A founder I’m mentoring sent me an email last week I haven’t stopped thinking about.
She’s running a real business. Paying customers, growing revenue, no death march. And she’s wrestling with something most founders never let themselves say out loud: what if the hyper-growth, VC-fueled, up-or-out playbook just… isn’t her?
Her question — and she was almost embarrassed to ask it — was whether choosing a slower, more sustainable path is a sign of lesser ambition. Whether she was talking herself into “lifestyle business” because she couldn’t hack the big leagues.
She also asked something more interesting: are some CEOs just wired for the chaos of hyper-growth? Or is it a muscle you build?
Here’s what I told her.
Some founders are chaos metabolizers. The ones who get strangely calm when everything is on fire. A competitor drops a surprise product, the burn rate looks like a countdown clock, the lead engineer quits on a Tuesday — and they don’t spiral. They get curious. To them it’s not a catastrophe. It’s data.
At Netflix, that wasn’t a personality quirk. It was a job requirement. We rewrote the operating plan every week. If you needed certainty before you could move, you wouldn’t have made it past month six.
Innate or learned? Bit of both. You can build the muscle. But some people are just born with a higher tolerance for randomness — energized by the same volatility that wipes everyone else out.
If you’re not one of them, that’s not a flaw. It just means you burn a different type of fuel.
Profitable Isn’t a Dirty Word
Somewhere we got it into our heads that “profitable” is a dirty word for an early-stage company. That if you aren’t constantly doubling down, chasing 2x growth year over year, you’re not really playing. That growing “within your means” is what people settle for when they fail to raise.
Nonsense.
Building something durable — funded by your customers instead of your bankers, hiring people you actually plan to keep — is a perfectly legitimate game. It’s just a different game. You know your employees. Your product doesn’t get hijacked by whatever will make the next board deck tingle.
I’ve watched plenty of founders force themselves into the hyper-growth mold because they thought they had to. They raised the money. They hired the people. They were crushing it on paper and miserable in their actual lives. Running a race they didn’t want to win.
The Fit Nobody Talks About
Everyone obsesses over product-market fit. Almost nobody talks about founder-model fit. But it’s the same idea. If the way your company is built to grow doesn’t match the way you’re built to operate, you’re going to spend every day fighting yourself. And you’ll lose.
The question isn’t whether you can handle the rocket ship. You probably can. The question is whether you want to.
Don’t talk yourself into running someone else’s race.
There's another angle to founder fit - and that's founder faith. I am building something not just because I want to, but because I feel a responsibility to move humanity forward. That makes me a bit delusional and also daring. It makes me aspirational and at times aloof! My personality is to hide in a corner and find myself wrapped up in a 16 series kdrama - but my passion to impact the greater good makes me put down the remote and pick up my macbook. This work is not fuel by my desire for deep pockets, but a resolve to deeply impact society - for good.
Now here's a kicker...
I'm listening to the acknowledgements of your audiobook. I'd already convinced myself to NEVER reach out again, (because it looks too desperate) and then you freakin' said my name: Cody LOVE
Ok - wait - this has to be some sort of sign. I pause the audible and run for my laptop. I am Koddi of Love Mobile, the wife half of the dynamic husband and wife team who turned a "kitchen table conversation into a cell phone company that gives back to local nonprofits when you pay your bill". Yep.
Got 6 mins? Watch my story here: youtube.com/watch?v=b5-iqkAGN14&feature=youtu.be
I'd love your thoughts, insights, advice....or even a word of encouragement. (Plot twist: we lost the pitch comp to a local team that this video is from, but we march on). And I don't have to say that your substack has so much depth, because the reality that so many of us "deep in the trenches livin' founders" take an active pause from our grind to read your thoughts, says it all.
PS - To all of my fellow founders - keep the faith!
Koddi of GetLOVEMobile(dot)com
A lot of founders end up outsourcing themselves to the expectations around the game.
Investors.
Growth culture.
Status.Momentum.
The identity of being “all in.”
At some point you have to ask whether the business is still an expression of your life…or whether your life became fuel for someone else’s model of success.