Most people think a founder has a title — CEO. Builder. Entrepreneur. But those are labels, not roles. Most founders think their main job is to build a product — It’s not. It’s so much more! It’s to bring something useful and delightful to the world. But reality is much less glamorous than this sentence.

In reality, founding a company is more like wearing a rotating set of hats. Some days you’re a philosopher. Other days, a recruiter. Occasionally, a therapist. Frequently, a firefighter. And always the person who can’t walk away when things break.

The founder’s job is to hold together the invisible architecture that transforms an idea into reality.

Some people feel and do this naturally; it took me some years building companies to fully understand it — founder must play multiple roles simultaneously, each critical to survival.

Let’s break them down and see if you are neglecting any …

Every company begins with a story about the future. At first, that story feels obvious. Exciting. Inevitable.

But when you’re walking a thousand miles, the first steps look impossibly small. The hundredth step feels futile. The five-hundredth makes you question everything.

This is where founders earn their keep.

Someone needs to stand there and say: “We’re one step closer. The goal exists. It’s not a mirage.”

This isn’t motivational fluff. It’s a structural necessity. When everyone else is buried in the weeds — drowning in bugs, customer complaints, and burned-out Saturdays — you’re the one who holds the long view.

You remind people why this matters, where you’re going, and that it’s possible to get there. Without that voice, every setback feels existential.

The vision isn’t static. It evolves. But someone needs to be its custodian, its reiterator, its defender against the entropy of daily operations.

Without this role, companies don’t pivot — they drift. Seeing many such cases, aren't we 😉

Here’s the truth most people won’t tell you: recruiting is your most important early-stage job.

Not product. Not sales. Not fundraising.

Recruiting.

Because everything else flows from who you bring through the door. Get ten insanely great people together early, and something magical happens — the group becomes self-policing. They won’t let mediocrity in. The bar maintains itself.

This is how culture actually works. Not through ping-pong tables or mission statements, but through the molecular-level composition of your team.

The best founders spend 30-40% of their time on talent (see examples at the end). They’re always recruiting, always watching for excellence, always building relationships with people they might not hire for years.

Why? Because great people compound. They attract other great people. They raise standards. They ship faster, think deeper, and care more. You may have seen Mark Zuckerberg recruiting. You may have read Dan Romero’s 15-year mission of building startup relationships.

Your hiring decisions are your company’s DNA. Recruit like your life depends on it.

The easiest way to explain it is — Founders love ideas. Engineers love technology. Investors love markets. But none of those actually pay the bills. — Customers do!

Even though it’s so simple, most founders get this backwards.

They fall in love with technology, then try to find someone to sell it to. They build the solution before understanding the problem and the person with that problem. Because don't get me wrong — many of us believed that we understood the problem, but we never understood the person who had it. Because we thought it was us.

The correct sequence is the opposite: start with the customer, and her experience, and work backwards to the technology. The founder’s job is to obsess over the human on the other side of the screen. Because if you don’t, nobody will.

This isn’t obvious when you’re technical. When you can see the elegant solution, when the architecture is right there, it’s tempting to build it first and ask questions later.

But that’s how you accumulate scar tissue.

Your job as a founder is to be the bridge between what customers need and what your team builds. You translate frustration into features. Pain into priorities. Confusion into clarity.

This means spending time in the customer’s world. Not just reading surveys — actually watching them struggle, listening to their complaints, feeling their friction.

The best products aren’t born from genius insights. They’re born from deep, almost obsessive attention to how people actually live.

Focusing isn’t about saying yes. — It’s about saying no. That’s what Steve Jobs always said.

And this truly might be the hardest role because it goes against every instinct. When you’re building something new, you want to pursue every opportunity, chase every lead, and build every feature.

But optionality is the enemy of progress.

Your job is to be the editor-in-chief of your company’s story. You decide what makes it into the final cut. What gets built. What gets shelved. What gets killed.

This requires a particular kind of courage — the courage to disappoint people, to leave money on the table, to trust that depth beats breadth.

Apple became Apple because Jobs was willing to say no to thousands of good ideas to say yes to a handful of great ones. The iPhone didn’t have copy-paste at launch. It didn’t have apps. It barely did anything except make calls and browse the web.

But what it did, it did better than anyone else.

That’s the power of focus.

Here’s what’s often missed about culture - what you tolerate becomes culture. And everyone is watching you even when you think they're not.

And it’s not what you say. It’s what you do when things get hard.

You can talk about quality all day. But when the deadline hits and something’s “good enough,” everyone watches to see what you do. Do you ship it or do you fix the extra bug?

Values aren’t policies. They are behaviors under pressure.

As a founder, you don’t create culture through documents or all-hands meetings. You permeate it through example. Every decision you make, especially the difficult ones, broadcasts to everyone what actually matters here.

