Find your real motivations

When people in SF are building companies they will often tell you things such as “I am doing this as my life’s true purpose of giving back to the world”, in the same breath they will tell you their goal is to “make a billion dollar company to make an impact”. I find this dishonesty to be laughably absurd because either you have to believe that I am stupid enough to belive you or either you are so stupid that you believe in your own lie(I would argue that the second case is worse).

What’s interesting is that watching all the steve jobs and elon movies this idea of a saviour entrepreneur is drilled into your heads so we end up doing a cosplay of these people and end up in a peak cringe state. But here’s the kicker, I don’t think anyone around you buys into it, so maybe stop doing this cosplay and just be honest.

If you say, “Hey I really like play with this AI thing and I see a great outsized opportunity that could help a lot of people and while we are at it this could make me very rich too, wouldn’t it be nice to never have to think of money ever again? and btw here’s a 100 paying customers and 15% MoM growth” My claim is that the second one is far more convinicing and honest. Your self awareness and honesty and seriousness about your own motivations reflects in every inch of the tonality of your conversations.

By all means have a grand ambition and goals and really try to help people if that’s what you really wanna do but for the love of god figure out your true motivations and be honest about it. Some of us just wanna get a yatch and travel the world? and if that’s the case then just do that. Me thinks that getting a yatch and travelling the world is a lot simpler than doing the fake founder cosplay for many years.