You are not your company

A lot of founders are very proud of the companies they built. Many, after they sell, find themselves adrift and surprisingly unhappy. Millions in a bank account and no obligations–and unhappy?

Yep. It’s a thing.

But the bigger thing is founders conflating their identity with their company.

You are not your company, just as an employee is a person, not their job title or role. Only when you recognize this can the whole world of opportunity open up. Here are some examples in which you can be limited by feeling that your company’s success is your success.

Sharing responsibility

It is very hard for founders to let go of many things, and one of the hardest is the sales process. Even if they don’t like sales, the customers feel important, those relationships feel important, and it’s easy to cling to this for too long. You wouldn’t want some new hire to misrepresent you.

But it’s not you. They represent your company, not you.

This is true in every department, and for every function. Let your team build relationships with your partners and your company will be more successful. You can (and should) be involved, but it isn’t only about you.

Acquisition

To many founders selling is the end. And, in reality, it can be an end. But the founderwill go on. One founder I knew early on sold his bootstrapped company to Expedia and became an opera singer. For real. Maybe it’s a thing?

If you can separate yourself from your company you can look at offers more dispassionately, and possibly take one that–if your ego is to wrapped up in the company’s success–might be a better outcome for you personally than the alternative.

Team and spending

A founder of a company that went from cash rich to on the constant brink of insolvency kept ordering the absolute most expensive SWAG of any startup I’d ever seen. SWAG that was too expensive for even Google. Why? Because he viewed it as an extension of himself, and he didn’t want to have cheap SWAG.

This same mentality can lead to keeping team members on even if they are not top performers or if the company’s needs have changed. The feeling that the company has responsibility to them comes from you feeling that you have responsibility to them, but you don’t. Because you are not the company. Of course, take care of them if you can with generous severance. But keeping someone who is underperforming or in an unnecessary job serves no one.

Fundraising

It’s hard to take criticism if it’s directed ad hominem at you–but frequently, that isn’t how feedback is meant. Instead it is observations on your company’s metrics, not you personally. By separating yourself from your company you can listen and understand, rather than defend.

It’s also hard to let go of existential survival thoughts. If you are your company, and the end of the company means the end of you, you will do things that you may perhaps regret later to keep it going. Did the word “Theranos” spring to mind? By separating self from company, you can act more dispassionately when it comes to “needing” to keep the lights on.

Shutting down

Startups are experiments. Capitalized differently than a corporations in-house experiments, but experiments none the less. Sometimes they don’t work. In the movies, people persevere through this adversity and figure it out. But this is real life, not a movie, and if you are skilled enough at something to raise significant capital there is a very high opportunity cost for you to continue to work on a failed experiment. In nearly every successful founder’s background is at least 1 failed startup. That is what makes America and Silicon Valley so special. You learn and move on.

Delegation

There comes a point where the people (especially executives) you’ve hired are better at the job than you are. The best CEOs acknowledge this and change their role. Perhaps they stay as CEO. Perhaps they find a new CEO and move on. When you are tired of your job, you don’t have to sell. If selling is an option, hiring a replacement is probably also an option. This is hard to do if your identity is your company.

Success

Success looks like a lot of different things to different people. Conflating your identity with your startup early on can be an asset–it provides drive, an unwillingness to allow failure, and the perserverence to smash through walls. But as your company grows, it can be a major impediment to both the company’s success and your own success. Be careful.

If you can recognize the difference between yourself and your company early, while you’re still operating, it will also increase your chances of finding happiness afterwards– whether you had to shut down, or you have millions in a bank account and no obligations.