Founders, Stop Taking Advice from Other Founders

I once asked another founder about exiting my company.

"Why would you do that?" they said, aghast. "You love what you do. You don’t need to sell."

They said it like selling was a betrayal. Like it meant I didn’t love my work. Like success was a monastic vow of eternal struggle.

The reality is that Founders lie to themselves. A lot.

Not because they’re bad people, but because entrepreneurship is a competition dressed up as camaraderie.

Who’s raised more? Who’s growing faster? Who’s got the biggest team?

We don’t talk about profit. We don’t talk about founder burnout. We definitely don’t talk about getting off the ride.

Even halfway through our journey, VCs would reach out. We were profitable, doing well, growing without external capital. And yet, every founder we talked to would say:

"Yeah, but you should still consider taking VC money to scale."

So we'd listen. We'd spend weeks preparing pitch decks, refining metrics, getting our house in order. And every time, the VC firms would come back with the same objections they had when we started:

At first, they didn’t think our business was viable. Now, they knew there was a market for our product—because we were growing at 40-50% each year—but because we were profitable, they no longer thought we were 'truly scalable'.

That was when I started getting disillusioned with the whole venture capital industry. It was a game designed for companies to either burn cash at all costs or die trying. The metrics that mattered to them were never the ones that actually built great businesses; they were just arbitrary benchmarks that justified their next round of investments.

And through it all, when I turned to other founders for perspective, I didn’t get clarity. I got condescension.

"If the VCs aren’t investing, maybe your business just isn’t scalable." "You really need to focus on this metric they care about." "You should rethink your whole model."

It was always the same script. The same blind faith that if you weren’t getting VC dollars, you must be doing something wrong.

The problem is that the VC world thrives on perception. If you don’t fit their mold, you’re simply deemed unworthy. Meanwhile, the companies that do take funding end up playing a different game entirely—one of constant fundraising, dilution, and chasing an exit that will likely never come. They rarely do for venture-backed startups.

Looking back, what I really needed wasn’t more founders parroting the same talking points. I needed someone with an alternative perspective. Someone who’d been through it and could see past the groupthink. Someone who had already made the tough calls and could tell me, without bias, what was actually in my best interest.

Because the truth is, most founders are still in the struggle. They haven’t made it out yet. They’re still justifying their own decisions. And they can’t offer advice that isn’t colored by that.

The best advice I ever got wasn’t from another founder. It was from someone who had already exited and had no vested interest in my decision. They didn’t need me to make the same choices they did. They just wanted to help me make the right choice for my business.

That’s what I try to do now—give founders the advice I wish I had. Not the advice that sounds good in an X thread. The advice that actually gets them to the finish line. The advice that acknowledges the trade-offs, the real tensions, and the realities of building something sustainable.

So if you're a founder looking for guidance, talk to someone who's been there. Someone who's done it. And someone who doesn’t need you to make the same choices they did.

Because their advice isn’t about you. It’s about them.

And that’s the one lesson no founder will ever tell you.

But you should know it anyway.