I remember at the tail end of my last company, I didn’t want to shut it down because some smart people were starting to “believe” in me. For example, I had a writing marketplace and a Harvard grad was entertaining the idea of writing for us. In addition, a VC in the Rough Draft Ventures program also wanted to work for us on a volunteer basis. I thought I was a recruiting god. Clearly, if I was attracting talent like Harvard alum and Rough Draft Fellows, I was onto something right? And it would be wrong of me to shut down something that was starting to get traction, right? Wrong. These people didn’t actually care. They were throwing positive signals at me in case I became the next Google, yet I mistook the signals for leaps of trust and commitment. After I shut the company down, I never heard from them again. I saw them as traction in my biased brain, yet when times got hard, they were nowhere to be found. The explanation for this is the search for social status….

People care about knowing the founder before they became THE founder. They care about being a first 100 user of the hottest app, not the hottest flop. But since there’s so many founders that flame out, the consensus behavior among the tech community is to just be nice to everyone. To make every founder think they’re onto something because out of the thousands out there, the few that actually make it will remember the people who cheered them on. The founders will think it was genuine, but it was really just a social capital bet.

This isn’t to say that founders don’t have real cheerleaders out there. Investors, advisors, and friends of the company can move mountains for a founder and the progress of a startup. I don’t know what I would do without my crew of supporters. It’s just outside of that crew, there are a mob of leeches, or as I like to call them, status seeking monkeys. People that want me to win enough to help improve their social status in case I do, but not enough to actually help me in any capacity get to that goal. These people provide a false sense of confidence & support that creates a reality distortion field for a founder that makes them think more people are in their corner than actually are. For a newer founder, this is dangerous.

It’s a minefield out there. Find people in your corner. Hold them tight. And forget what anyone else says about you, because it’s probably more for them than it is for you. This is how you win the mental game of the pre-seed startup arena. And remember, no one actually cares.