The Hard Truth About 'Wanting to Be a Founder’

Hey there,

It’s Yoela, coming to you fresh from a late-night chat with a friend about this modern itch to become a founder. It got me thinking: why does everyone want to be a founder these days? None of my most successful companies started with, “I want to start a business.” Funny how that works, right?

End of week ritual: hot cacao, quiet moments, and processing weeks of information overload.

Let’s bust a myth: All those detailed notes and carefully crafted business plans? That exhaustive industry analysis? Hate to break it to you—they’re probably worth way less than you think. The truth is, successful businesses don’t emerge from perfection. Their stories are messier, more accidental, and infinitely more interesting (my condolences to the Type A personalities out there).

You’ve heard it before: “Exceptional companies start with exceptional founders.” But after chatting with a partner from a16z this weekend, it’s clear that the startup world is producing fewer exceptional founders these days. Why? I’d argue it’s a mix of two things:

1. Genuinely unique ideas are getting harder to come by.

2. Strategy and tactics are often carbon copies of competitors, which means value erodes fast when alignment gets shaky.

I’ve built and sold companies three very different ways, and I want to unpack those paths. I know someone out there needs to hear this today.

1. The "Oops, We Built a Company" Path

Remember that time you stayed up late working on something just because it was fun? That's how Baskit started. A friend mentioned their struggle with shopping cart abandonment, and suddenly I'm down a rabbit hole of "what if we tried this?" Before we knew it, we had our first paying customer.

Think about Slack. It began as a side project for a video game development company. The founders were simply trying to solve their own internal communication problem. But they soon realized that their chat tool was far more valuable. Today, Slack is worth billions. The lesson? Sometimes the best companies start as accidents.

2. The "This Problem is Driving Me Crazy" Path

Full transparency: this is where I’ve failed the hardest. Twice catastrophically, and countless times where things fizzled out early. Why? Because when frustration drives you to build a solution, you’re either a visionary genius or too close to see clearly. The real challenge? Figuring out which one you are before you torch your savings or your investors’ cash.

Sara Blakely felt this with pantyhose, got annoyed enough to cut the feet off, and boom – Spanx became a billion-dollar company. But for every Spanx, there are thousands of passionate founders solving problems that only they had.

3. The "Let Me Just Learn Everything" Path

This one's my favorite—it led to my first and third exits. With MEA, I jumped into mobile development back in 2009, not as an expert, but as an observer. I took on projects, watched the space evolve, and noticed something glaring: developers were getting sidelined. Advertisers & App Stores held all the power, controlling the revenue and the data. The solution was obvious: give developers access to their own application data, sprinkle in some analytics and enable real-time A/B testing and QA of new features via an SDK. That insight became my first exit. Fast forward to GoMblty. While my friends were building Bird, Lime, and Lyft, I stayed in the background—consulting, advising, and taking on projects they needed extra hands on. That’s when I noticed a key gap: they struggled to gain traction with corporates and universities because those clients wanted to control vehicle and scooter operations on their privately owned land. The result? A B2B2C mobility solution tailored to their needs. Less than 12 months later, it was acquired by Envoy—a company with the clients and infrastructure to scale it.

Sometimes, the win comes from simply watching the gaps others overlook and making a move with calculated timing.

Look at Elon with Tesla – he didn't start it, he just got really curious about electric vehicles, started drawing, prototyping and working on passion projects with experts globally, jumped fully in to learn, and well, you know the rest. Then he did the same thing with rockets. 🚀

Here's what I've learned through trial and error:

• The best ideas rarely come from brainstorming sessions

• Curiosity beats strategy

• Validation beats passion

• Consistency beats perfection

The path doesn't matter as much as your willingness to be wrong, adjust, and keep moving. My successful companies look nothing like their original plans. The failed ones? Stuck more closely to the plan until the bitter end.

So, stop asking "What business should I start?"

Start asking:

• What makes me curious enough to stay up late?

• What problems do I notice that others ignore?

• What industry fascinates me enough to learn everything about it and invest time for months, or potentially years?

The answer might just be your next company. Or not. That's the fun part – you won't know until you're in it.

Until next time,

Yoela

P.S. Sitting on a business idea or have an experience to share? Hit reply – would truly make my day.