Please don't pretend that we are already successful.

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Please don’t pretend that we are already successful.

This is on behalf of all the founders who wish they could share it with their team.

The founders might be rock stars, the investors might be tier 1, the interview might have been 7 rounds, you might be at pre-seed or series B, your colleagues might be coming from big-name companies, your title might be anything from intern to founder. You might be in it for years already, and yet we might still fail.

Please don’t pretend that we are already successful. See the evidence with your own eyes. Make up your own mind. We haven’t made it until we have made it.

Let’s say you are a software developer working at a tech startup.

What happens if you pretend that your employer is already successful when they are not?

You start thinking, now is the time to make everything scalable.

You go back to the comfort of, “let’s just keep improving our code, I’m sure everything will work out.”

There’s an infinite amount of busy work you can invent to keep yourself occupied forever.

You start looking for your slice. The company is already successful, right?

You should be getting promotions and titles and people reporting to you.

You stop asking the hard questions. You think they have been answered already.

All of it takes us further away from any real chance of success.

And let’s see what happens when all of us realize that maybe we are not already successful.

We can decide to fix it, when all of us know that the current direction isn’t working, we can all speak freely and truthfully and nobody gets offended.

No matter how much of our heart and soul we poured into it, if it didn’t work out, we give ourselves another chance at another direction. It sucks, but it sucks less than working in the wrong direction longer.

Nobody is looking for their slice when the pie is not worth anything.

Nobody is fighting for promotions or asking for raises or upping their work-life balance.

If you were hired correctly, you all work together to save the ship or maybe you lose a few non-believers along the way.

We don’t shy away from asking hard questions.

I wrote this for all the founders that wish they could share this with their team, but can’t or won’t. This is a hard conversation to have once, let alone having it again and again with everyone.

It’s like admitting defeat, but it’s not actually admitting defeat. Pretending doesn’t avoid failure, it just delays it. Face it today instead of tomorrow. Maybe this approach didn’t work, but you didn’t lose forever. You still want to give it a shot, and you want to do it right. Is that so bad? Is that so hard?

You only have to be right once. How many are right the first time?

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