Molly Mielke • morals

For the past decade, our idolatry of startups and innovation has meant the focus has been: What can we disrupt? How fast can we grow? How big can we get? How much can we raise?

Founders are taught to possess enough faith that they can build something very big very fast. This creates a pressure cooker of responsibility that distorts reality to the p... See more

Being a founder requires constant calibration between arrogance and humility, optimism and pessimism. You need the arrogance to believe that you have something important to say, but the humility to know most people won’t care. You need the optimism to convince yourself and others (employees, investors, customers) to believe in you. But you need pes... See more

But running your own company does not automatically lead to more freedom. Sometimes it leads to the opposite. We think of entrepreneurs as the ultimate renegades, not bound to a 9-to-5 desk job or serving as a middle-management cog in a sclerotic machine. Yet thinking that you don’t have a traditional boss might just mean that mimetic desire is you

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How many people achieve that -- finding the thing they love to do, and that they're good at, and then focusing on it? I suspect most entrepreneurs force themselves into roles they're just not right for because they want to be CEO.

Tragically, I think very few. The number of people who have successfully scaled a company from dream to post-IPO succes... See more

When your team knows too much about you as a person, not just you as a CEO, they start dissecting your personal life to try to understand your decisions. Your motivations. Your ways of thinking. That’s not only a distracting waste of time, it’s counterproductive. When you explain why you’re doing something, it should be all about the customers, not

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