So You Think You’re an Entrepreneur? (You’re Not)

Calling yourself a founder is also cool. When I went to B-school, everyone wanted to work in consulting or at Goldman. Today, they want to raise their seed round before graduation.

Here’s the harsh truth: My experience says most of them either a) don’t have the talent, or b) aren’t willing to do what it takes.

I meet a lot of founders, and consider it the best part of my job. But after years of these conversations, I’ve noticed something that won’t sit well with a lot of people: most founders should be doing something else.

Not because they lack a good idea. Ideas are cheap, and with AI they’re getting cheaper by the day. So is building. And great entrepreneurs also evolve, pivot, and polish their original ideas naturally. Not because they didn’t go to the right school or work at the right company. Resumes are meaningless.

Great founders are unicorns, and chances are, you aren’t one of them.

First, the reality of failure. And the required grit.

The glamorous image of entrepreneurship is the product of survivorship bias: you hear about the rare wins. You don’t hear about everybody else, the 99% of founders who slave away for ten years, work their ass off, and never get those outcomes.

Harvard’s Shikhar Ghosh studied about 2,000 venture-backed startups and found that roughly three out of four never returned their investors’ money. And those are the ones who got funded. As he put it, venture capitalists “bury their dead very quietly.”

Oh, and being your own boss? Founders have more bosses than anyone. Every customer, investor, and employee who could walk out the door. Ask any founder how much freedom they feel at 3 a.m. the night before missing payroll.

And while there is the joy of building, there is also the reality that as you succeed, the problems get harder (the easy things get solved down the org chart). And you get pulled further and further from the early, fun stuff. You can bet Zuck never thought testifying before Congress was part of his job when he started.

Jensen Huang, when asked what company he’d start if he were 30 again, said, “I wouldn’t do it.” Building NVIDIA, he explained, turned out to be “a million times harder” than he ever expected.

Second, great founders are not normal.

I mean that as a compliment. Mostly.

The founders I’d back are not your average, run-of-the-mill, good next-door-neighbor type. They’re wired differently, and it shows up in three places.

That combination is rare. It can also be exhausting to be around. It’s not fun, and it’s not normal.

When I look at the founders who build something — the ones who raise the next round, hire the great team, and are still standing five years later — I also see the same five habits over and over. Most people have one or two. The founders I’d back have all five habits, and they keep them up for years. Here’s my list.

1. They’re willing to sacrifice.

This is the price of admission, and it’s the one the fantasy leaves out.

Great founders give things up, knowingly and for a long time.

They don’t do it because they enjoy suffering or wouldn’t like being at the soccer game. They do it because the thing they’re building matters more to them than what they’re giving up.

I’m not saying it’s right. It surely isn’t politically correct. All that work-life balance advice. I’m saying it’s the truth.

If you’re doing it for the outcome, the sacrifice will feel like a bad trade by year three. It’s like talking to actors who made it: they’ll tell it worked out for them because they had no Plan B.

So here’s the real question: what are you willing to give up, for ten or twenty years, with no guarantee?

2. They work hard. Really, really hard.

I know, not exactly a breakthrough insight. Most people work hard, but they don’t work “founder mode” hard.

Every great founder I’ve backed works harder than the people around them. Not performative hustle, posting on LinkedIn at 5 a.m. about grinding. Real work. Every day. They’re the ones who know the numbers cold, personally call the unhappy customer, and stay with the problem after everyone else has gone home.

At one of our portfolio companies, the team routinely sleeps at the office. At a European tech conference, people talked about that in a disparaging light. Two months later, the company became a unicorn. I just heard they are approaching $1B in ARR.

Here’s why it matters so much now. AI just made a huge amount of work easy. That means the easy work is no longer an advantage. What’s left is the hard work, and the people willing to do it are going to separate from everybody else, faster than ever. In this era, hard is good.

3. They telescope.

This is the one that surprises people. The best founders not only work incredibly hard, they also refuse to live entirely in the weeds. They telescope from the big picture of telling the company story down to the minutiae of a font choice in a blast email — and back out again.

They also carve out deep work and think time. They pull back far enough to ask the only questions that matter: What are our three priorities? Are we working on them? What should we stop doing?

They’re in good company. Bill Gates famously took “Think Weeks,” going off alone with a stack of reading to contemplate the big picture. Paul Graham wrote about the “maker’s schedule” versus the “manager’s schedule” and how one meeting in the middle of the afternoon can blow up a day of real work. Cal Newport wrote a whole book called Deep Work.

Also important to them: they stay close to the work. Lots of tech founders still write code, take customer calls, and pitch. They’ve never lost the ability to flip burgers.

4. They’re storytellers.

Every important thing a founder does is a story. Raising money, recruiting a great engineer, selling to a skeptical customer, keeping a team together through a rough quarter — all involve telling a compelling story.

The best founders can tell you where the world is going, why their company wins, and why it has to be now. And they do it in about two minutes, in plain English, and make you lean forward. Steve Jobs walking onstage in 2007 and introducing “an iPod, a phone, and an internet communicator” was a product launch. It was also a master class in storytelling.

Here’s the part people miss: storytelling is really thinking. Amazon famously replaced slide decks in senior meetings with six-page written narratives because you can hide fuzzy thinking in bullet points but not in full sentences. If a founder don’t have a compelling elevator pitch, it usually means they haven’t figured it out yet.

5. They’re optimists.

There is a reason I chose “Tech Optimist” for my blogs.

Every founder I’d back believes the future can be better, problems are meant to be solved, and that they can personally change reality. That’s not hyperbole — it’s the job.

Starting a company is an irrational act. The odds are terrible, the setbacks constant, and the smart move always to quit and go get a real job. Pessimists are often right in the short term. Optimists build the future.

But the great ones are optimists with their eyes open. Jim Collins called it the Stockdale Paradox: total faith that you will prevail in the end, combined with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality. The great founder says, “This is going to work,” and in the same breath, “and here’s exactly what’s broken right now.”

Every employee who quits is a chance to update the team.

Every failed pitch is a chance to refine your go-to-market.

Every super hard thing is a chance to build a moat.

So, are you an entrepreneur?

Be honest with yourself:

If you answered yes across the board, call us. Seriously.

If you didn’t, here’s the honest truth, in two parts.

It’s OK. If you don’t see something the world doesn’t, or a few rejections make you want to quit, that’s not a character flaw. It just means founding a company isn’t your path. You’re probably going to be happier and healthier.

You still have a lot to contribute. The world needs great teammates, operators, and investors too.

In conclusion: You are not a founder.

And if you are, you won’t give a damn about this blog.

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