Whenever I wake up and feel like building another company is a constant uphill battle…I also try to project how my life would be doing another job.
I could be a great executive somewhere? Maybe a great IC working on a project that matters for my company or someone running a unit of a large org?
I could do all of that (even if I usually say that in my next life I want to be a rock star, a professional cyclist or a lawyer – in this order!).
I would be a lot more relaxed and my mind wouldn’t be always on. It would also be great not to worry about salaries for the team each month or sales pipeline going up and down. It would be so great to watch a movie without thinking that I haven’t sent that email I had to.
But I would miss building.
It doesn’t matter what, building is thinking about what’s next, improve it and dealing with something that keeps changing daily and you live for seeing it getting better.
For a long time in my early years as a teenager I dreamt of seeing my dad’s stamps e-commerce grow, become famous and provide for us. It was my project, I was building it and it was keeping me excited. It’s one of the best memory I have about building because I did not know anything about money, venture or companies. And even today I keep building that website (it’s here btw), my dad is 75, it will not change much for me and us but building it is fun, it gives me joy and the idea that someone will find it online and buy from it makes me incredibly happy.
Building is difficult to understand – VCs that haven’t been builders themselves cannot fully connect with founders because of that. They haven’t had that feeling and can’t understand its nature.
And this is often the case why people think entrepreneurs and founders are purely driven by money and success – they confuse the constant relentless focus and obsession to building a company as a way for those entrepreneurs to make money and become rich.
That’s never the case. Entrepreneurs that become rich and successful don’t miss much of the stress and constant relentless focus (and what they do to them and their beloved ones) but they almost always miss building. And that’s why they go back and keep building new companies.