Ninety days after the sale of Pneuma, the Denver entrepreneur was rested, clear-headed, and still unsure what to build. He is glad he did not rush the answer.
David Riggs, a Denver entrepreneur, sold Pneuma, the first company he started, in May 2025. He had expected the weeks after close to feel calm. They did not.
"I figured I'd feel calm. Clear. Settled. But mostly, I felt… scrambled?" he wrote that August in his newsletter, Working Theories, after a calendar reminder marked 90 days since the sale.
Time, then the hangover
The first thing he noticed was time. He suddenly had all of it, after years of telling himself he had none. "The truth is, I had time before, I just told myself I didn't," he wrote. He had grown accustomed to running fast at all times, convinced the business needed him. Later he concluded that it mostly ran without him, and that "the 'urgent' stuff was mostly in my head."
Then came what he called the stress hangover. Two weeks after close, he woke up in a cold sweat, certain he had forgotten to reply to a client. He jumped out of bed to check his phone. There was no client. His brain had invented one.
"Years of living in go-mode doesn't switch off just because documents are signed," he wrote. Ninety days later, he was still dealing with it, though he said it was getting better.
When clarity doesn't show up
The clarity he expected did not arrive on schedule. "I couldn't figure out what to do with myself," he wrote. Sleep in? Wake early? Build something? Relax? He tried a run of routines, then slowly returned to the rhythm that had carried him through his career: wake early, drink coffee, do the main work of the day, hike or lift, then finish whatever work remained before bed.
Possessions felt unstable too. Friends who had sold companies told him they had wanted to throw everything away. He felt that. Within the first 60 days, he debated selling his rentals, his house, his cars, even a holding in another business. After advice from close friends, he gave away half of his closet instead.
People asked him how he sold. He was willing to talk, but careful about turning his path into a template. "My story and path is going to look different than yours," he wrote.
By the 90-day mark, much of the chaos in his head had receded. He wrote that he was the most clear headed he had been in a long time, the most rested, and the most excited about finding what came next. He was spending more time in his faith, praying about the path. The question he was actually asking was more precise: "What am I actually good at?"
He had taken a business he knew nothing about and built it into a company he later described as growing from zero to $3 million in annual recurring revenue in 36 months. "So what was my actual edge?" he asked. "My speed? My discipline? My leadership? Or just brute force?" He said he was still, happily, working through it.
Letting the next build wait
A week later, Riggs wrote that the path had already changed more than once. Two years earlier, he thought he would run Pneuma forever. A year earlier, he thought he would become a small business investor. "Now? I'm not sure," he wrote. "And I'm learning to be okay with that."
He was not filling the gap with a new company just to have one. "Right now, I'm listening. Reflecting. Letting things sit before I rush into the next build."
That sitting still involved a hard look at how he had actually worked. In early September, he wrote about a framework he had stumbled into by running his own companies: the player, the coach, and the owner. At Pneuma, he started as the player, with his hands in everything. As soon as he could hire, he became the coach. He tried to take the last step. "I tried to become the Owner, but never fully did," he wrote. He could step away for a week, then get pulled back into the day to day. For David Riggs, the framework was another way of sitting with the 90-day question before he chose the next kind of work.
Later he would write that he had underestimated how much of his identity was wrapped up in the chase. When the company sold, "the north star sold with it." About three or four months after the sale, the honeymoon period of "retiring" wore off. He still believed he would end up back in the business world. He just was not in a hurry to invent a company in order to get there.
The work that formed after the wait
By November, a shape had emerged that he had not expected at close. "In May, I sold Pneuma," he wrote. "That exit pushed me into a season I didn't expect: a blend of consulting and capital. That became Karteria."
The capital side, as he described it, is investing in or lending to small, local, operator-led companies. The consulting side is working directly with founders and leadership teams to diagnose what is not working, fix it, and build operating systems that hold. "Neither arm is glamorous. Both are hands-on," he wrote.
Looking back, Riggs is glad he took more time away from starting a next business instead of rushing into something, so he did not jump into the wrong type of business. The work that formed was not a second version of Pneuma, and it was not a quick attempt to become only a buyer of companies.
David Riggs still writes about the stretch after the sale without dressing it up as a clean victory lap. The documents were signed. The urgency he had been living on was mostly in his head. What followed was time, a hangover, a period of not knowing, and then a company, Karteria, that only made sense after he let the next build wait.