Stay until midnight to fix something that only three people will notice? That’s your new standard.

Your team is always watching. Always calibrating their own behavior based on yours.

This is exhausting. It means you can never really clock out. Every action carries weight, sends signals, shapes the company’s DNA.

But it’s also leverage. When you embody the values you want to see, you don’t need compliance systems. The culture enforces itself.

Because — before you can play any of these roles, you need the right reason.

Here’s an uncomfortable truth: money is a terrible reason to start a company. It’s not strong enough to survive the pain. Startups are too volatile, too uncertain, too emotionally taxing to be fueled by financial goals alone. When things get hard — and they will — extrinsic motivation evaporates.

The founders who persist are the ones who feel like they have something they must express. Something that won’t leave them alone. An idea that nags. A problem that irritates. A future they can’t stop seeing. Sometimes you start a company not because you want to, but because nobody else will build the thing. That’s the difference. In an ideal case — founding isn’t chasing upside. It’s answering a calling. It's scratching your itch.

As a founder — you can’t outsource any of these roles. You can’t delegate them. They’re inherently founder-level work.

The good news? Once you understand these roles, you can get better at them. You can build systems. You can create leverage. You can find what you love within the chaos.

Because that’s the final truth: you’ve got to love this work. Not the idea of being a founder, but the actual grinding, impossible, beautiful work of building something from nothing.

If you don’t, you’ll quit when it gets hard.

And it always gets hard.

Now let’s look at some real examples. These people didn’t start by knowing it all, nor doing it all well. Yet, here we are watching them build empires that inspire. 👇

And till next time — let's build better!
Pete

The Vision Keepers

1. Elon Musk (SpaceX): When SpaceX failed three rocket launches in a row and was nearly bankrupt, Musk’s role was to convince his team that the fourth launch would work — and that Mars colonization wasn’t a fantasy. He kept reiterating the vision even when the evidence suggested otherwise.

2. Brian Chesky (Airbnb): During the 2008 financial crisis, when investors called them “the worst idea ever,” Chesky held the vision that people would open their homes to strangers. He kept the team focused on the future even when revenue was coming from cereal boxes.

3. Reed Hastings (Netflix): In 2011, when the Qwikster pivot nearly destroyed Netflix, Hastings maintained the long-term vision of streaming while navigating short-term chaos. The vision of becoming HBO before HBO became Netflix kept the company alive.

The Recruiters

1. Steve Jobs (Apple): Jobs personally recruited John Sculley from Pepsi with the famous line, “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?” He spent weeks recruiting key engineers for the Macintosh team.

2. Larry Page (Google): In Google’s early days, Page interviewed every candidate himself and maintained a hiring bar so high that he’d rather keep positions open than compromise. This created the self-policing culture Google became known for.

3. Jensen Huang (NVIDIA): Huang has been known to personally recruit top AI researchers and chip designers, spending years building relationships before hiring. He views recruiting as his primary competitive advantage.

The Customer Translators

1. Jeff Bezos (Amazon): Bezos famously leaves an empty chair in meetings to represent the customer. He reads customer complaint emails and forwards them with a “?” to executives, forcing the company to work backwards from customer experience.

2. Drew Houston (Dropbox): Before building Dropbox, Houston spent months in coffee shops watching people struggle with USB drives and email attachments. He built the entire product around observed customer frustration, not technical elegance.

3. Whitney Wolfe Herd (Bumble): After experiencing toxicity in dating apps, Wolfe Herd started with the customer experience of women feeling unsafe and worked backwards to the technology of women-first messaging.

The Chief Editors

1. Steve Jobs (Apple): Jobs killed dozens of product lines when he returned to Apple in 1997, focusing the company on four products. He said no to the Newton, the Cube, and countless other “good” ideas to focus on great ones.

2. Mark Zuckerberg (Meta): Despite pressure to monetize early, Zuckerberg said no to advertising for years, focusing solely on growth. He’s consistently said no to features that would complicate the core product.

3. Jan Koum (WhatsApp): Koum famously said no to ads, no gimmicks, no games — just messaging. He maintained radical focus on a single use case even as competitors added feature after feature.

The Example Setters

1. Satya Nadella (Microsoft): When Nadella became CEO, he didn’t just talk about “growth mindset” — he publicly admitted Microsoft’s mistakes, shared his own learning journey, and modeled vulnerability. The culture shifted because he embodied it.

2. Tobi Lütke (Shopify): Lütke codes regularly and commits to the main repository, showing engineers that technical excellence matters at every level. He spends weekends building side features to stay close to the craft.

3. Sara Blakely (Spanx): Blakely tested every product herself and shared her failures openly with the team. When she made mistakes, she celebrated them in meetings, creating a culture where experimentation was valued over perfection.

