for R&D, for writing, for planning, for machine repair, for a thousand other things that I picked up in order to save money, since we refuse to take venture capital money.

But for that, I find myself to be largely irreplaceable... and thus, I haven’t been able to take a vacation in these last 9 years. I’ve travelled places, sure. I’ve attended events. But all the time, I’d be working, never able to disconnect, often working deep into the night after the day’s events were over to try and keep from falling behind, catch a few hours to get up at the same time as everyone else, still be distracted on my phone as I did my best to keep things running there, and...

I don’t really know what I’m getting at here, honestly. I’m not sure how I’m ending this. I’m just airing my thoughts out-- not exactly venting, not exactly trying to make a point, just... contemplating. Thinking about the year, I suppose.

Like, I think about it, and from a bird’s eye view, I wonder exactly how we were unable to get the materials we needed for VMK for this long. We had them, technically, and then we didn’t, and even in the worst case scenario, how did it take me going personally to count everything, and then even after that, more things kept popping up to cause even more delays...?

I think I’d go insane if I were to try and backtrace all of it. But I do have all the logs, all the problems, the mistakes, all the fixes... And I dread going over it more than I have already, but know that I need to in order to discover what caused it all, and build the systems that prevent it from ever happening again, regardless of who’s running the system.

And I know that a lot of it was because I trusted those old custom, people-tailored systems, that I didn’t look over things myself, that... I didn’t manage the people who were supposed to manage the systems that were supposed to manage the supply chains that managed the suppliers that managed their own teams well.

Ultimately, it comes down to my responsibility. And I think the thing that sucks the most about that isn’t taking responsibility and accountability for the things that have happened, but that I don’t know where else to pull time and energy from anymore.

I keep seeing the paths that we can take, the paths that would, with rigid adherence to proper execution, allow us to thrive, but... I don’t know if I have the time to commit to just that one path, when a dozen others stretch out before me, all pulling me in those different directions, and if any one of them fall, so do the rest.

But at the end of the day, I need to. I don’t have the luxury of stopping and resting. I have the lives of more than a dozen people relying on me, I have all the obligations to everyone. I’m moving slower than I’d like. Things aren’t going as fast as I hoped. Mistakes happen more often than I wish they did.

But one heavy footstep at a time, I move forwards. So long as I believe it’s possible, it will be. So long as I can take another step, I will. I owe it to everyone who’s believed in us, everyone who’s supported us, everyone who’s watched this journey.

Because when you say run, say that’s enough, I say that I haven’t reached my potential yet. I say I’ll break another limit, and I’ll keep making things better, and better, and better, until it all works out. You ask how much more can I take, how long can someone carry all of this and keep going, and I tell you that I’ve heard this since the day Vite was started, and it’s been nine years of everyone telling me that I can’t keep doing this, I can’t make it, that I’ll burn out, and I’ll collapse, that I’ll ruin my mind and body and find myself in the hospital.

But I believe in the indomitable human spirit.

I believe in the will to keep going, the one extra step, in getting up again, and again, and again, and again, after you fall.

I believe in failures and all the lessons they teach, and being stumbles and scrapes and scars that you’ll be able to tell a story about later.

I think of what I’ll think of myself thirty years from now if I quit. And I think I’d regret quitting without fighting to the last.

And above all, I believe that despite everything--

I am still happy.

I’m not rich in money.

But I have some ability to control my time, and go get lunch at 12PM, or 3PM, or whenever I want.

I can work from home, or the facility, or my parent’s place when I visit, or even at conventions or halfway across the country.

I can be creative for a living, I can make things that I’m truly proud of, and I can see the things I make, in turn, make people halfway across the world light up in joy.

I have my basic needs taken care of.

And I have the love of so many.

Sure, I can be stressed. Sure, I can be sad, and disappointed, and enraged, and despondent, and despair-- but through all of that, I can also still be happy, and rich in all the things that I do have.

I’ve never believed in bad things invalidating the good. I think they’re all separate things, to be celebrated and mourned separately.

So.

Here’s to 2026.

Here’s to another year of insanity, of crazy creative campaigns and supply chain mess ups and systems and the coming and going of people and peaks and valleys and happiness and sadness and the full, colorful tapestry of emotion and experiences that life has to offer.

Here’s to kindness.

Here’s to the indomitable human spirit.

Here’s to us.

Cheers.

-Tim, Founder Vite