In the last few years, most of the succesful people I have met are founders who’s company history goes quite contrary to the typical startup advice, but still they achieved the result of a fast growing, impactful company that made them rich in the process. Most of the founders I see with success are actually in service business or large suppliers for certain industries. A lot of them built their companies on the side, and the founding teams are either solo founders or large committees. Furthermore, these companies all grew profitably.

​

This goes contrary to the advice we get about how to build a startup, which is to do product businesses, focus on the company 100% with 2 or 3 founders etc etc. Yet the people in my life who went against this narrative still got to the end result we all want: to make a fast-growing, impactful company that makes us rich. This makes me wonder why there is a discrepancy between the advice we read online about company buidling, vs what the reality is on the ground.

​

The conclusion I’ve come to is that a lot of the advice we see online is written by prominent investors, and investors are usually faced with a big problem: how to align their interests with those of founders. The interest of an investor is to make many bets in different companies and quickly see which one will be the winner in their portfolio to beat the S&P 500 within their 10 year time window. This is contrary to the interest of most entrepreneurs, who just want to see their dream company come to life and be big enough to feed their family plus a couple of niceties here and there. To bring the interests of founders closer to those of investors, the financiers have flooded us with propaganda that blitzscaling unprofitable product businesses full time is the only way to go about building a big company.

​

In conclusion, don’t take the word of investors on social media as the gospel truth. Most of those guys are just selling the VC dream, so you shouldn’t feel bad if your startup doesn’t fully fit into their mould of what one should be.