Till next time ... 😉

Most people think a founder has a title — CEO. Builder. Entrepreneur. But those are labels, not roles. Most founders think their main job is to build a product — It’s not. It’s so much more! It’s to bring something useful and delightful to the world. But reality is much less glamorous than this sentence.

In reality, founding a company is more like wearing a rotating set of hats. Some days you’re a philosopher. Other days, a recruiter. Occasionally, a therapist. Frequently, a firefighter. And always the person who can’t walk away when things break.

The founder’s job is to hold together the invisible architecture that transforms an idea into reality.

Some people feel and do this naturally; it took me some years building companies to fully understand it — founder must play multiple roles simultaneously, each critical to survival.

Let’s break them down and see if you are neglecting any …

Every company begins with a story about the future. At first, that story feels obvious. Exciting. Inevitable.

But when you’re walking a thousand miles, the first steps look impossibly small. The hundredth step feels futile. The five-hundredth makes you question everything.

This is where founders earn their keep.

Someone needs to stand there and say: “We’re one step closer. The goal exists. It’s not a mirage.”

This isn’t motivational fluff. It’s a structural necessity. When everyone else is buried in the weeds — drowning in bugs, customer complaints, and burned-out Saturdays — you’re the one who holds the long view.

You remind people why this matters, where you’re going, and that it’s possible to get there. Without that voice, every setback feels existential.

The vision isn’t static. It evolves. But someone needs to be its custodian, its reiterator, its defender against the entropy of daily operations.

Without this role, companies don’t pivot — they drift. Seeing many such cases, aren't we 😉

Here’s the truth most people won’t tell you: recruiting is your most important early-stage job.

Not product. Not sales. Not fundraising.

Recruiting.

Because everything else flows from who you bring through the door. Get ten insanely great people together early, and something magical happens — the group becomes self-policing. They won’t let mediocrity in. The bar maintains itself.

This is how culture actually works. Not through ping-pong tables or mission statements, but through the molecular-level composition of your team.

The best founders spend 30-40% of their time on talent (see examples at the end). They’re always recruiting, always watching for excellence, always building relationships with people they might not hire for years.

Why? Because great people compound. They attract other great people. They raise standards. They ship faster, think deeper, and care more. You may have seen Mark Zuckerberg recruiting. You may have read Dan Romero’s 15-year mission of building startup relationships.

Your hiring decisions are your company’s DNA. Recruit like your life depends on it.

The easiest way to explain it is — Founders love ideas. Engineers love technology. Investors love markets. But none of those actually pay the bills. — Customers do!

Even though it’s so simple, most founders get this backwards.

They fall in love with technology, then try to find someone to sell it to. They build the solution before understanding the problem and the person with that problem. Because don't get me wrong — many of us believed that we understood the problem, but we never understood the person who had it. Because we thought it was us.

The correct sequence is the opposite: start with the customer, and her experience, and work backwards to the technology. The founder’s job is to obsess over the human on the other side of the screen. Because if you don’t, nobody will.

This isn’t obvious when you’re technical. When you can see the elegant solution, when the architecture is right there, it’s tempting to build it first and ask questions later.

But that’s how you accumulate scar tissue.

Your job as a founder is to be the bridge between what customers need and what your team builds. You translate frustration into features. Pain into priorities. Confusion into clarity.

This means spending time in the customer’s world. Not just reading surveys — actually watching them struggle, listening to their complaints, feeling their friction.

The best products aren’t born from genius insights. They’re born from deep, almost obsessive attention to how people actually live.

Focusing isn’t about saying yes. — It’s about saying no. That’s what Steve Jobs always said.

And this truly might be the hardest role because it goes against every instinct. When you’re building something new, you want to pursue every opportunity, chase every lead, and build every feature.

But optionality is the enemy of progress.

Your job is to be the editor-in-chief of your company’s story. You decide what makes it into the final cut. What gets built. What gets shelved. What gets killed.

This requires a particular kind of courage — the courage to disappoint people, to leave money on the table, to trust that depth beats breadth.

Apple became Apple because Jobs was willing to say no to thousands of good ideas to say yes to a handful of great ones. The iPhone didn’t have copy-paste at launch. It didn’t have apps. It barely did anything except make calls and browse the web.

But what it did, it did better than anyone else.

That’s the power of focus.

Here’s what’s often missed about culture - what you tolerate becomes culture. And everyone is watching you even when you think they're not.

And it’s not what you say. It’s what you do when things get hard.

You can talk about quality all day. But when the deadline hits and something’s “good enough,” everyone watches to see what you do. Do you ship it or do you fix the extra bug?

Values aren’t policies. They are behaviors under pressure.

As a founder, you don’t create culture through documents or all-hands meetings. You permeate it through example. Every decision you make, especially the difficult ones, broadcasts to everyone what actually matters here.

