The reason I wrote down two years ago

In October 2022, I published a piece called "Why we started HAUS XXIV." I wrote it fast, closer to a confession than a mission statement, and the reason I gave was simple. I was done watching good ideas die in rooms ruled by someone else’s ego. Twenty years inside agencies had shown me the same pattern in different cities under different names, and I’d finally decided I would rather build the opposite of it than keep surviving it.

I go back and reread that piece more than I tell people I do. Not because I’m precious about my own writing, but because it’s the clearest record I have of what I actually believed before any of this existed to prove me right or wrong. It’s easy to rewrite your own history once the thing is working. That post is the version of me with nothing built yet, only a conviction and a lease.

Two years later, with a real haus around me, I wanted to go back to that reason and ask it a harder question than "did we grow." Did the bet hold? Was the thing I refused to become actually worth refusing?

What I was actually betting on

Here’s what gets lost when people hear "I left agency life to start my own thing." They assume the bet was on independence. Freedom from a boss, freedom from a holding company, my name on the door instead of someone else’s. That was never it.

The bet was that a haus led by many could out-build a haus led by one. That giving real weight to more seats than mine would produce sharper work, not softer work. That conviction and collective decision-making weren’t opposites, they were the same muscle used two different ways. I didn’t know that for certain in October 2022. I believed it hard enough to risk everything on it, which is a different thing than knowing it.

Believing something and watching it hold under two years of real client work, real payroll, real disagreements in real rooms, are not the same experience. The first one is a decision. The second one is proof, or it’s the absence of proof, and you find out which one you got by living through it.

“I’ve worked places where the founder’s opinion won every argument by default, whether or not it was the best idea in the room. Here, David loses arguments in front of clients and doesn’t flinch. That’s the whole culture in one habit.”

Marisol Vega, Creative Director, HAUS XXIV

What got validated, and what surprised me

The part I expected to be right about was the work. Give strong creatives real ownership over a project instead of a note-taking role under someone else’s vision, and the work gets sharper. Two years of client rooms have proven that out again and again. I’ve watched a junior designer’s instinct beat my own instinct in a pitch, in front of the client, and watched the room go quiet in the good way. That’s not a surprise. That’s the entire premise of the haus working exactly as designed.

The part that surprised me is harder to admit, because it’s less flattering. I underestimated how much of my old instinct as a solo decision-maker I’d have to actively unlearn, not just structurally but personally. Building a collective on paper is a governance decision. Living inside one, day after day, means sitting through a disagreement you’re pretty sure you’re right about and choosing to let the room work it out anyway, because that’s the whole point and you don’t get to suspend it when it’s inconvenient. I didn’t fully understand how often that moment would come, or how much it would cost me in the short term to keep choosing it. It costs less now. It cost real ego in year one.

The other thing I didn’t expect was how much the "no ego at the center" bet would get tested by success, not just by hardship. It’s not hard to share decision-making when the haus is small and scrappy and everyone’s figuring it out together. It’s a different kind of hard when a project goes well, the client loves it, and the instinct to take the credit shows up quiet and reasonable, dressed up as confidence instead of ego. Two years in, I can tell you that instinct doesn’t go away. You just get better at catching it before it talks.

“The defiance I built this haus on was never about picking a fight with the industry. It was a promise to a version of myself who almost didn’t get to build anything at all. Two years in, I still owe him that promise every single day.”

David Keyes, Founder & CEO, HAUS XXIV

Why it was worth it

Here’s the honest answer to the question I set out to ask. Yes. Not because every number on the two-years-in scorecard came back green, they didn’t, and we said so two weeks ago without softening it. It was worth it because the thing I refused to become, I still haven’t become, and that refusal got harder to keep, not easier, which is exactly how you know it’s real conviction and not a slogan on a wall.

Safe doesn’t survive here. Two years ago that was a sentence I wanted to be true. Today it’s a sentence I’ve watched hold under pressure, in rooms with real money and real deadlines on the table, which is the only kind of proof that counts.

I started this haus because I was done watching good ideas die for the wrong reasons. Two years in, the ideas here are still alive, still argued over, still occasionally winning against my own instincts in front of a client. That was always the whole point.