Entrepreneurship

Since joining the startup world, I’ve been quietly amused by how much founders catastrophise. Perhaps to romanticise the work, or to feel better about it, they make it sound harder than it is. Some even quote Elon Musk, who famously compared building a startup to chewing glass and staring into the abyss.

I get it. Running a startup is hard. You’re told there’s a 99% chance you’ll fail, and something is always going wrong. But let’s stop pretending that kind of pressure belongs to founders alone. Consider the doctor who goes home worried that a decision they made might cost a patient their life, and whose nights and weekends disappear into exams and research. Or the investment banker or lawyer who alone answers for a big deal and is still replying to emails at 1am. Or even the service workers balancing multiple jobs, unsure rent next month is being paid. The difference is that a founder’s hardship apparently makes a better story.

Repeat that story often enough and you damage your own psychology and your team’s. Sam Altman warned that taking on chronically negative early employees is the biggest hiring mistake founders don’t see coming, because their expectation of failure tends to come true. A founder who talks themselves into pessimism and defeat has hired one of those people and put them in charge.

What all the talk of chewing glass leaves out is how lucky you are.

It starts with the privilege of choosing exactly who you work with. Early on you interview and pick every hire yourself, so you end up surrounded by people with enormous energy who don’t need to be told to care. That rubs off on you, and going to work becomes a real joy. Not knowing whether the company will make it draws everyone closer, and those scrappy beginnings build camaraderie and trust that turn colleagues into friends. Speak to seasoned entrepreneurs and hardly anybody looks back at the early days and hates them. Most remember them fondly, as the good times.

Then there is the freedom to decide exactly which problem you want to solve. Think about how many times in your working life you have had complete agency over that. Having it makes the work absorbing and purposeful. And there is almost no bureaucracy. A startup moves too fast for the dumb processes you find in a large hospital or corporation, and the only question anyone asks is whether something worked.

Your confidence grows quickly, too. Yes, you will make mistakes, a lot of them, but you will learn from them. That is what makes the bet so lopsided in your favour. If the company fails, you come out the other side knowing far more than when you went in, and far surer of yourself. If it works, you’ve done something extraordinary, and you’re probably financially set.

I understand that bad things happen, and I’ve seen some people really burnt out by startups. That is the risk of doing anything hard and worth doing. But if I had to pick which hard thing to take on, weighing the risks against the upside, I’d choose building from zero every single time.