Founders Dont Fail

July 21, 2026

People forget that founders don't fail.

I have talked about this before, but people bring up the 9/10 of startups go under stat as if it matters.

If you are a founder at heart, you are a builder, an experimenter.

Sure, you might not succeed with the first thing that you build, but if you are a founder you are of course not going to stop? Building is what you would do even if there were 0 incentive to make any money. It should be in your nature.

One of the people in SF I look up to once told the story that he was in a room with 20 other founders in 2012 in SF. All were working on cool stuff and telling each other about it. Looking back at that moment, he said that none of the active ventures in that room succeeded, but there is not a single person in that room that as of 2026 is worth less than 10 million dollars.

Boring people call this survivorship bias. Don't do that. One of the ways you actually might still fail is losing your delusion. If you stop believing that you are special, you will blend into the swarm of average.

The truth is that most people are average. Average is a spectrum. If you move to a small town in Sweden and even try to pursue startups, you feel invisible, that no one can touch you, and you feel like you are miles ahead of everybody. If you move to SF, you realize that your ambitions are the norm.

Now let me also clarify that of course startups fail, and everybody can't have the grit to hold on. But true failure is rare, because the subset of people that went after startups in the beginning will come out more valuable on the other side, and get high paying jobs making 200k dollars annually.

But as a founder in the trenches, believing in survivorship bias will only do you damage. If you were storming Troy and your whole battalion were confident you were going to lose, you are going to lose. Doubt slows down momentum.

If you are confident you are going to win, it might be inevitable you will lose a couple of soldiers. But your chances of the attack succeeding as a whole are 10x higher.

Believing in survivorship bias is a pill of poison you should not take. You do not look at trees when you go skiing. You look at the gaps.

But delusion does not mean blindness. The people who win are the people who understand the objective playfield, who aren't blind to their surroundings but still keep their delusion where it matters. One thing you can't control in the valley is that you are doomed to mediocrity. There are founders who were chess grandmasters at the age of 5. You are not more intelligent than them, and believing that you are is also dangerous. In a game of poker, a 7-2 does not equal a loss.

You can bluff. You can fold the bad hands cheap and wait for a better one. You can pick a softer table instead of sitting down against the grandmasters. There are multiple ways to turn it into a win. But playing it as a double ace will lead to a loss.

In life the ONLY THING you can control is what's happening in your head. The grit, the determination to stay in the game and outwork your competition. What you can do is play the cards you are dealt and play them god damn well.