Founder stories get told from the end, and the middle disappears
Press coverage compresses years of confusion into a clean arc. The corrective is the founders' own accounts, read with the same care.
The media often glamorizes successful founders and makes their paths seem easier than they actually were.
Last autumn The Social Network turned the founding of Facebook into a courtroom drama with a soundtrack. It was a fine film and a poor guide to starting a company. Most of what founders spend their time on, such as fixing servers, chasing payments, hiring and losing people, appears briefly if at all. That is the pattern Jessica Livingston is describing.
Livingston co-founded Y Combinator in 2005 and, two years later, published Founders at Work, a book of long interviews with the people who started companies such as Apple, PayPal and Hotmail. The interviews dwell on the early days rather than the triumphs. PayPal’s founders describe fraud losses that threatened to sink the company. Others describe months when nothing worked and they were close to giving up. Read together, the accounts make the paths look much less certain than the press versions. Several founders say they did not know what their company would become until well after it started, and some of the best-known products began as something else entirely.
The distortion matters because people compare their own messy start with other people’s edited stories. A founder who believes successful companies grew smoothly will take ordinary trouble as a sign of failure and may quit too early. The opposite mistake happens too: someone who reads that a famous founder raised money on a slide or two expects the same, and plans a company around funding that is not coming. Livingston’s work at Y Combinator involves telling founders, repeatedly, that the trouble they are in is normal.
There is a second distortion worth noting. Once the media learned that struggle makes a good story, the hard-times narrative became a form of glamour too. The founder who slept under a desk and ate instant noodles is now a stock figure, and some founders now perform hardship the way others once performed ease. Both versions leave out what often mattered most: timing, luck, family money, a lucky introduction.
The practical defense is to read founders’ own accounts, including the dull parts, and to prefer interviews given early over those given after an exit, when the story has settled. Accounts given close to the events, before anyone knew how they would end, keep more of the doubt that the later versions smooth away.