Faith without fear is how startups begin and how some end

A startup asks people to act before the evidence exists. The founder quits a job, the first employee accepts less pay, the first customer tries an unproven product. Each of them is acting on belief. Micah Baldwin, who co-founded Graphic.ly, a Denver company building a platform for digital comics, and has mentored many founders in accelerator programs, puts that fact at the center of the first half of his line.

That belief is not irrational, but it is ahead of the data. Nobody can show that a new market exists until someone builds for it. So faith, in the plain sense of commitment without proof, is part of the job. It is also contagious. Investors, early hires and first customers often decide on the strength of the founder’s conviction, because conviction is the only evidence available at that stage.

The second half is harder to accept. Founders who succeed are rarely fearless in any literal sense. Many describe years of anxiety about payroll, competitors and their own mistakes. What they have is the ability to act while afraid, which is different. Fear that stops a founder from calling customers is a problem. Fear that makes a founder check the bank balance weekly, keep a reserve and test assumptions before betting on them is useful.

Consider two founders facing the same slow quarter. One is frightened, cuts spending, calls every customer and finds out why sales stalled. The other feels nothing, keeps hiring on the original plan and runs out of money six months later. The second founder looked braver the whole time.

A founder with no fear at all is missing a signal. The honest version of the line might be that successful startups keep their faith and manage their fear, using it to decide where caution is needed and ignoring it elsewhere.