Founder Stories

What I actually do: Build something from nothing. Get it standing on its own. Hand it to someone who can scale it. Then go do it again. Build. Set the foundation. Hand off. Repeat. The handoff isn't me failing. It's the whole point.

I spent years trying to fix what I thought was a flaw in my career. I'd build something from nothing, get it working, put the right people and processes in place… and eventually someone else would take over. For a long time, I thought that meant I wasn't a good founder. Now I think it means I was playing a different role. I don't enjoy running mature organizations. I enjoy creating them. I love the moment when someone says: "We've wanted to do this for years, but nobody has been able to make it happen." That's my favorite sentence in business. Once it exists — once the systems are in place, once the team knows what they're doing — my instinct is to make sure it no longer depends on me. Ironically, that's often the moment an operator becomes far more valuable than I am. I've stopped believing every founder should aspire to be a world-class operator. Some of us are wired to invent. Some are wired to scale. Some are wired to optimize. The mistake is thinking those are the same job. The best thing I've built over the last 25 years isn't a product or a company. It's the ability to turn "someone should build this" into "this now exists." And the next chapter is always the same: handing it to someone who can make it ten times bigger than I ever could.