A king and his boulder. The writer and his line. This lab and its dog.

Sisyphus was king of Corinth and the cleverest man in Greece: clever enough to trick Death into his own chains, and clever enough that, once in the underworld, he argued his way back out.

The gods did not like being tricked twice. They sentenced him to push a boulder to the top of a hill; every time he reached the top, it rolled back down, and he tried again. Over and over again.

In 1942, Albert Camus looked at Sisyphus and didn't see a tragedy. He watched him walk back down the hill and saw the one thing the gods couldn't take: how he walks it.

The boulder rolls back down either way. Might as well enjoy the walk.

If you run a business, you're already on one. In the myth, the hill is only where it all happens. Here, the hill is the business: your customers, your craft, the thing you built that nobody else could.

Nobody can take the hill away, and it's what makes the business yours. Growth doesn't flatten it either. It just makes it steeper, which is a good problem.

I'm Esteban. The hill is yours, and I don't touch it. You push your own boulder up it: running the business, every day. I have mine.

Camus says Sisyphus's boulder is his own thing. Mine is this lab and what I've committed to do with it: your business's platform. And when it comes to software and technology, the road has no end.

Today, the platform lets your customer find you online and lets you forget the spreadsheet, or uploading the report every Monday. Tomorrow, an AI that helps you make the best decision or speeds up your sales. And after that? That remains to be seen.

Camus Labs is named after my dog, Camus.

Over the years, people kept asking whether I'd read the author of the same name. I did, and it turns out we agree: the hill is a given, the walk is a choice.

So which came first: the dog, the lab, the writer, or the myth? I still don't know. All I know is I'm good at the walking-to-the-top part of the myth.