The Stoic Founder
I just finished Spinoza’s Ethics. To be honest, it’s not a fun read. It’s a few hundred pages of geometric proofs like something out of Gödel, Escher, Bach, except moral philosophy.
Spinoza’s God isn’t a deity intervening in human affairs. His God is nature. Deus sive Natura: God or Nature, interchangeable, nothing random, everything follows from what came before.
Freedom isn’t escaping causation; it’s understanding causation deeply enough to align with it. The free person doesn’t break the laws of nature, they comprehend them and act accordingly.
The Contradiction We Celebrate
The founder archetype we worship is the unreasonable founder. The one who looks at consensus and says no. Who gets rejected by every investor and keeps building. Who hears “the market isn’t ready” and treats it as fuel.
This is the story we love to tell, the founder who bends the world to their will.
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
– George Bernard Shaw
But the story conflates conviction with stubbornness.
Elizabeth Holmes had unreasonable conviction, as did Adam Neumann. The technology didn’t work; the unit economics didn’t make sense. They kept pushing anyway. Neither was reading signals from the universe, they were performing belief, hoping reality would eventually comply.
Compare that to Musk. He’s often cast as the Nietzschean figure who willed new industries into being through sheer force. But look closer. With Tesla, he picked up on the signal Eberhard and Tarpenning had already discovered, that lithium-ion costs were dropping fast enough to make EVs viable. With SpaceX, he didn’t ignore physics; he read the cost structure of rocketry and found inefficiencies galore born from a small monopoly and little incentive to decrease costs given government willingness to pay. He had conviction, yes, but it was conviction rooted in signal.
Chesky wasn’t clairvoyant either. When he started Airbnb, smart people told him the idea was doomed. But he’d noticed something: Craigslist and Couchsurfing were already facilitating this behavior, with high liquidity. The signal was there, so the challenge wasn’t finding resonance, it was evangelism and building on top of what was working. His goal was to help others see what he’d already seen.
Stewart Butterfield tried to build a video game, twice. Both times it failed. Both times he noticed something else was working, first Flickr, then Slack.
The difference isn’t grit. All of them had grit. The difference is perception and openness to being wrong.
The best founders I’ve met aren’t the most stubborn. They’re deeply confident in themselves while radically open to what reality is telling them. They push on the world while listening to it.
Reading the Causal Structure
For Spinoza, the highest knowledge is understanding why things happen, not just that they happen.
The goal is not to impose your will on an indifferent universe, it’s to read what conditions already exist and what they make possible.
Customer discovery is epistemic, market research is mapping causal structure, pivots are admissions of misreading conditions.
The Poker Table
Starting a company is like sitting at a table with mysterious rules.
You can watch many hands before committing serious chips. You can fold early and cheap. But you never see the other players’ cards and the “other players” aren’t competitors. They’re the market itself, which is indifferent.
Starting a company isn’t about being dealt one hand and grinding it out. It’s about knowing when to sit out, when to probe, when to size up, when to go all in.
Most founders either force a company by playing a hand too early or fold too late. They force the identity before finding the opportunity or fall in love with their hand instead of reading the table. The conviction that’s supposed to be their edge starts to obscure the situation.
Origin Stories
We love narratives like Zuck in his Harvard dorm room. The brilliant drop-out who saw a trillion-dollar future from a photo directory.
I doubt he frames it that way. He built something for college kids and it worked. He paid attention to what was engaging and kept feeding the signal. The photo directory became a social graph became an attention marketplace and is now becoming a much broader AI bet.
Each transition required listening. To users, to engagement patterns, to what the world itself was revealing. Gokul Rajaram, who worked with him at Facebook, called Zuckerberg “the greatest mind on building growth and engagement in consumer products.” That’s about perception, not stubbornness.
Plenty of brilliant people started social products in the early 2000s. The ones who didn’t build Meta weren’t dumb. They had different initial conditions, or read them wrong.
There are roughly 8 billion people on earth. Statistics guarantee a few will land extraordinary outcomes. We look backward and attribute those outcomes to visible traits: vision, grit, genius, while underweighting timing, market structure, and luck.
What You Can and Can’t Control
The Stoics drew a sharp boundary between what’s “up to us” and what isn’t.
For founders:
Up to you: Your judgment. Your ability to learn. Your integrity with customers. How you treat your team.
Not up to you: Whether the market exists at scale. Whether timing is right. Whether an external shock, regulation, platform shift, pandemic, kills your category.
The Stoic founder works relentlessly on what’s controllable and stays equanimous about what isn’t. Energy spent raging at reality is energy not spent understanding what you should be doing differently.
When a company fails, it’s not a moral judgment. The universe isn’t punishing you. You either misread the situation, or the situation shifted unpredictably. Both happen. Neither says anything about your worth.
When COVID hit, my first company Petal got caught in a trifecta. Customers became delinquent, prioritizing rent over our product. Spending froze as supply chains broke. ZIRP ended and our cost of capital spiked. Brutal. But that’s the situation shifting, completely out of our control. You adjust to reality or you don’t.
On Conviction
What conviction actually matters?
Not conviction you’ll succeed. The universe owes you nothing, and believing otherwise is delusional.
Instead, conviction a problem is worth solving, that you’re capable of learning what’s required, that you’ll stay in the game long enough to find out.
Stoic in spirit, believing in process over outcome. Spinozan in practice, seeking to understand causation rather than attempting to overpower it.
Sub Specie Aeternitatis
Spinoza talks about seeing things sub specie aeternitatis, under the aspect of eternity.
The best founders operate this way. They zoom out to see what the world is ready to become, then zoom in to do the work that serves it.
Spinoza called this acquiescentia in se ipso: contentment with oneself. Not from getting what you want, but from acting in accordance with what you understand.
Do the work that’s up to you. Do your best to read the table clearly. Fold when your hand is weak. Go all in when you see something special.
Outcomes belong to the universe.
Albrecht Dürer, “Rhinoceros,” 1515. He never saw one but was remarkably close anyway.
