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I notice more and more people found companies — large and small — or claim they do, in order to disseminate the myth that they ‘founders.’ Entrepreneurship culture is really, now, founder culture — a culture where, in order to be respected and looked up to, you have to have started something, seemingly, if not authentically, by yourself. The younger you are, the more precocious, the better — the more you lend your identity to the general mythos of foundership. If you’re a coders, publisher, restauranteur, educator, etc—the expectation is that you start your own company, raise capital, hire a web-developer, print business-cards: mint a new identity as a pioneer/genius/hero-of-capitalism. I know plenty of people I don’t respect who happen to be founders. I’ve discovered no connection between being a founder and being interesting or really, alive — poetically alive. None at all. So my short manifesto ends this way: stop founding things; stop starting businesses, stop raising capital, stop using stupid buzzwords; stop buying and selling self-help books. Just read books — old books. Or don’t do anything. Don’t make money. Don’t brag about making money. Don’t pretend to be Jobs or Zuckerberg or Musk or Sandberg. Stop with the cults of personality. Get a personality first. Found yourself. And resist the temptation, then, to monetize it. Or put it on your CV.
[Written spontaneously between 7:03pm and 7:13pm Friday October 6th.]