Stay until midnight to fix something that only three people will notice? That’s your new standard.

Your team is always watching. Always calibrating their own behavior based on yours.

This is exhausting. It means you can never really clock out. Every action carries weight, sends signals, shapes the company’s DNA.

But it’s also leverage. When you embody the values you want to see, you don’t need compliance systems. The culture enforces itself.

Because — before you can play any of these roles, you need the right reason.

Here’s an uncomfortable truth: money is a terrible reason to start a company. It’s not strong enough to survive the pain. Startups are too volatile, too uncertain, too emotionally taxing to be fueled by financial goals alone. When things get hard — and they will — extrinsic motivation evaporates.

The founders who persist are the ones who feel like they have something they must express. Something that won’t leave them alone. An idea that nags. A problem that irritates. A future they can’t stop seeing. Sometimes you start a company not because you want to, but because nobody else will build the thing. That’s the difference. In an ideal case — founding isn’t chasing upside. It’s answering a calling. It's scratching your itch.

As a founder — you can’t outsource any of these roles. You can’t delegate them. They’re inherently founder-level work.

The good news? Once you understand these roles, you can get better at them. You can build systems. You can create leverage. You can find what you love within the chaos.

Because that’s the final truth: you’ve got to love this work. Not the idea of being a founder, but the actual grinding, impossible, beautiful work of building something from nothing.

If you don’t, you’ll quit when it gets hard.

And it always gets hard.

Now let’s look at some real examples. These people didn’t start by knowing it all, nor doing it all well. Yet, here we are watching them build empires that inspire. 👇

And till next time — let's build better!
Pete

The Vision Keepers

1. Elon Musk (SpaceX): When SpaceX failed three rocket launches in a row and was nearly bankrupt, Musk’s role was to convince his team that the fourth launch would work — and that Mars colonization wasn’t a fantasy. He kept reiterating the vision even when the evidence suggested otherwise.

2. Brian Chesky (Airbnb): During the 2008 financial crisis, when investors called them “the worst idea ever,” Chesky held the vision that people would open their homes to strangers. He kept the team focused on the future even when revenue was coming from cereal boxes.

3. Reed Hastings (Netflix): In 2011, when the Qwikster pivot nearly destroyed Netflix, Hastings maintained the long-term vision of streaming while navigating short-term chaos. The vision of becoming HBO before HBO became Netflix kept the company alive.

The Recruiters

1. Steve Jobs (Apple): Jobs personally recruited John Sculley from Pepsi with the famous line, “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?” He spent weeks recruiting key engineers for the Macintosh team.

2. Larry Page (Google): In Google’s early days, Page interviewed every candidate himself and maintained a hiring bar so high that he’d rather keep positions open than compromise. This created the self-policing culture Google became known for.

3. Jensen Huang (NVIDIA): Huang has been known to personally recruit top AI researchers and chip designers, spending years building relationships before hiring. He views recruiting as his primary competitive advantage.

The Customer Translators

1. Jeff Bezos (Amazon): Bezos famously leaves an empty chair in meetings to represent the customer. He reads customer complaint emails and forwards them with a “?” to executives, forcing the company to work backwards from customer experience.

2. Drew Houston (Dropbox): Before building Dropbox, Houston spent months in coffee shops watching people struggle with USB drives and email attachments. He built the entire product around observed customer frustration, not technical elegance.

3. Whitney Wolfe Herd (Bumble): After experiencing toxicity in dating apps, Wolfe Herd started with the customer experience of women feeling unsafe and worked backwards to the technology of women-first messaging.

The Chief Editors

1. Steve Jobs (Apple): Jobs killed dozens of product lines when he returned to Apple in 1997, focusing the company on four products. He said no to the Newton, the Cube, and countless other “good” ideas to focus on great ones.

2. Mark Zuckerberg (Meta): Despite pressure to monetize early, Zuckerberg said no to advertising for years, focusing solely on growth. He’s consistently said no to features that would complicate the core product.

3. Jan Koum (WhatsApp): Koum famously said no to ads, no gimmicks, no games — just messaging. He maintained radical focus on a single use case even as competitors added feature after feature.

The Example Setters

1. Satya Nadella (Microsoft): When Nadella became CEO, he didn’t just talk about “growth mindset” — he publicly admitted Microsoft’s mistakes, shared his own learning journey, and modeled vulnerability. The culture shifted because he embodied it.

2. Tobi Lütke (Shopify): Lütke codes regularly and commits to the main repository, showing engineers that technical excellence matters at every level. He spends weekends building side features to stay close to the craft.

3. Sara Blakely (Spanx): Blakely tested every product herself and shared her failures openly with the team. When she made mistakes, she celebrated them in meetings, creating a culture where experimentation was valued over perfection.

Till next time ... 😉