Don't play founder

As Go Swag has grown, I’ve increasingly found myself getting asked by early-stage or aspiring founders for advice.

Usually they expect some tactical answer. Growth hacks, fundraising advice, hiring frameworks, AI tools, sales strategy.

But honestly, one of the biggest pieces of advice I find myself repeating is much simpler:

Don’t play founder.

Or maybe more accurately:

Don’t confuse participating in startup culture with building a company.

I’ve increasingly come to believe there are two very different types of founders: company builders and professional founders.

The company builders are usually much harder to spot because most of their attention is consumed by reality. Customers, operations, hiring, cash flow, management problems, distribution, legal issues, product issues. The actual mechanics of trying to build a functioning company.

Professional founders optimise for something different. Visibility, participation and status within founder culture itself. The ecosystem becomes part of the product.

Meetups, panels, founder discourse, LinkedIn quips, posting memes on X, “building in public”, chasing validation from other founders. Over time, the company itself can slowly become secondary to participating in startup culture.

The dangerous thing is that this can all feel productive.

That’s why it’s seductive.

You feel involved. You feel ambitious. You feel connected to momentum, innovation and smart people. There’s social validation everywhere. But a surprising amount of startup activity creates very little actual enterprise value.

I think Silicon Valley accidentally exported this globally.

There’s now an entire founder industrial complex built around the performance of ambition. And because the outlier success stories are so disproportionately visible, people mentally anchor against them.

The billion-dollar startup. The overnight growth story. The founder who raises enormous amounts of money before building a functioning business.

The problem is these are extreme statistical outliers, yet they dominate the discourse around what company building supposedly looks like.

Most successful businesses are built much more slowly, much more operationally and much less publicly than startup culture likes to admit.

I’ve also noticed that professional founders tend to behave a bit like magpies. They chase whatever is shiny. Whatever area is currently receiving the most status or attention suddenly becomes the thing they deeply care about.

One year it’s AI. Before that it was crypto. Before that Web3. Before that consumer social.

The specific obsession changes, but the pattern usually stays the same.

The actual problem being solved often feels secondary to the prestige associated with solving it.

You rarely find these people deep inside large, operationally painful, boring industries trying to build durable value. They don’t want boring. They want proximity to whatever currently looks intelligent, cutting edge or culturally important within startup discourse.

But a huge amount of real value in the world sits inside deeply unsexy problems. Logistics, procurement, compliance, infrastructure, manufacturing, operations.

Messy industries with real complexity and real customers.

Ironically, those are often the areas with the greatest opportunity because fewer people are willing to endure the boredom and operational pain required to improve them.

I think this entire dynamic distorts incentives. Instead of focusing on building something customers genuinely value, founders can end up optimising for looking like a founder instead.

One optimises for outcomes. The other optimises for perception.

You even see this in how some founders talk about exits.

In startup culture, being able to put “Acquired” on your LinkedIn or career history has become a kind of social validation badge in itself.

Sometimes to the point where founders seem more excited by the optics of an acquisition than the actual economics of it.

And the reality is that a surprising number of these companies weren’t acquired because they built something massively valuable. They were distressed sales. Tiny acqui-hires. Businesses sold for very little because they never built meaningful traction underneath the narrative.

But inside founder culture, the nuance often disappears.

The word “Acquired” survives.

And for some people, that was the real outcome they were optimising for all along.

Ben and I joke sometimes that the easiest way to spot founders with no real traction is often to look for who is most active inside founder culture itself. The people constantly posting, constantly attending meetups, constantly discussing startups, constantly visible.

That obviously isn’t universally true. There are plenty of smart people who post online. But there’s enough truth in the pattern that I think about it a lot.

The people buried deepest in actually building something often have less time, energy and psychological bandwidth for the performance layer around it.

I’ve never particularly enjoyed founder meetups. I understand there’s occasionally value in them. Networks matter. Relationships matter. Useful conversations do happen.

But honestly, a lot of the time they feel like pissing contests disguised as networking.

A room full of people subtly trying to establish status with each other. Who’s raised money. Who’s growing fastest. Who knows who. Who has the hottest AI take this week.

Even when events try to become more product or demo focused, the conversations often collapse into people trying to outsmart or outquip each other rather than discussing anything honestly.

There’s very little discussion about the reality of building companies. Revenue problems. Operational complexity. Hiring mistakes. Cash flow stress. Customer churn. Management failures.

The actual difficult parts.

What’s strange is that the startup ecosystem increasingly feels detached from the thing it originally existed to support: building successful businesses.

You can now spend years inside startup culture without ever building something with meaningful revenue, meaningful customers or meaningful operational complexity. “Founder” has almost become a profession in its own right.

I think this gets even more dangerous because modern technology makes it easier than ever to create the appearance of momentum.

You can launch constantly, redesign constantly, post constantly and generate endless noise around what looks like activity, while the underlying business itself remains fragile.

No revenue quality. No retention. No operational foundation. No actual moat.

Just movement.

The irony is that real company building is usually quite boring from the outside. It’s repetition, consistency, incremental improvements and solving operational problems one by one for years.

Most of the important work is invisible, which is probably why founder culture gravitates so heavily towards the visible layer instead.

To be clear, I’m not saying founders should never post online or build visibility.

There’s a real difference between founder-led marketing and playing founder.

Founder-led content can be an incredibly effective distribution channel. It can help with hiring, trust, brand and customer acquisition. I’m increasingly aware of that myself, which is partly why I’ve reluctantly started writing more publicly.

But I think the key is making sure visibility remains a tool rather than becoming the thing itself.

As Go Swag has grown, I’ve felt the gravitational pull of founder culture more myself. The ego massage. The attention. The positive reinforcement that comes from visibility, posting, speaking and being recognised inside founder circles.

Humans are social creatures. Nobody is immune to that.

That’s exactly why founders need to be careful with it.

The filter I increasingly try to apply is simple:

“What value does this actually create for the company?”

Sometimes the answer is distribution, hiring, trust, customer acquisition or brand. Those are all legitimate reasons.

But a surprising amount of founder activity, especially inside startup culture, creates very little actual enterprise value at all. It mainly creates social value inside founder circles.

And those are not the same thing.

So when founders ask me for advice now, honestly, one of the biggest things I want to tell them is this:

Don’t get drawn into startup culture for the sake of it.

Don’t mistake visibility for progress.

Don’t optimise for applause from other founders.

And don’t accidentally spend years becoming excellent at participating in the startup ecosystem while failing to build a meaningful business underneath it.

The founders I respect most are usually not the loudest.

Most of them are too busy building.

And I increasingly suspect that’s probably the point.