You Are Not Your Startup
How do we separate our egos from our work? Just ask the unicorpse.
I hoped one day to make the cover of Fortune — just not for writing an article summarized on that cover as “Lessons from a founder at the crossroads of failure” next to a picture of a unicorpse.
The past four years I’ve been working on a startup that hasn’t worked. Yet.
In between now and “yet”, it’s been the typical rollercoaster. Today Fortune published an essay I wrote on the journey. It begins with this prologue:
Somewhere I heard that a startup doesn’t fail when it fails. It fails when the founders give up.
In this “money is no longer free” market, that begs two questions: When should founders give up? And how should those founders manage their psychology while seeking the answers to such a momentous question?
The piece will be published in print in the February/March 2024 issue of Fortune under the title of “Face to face with failure.” The editor-in-chief at Fortune came up with an alt-title today, spontaneously, which I loved:
You are not your startup.
I asked Alyson if I could steal it. She said sure.
They say entrepreneurship is sometimes theft — ”borrowing” ideas from a corner of the present, making them the future, and then taking the credit.
Maybe being a writer is sometimes similar?
In light of all going on in academia, journalism, and AI, maybe too soon…
Proof of theft:
A few ways to get to the article:
- on Fortune.com
- my LinkedIN post
- via Fortune on ex-Twitter
- Alyson’s ex-tweet
I’ve been impressed with the team at Fortune. From Alyson, to the features editor Matt Heimer who suggested the piece, and my recently recruited friend Jason Del Rey, it seems a terrific team.
It would have to be to come up with the term unicorpse.
