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The most ambitious companies grow their products, not their teams.

Back in 2002, I was invited by (now) Managing Partner Roelof Botha to come pitch the partnership of famed venture firm Sequoia Capital. While I was sitting in their lobby I noticed two things that I'll never forget.

First, like most venture firms, they had a giant list of "tombstones" on their wall, which are the plaques they create after a company goes IPO. The list was already impressive back then which included companies like Yahoo!, Electronic Arts (EA), and Cisco among many others. It was the "who's who" of venture investments globally at the time.

The second was that there were maybe 20-30 people in the entire office — and this was back when everyone was in the office....

Most Founders are driven by pure fear — greed is something we can only "hope" to achieve.

Our pop culture loves to opine on the greedy nature of famous Founders, from Elon Musk to Cornelius Vanderbilt. It's easy to say, "Oh that Founder was only driven by greed — look at all they have that they don't need!"

But that often overlooks where it all started, where most of us are. It's kind of hard to be labeled a "greedy Founder" when you're living in your parents' basement applying for 24.99% interest rate credit cards just so you can keep the business alive!

The general population fails to realize that greed is a luxury we can only hope to achieve.

It Usually Starts with Fear... Lots of Fear

The reason being "greedy" is a luxury for most Foun...

We're not in the business of selling our startup; we're in the business of making it something worth buying.

Contrary to popular belief, we don't just build a startup and have a bunch of big companies start calling on us to make offers. Yes, it's happened to some really incredible companies, and no, it probably won't happen to you (or me).

That's fine, so long as we understand how the process of selling our startups actually works in the real world. At Startups.com we looked at over 100 startups before we bought 6, and I can tell you from experience that 90% of Founders have no idea how this process works. Why would they?

Startups are Bought, Not Sold

The first thing to understand is that we actually don't have a ton of control over when o...

The startup world is all about moving fast — but at what expense?

We've built this narrative for ourselves within startups that we're constantly under the gun to move quickly or else. If we don't move quickly, we won't attract more funding, we'll lose ground to all of our competitors, and we'll be perceived as being "slow," which is considered the death knell for any respectable startup.

But what if all of that is bullshit?

What if there are real costs to moving too quickly that will far outweigh whatever perceived benefits we're told we're getting? We stand to lose a lot if we invent a false notion of urgency that prevents us from making good decisions for the long term.

Pleasing the Wrong Party

Let's start with who we're moving fast for. ...

Investors want to believe that we're on the same side of the table and are interests are aligned — but it's all bullshit.

The pitch from investors goes something like this "We want all of our incentives to be aligned, so that a big win for us is also a big win for you. We're on the same side of the table!"

That sounds wonderful, but what's missing from that pitch is the fact that only a tiny number of outcomes wind up with both of us having the same upside. Like when you hear about a company getting acquired for a giant sum or going IPO — that's what investors are referring to.

But statistically, that's not how it actually goes. Less than 1% of funded startups are going to have that kind of outcome, which means we should be way more concer...

What if I told you that selling a company for $40 million could net you more money than if you sold it for $200 million?

On its face, it sounds ludicrous, I know! But what's missing in that formula isn't the exit price, but how much of that exit we get to put in our pocket as we raise more rounds of capital.

More importantly, our opportunities to sell for $40m are dramatically more abundant than selling for $200m (or more!). That means every time we raise capital, while it sounds like we're improving our chances of an outcome, we're also reducing our options to find an exit at all.

Real Founder Dilution Numbers

CapShare released a study of 5,000 startup cap tables to determine how much equity Founders have at each stage of a funding round. ...

What happens when our main customer becomes our investor?

This is fundamentally the rabbit hole that nearly every startup goes down when fundraising. At some point, we start to realize that we're no longer building a startup for the needs of our customers; we're building it for the perceived needs of our next investors.

At any given time, our startup needs vastly more cash than we have, so we're always looking for the shortest path toward filling that gap. The very nature of investor capital is that it comes dramatically before customer capital (revenue), so in most cases, our early "customer," as it relates to cash, is an investor.

So what happens? Our investors become who we're building the company for.

We Optimize for Their Needs First

T...

Startup Founders are like top athletes — if we don't keep working that startup muscle daily, we get out of shape fast!

Normally while we're building our startups, that's not a problem — we get all the "exercise" we need in the form of unrelenting stress and anxiety (hey, it's burning calories, right?)

But seriously, being active in our startup keeps us relevant, connected, and engaged in our business worlds. The moment we disconnect, whether it be from a sale, a wind-down, or even just a career change, we start letting that muscle atrophy, and it's very hard to get it back in shape.

We Lose Our Relevance

When we're in the middle of building our startups, one of the things that we can take for granted is how relevant we are at the moment. We...

It doesn't matter if we have a "big opportunity" if it never really accomplishes our personal goals.

Yet it's hard to avoid starting a company without thinking in terms of the market potential or the ultimate outcome. If we run around saying that our new startup could one day be a "$1 million business," we're going to get very few high fives. Yet, if we say we're going to be a "$1 billion business," we'll have people lining up to talk to us. Why is that?

The difference in that balance becomes who benefits from that outcome. At $1 million, it's almost entirely the Founders. At $1 billion, it's investors, staff, and everyone else that's joined in the party. What we need to consider is who we're really building this business for and, as such, ...

There are very few problems at a startup worth actually stressing about — but that doesn't keep us from burning ourselves out about them.

Startups are nothing but problems. Everything about this epic shit show that we've created is a problem. We're building a company that has never existed, in a market we invented, with a team that got here 5 minutes ago. What about that would breed anything but problems?

Even if we can agree that the fire hose of problems will never be turned off, we can at least understand how to treat those problems differently, separating the ones that may end us from the ones that are "just another day at the office." If we can't, we will crush ourselves with stress and anxiety.

Problems vs. Apocalypse

First off, we re...