Issue #018 — A founder I keep thinking about

Friend,

There is a founder I keep thinking about. I will not name her, because the story is hers to tell and she has not yet.

She runs a company you have probably not heard of. Twelve people. Hardware-and-software, in a category most investors consider unsexy. Profitable since year three. She has turned down every offer to raise. She makes, by my back-of-the-envelope estimate, more from her ownership stake than most of the venture-backed founders who get podcast spots.

I do not bring her up to argue against venture capital. There are plenty of correct reasons to raise. I bring her up because the dominant story we tell about ambition has narrowed, and it is starting to crowd out the kinds of companies that, historically, made up most of the economy.

She told me once that the most useful decision she ever made was to size her company to her life rather than her life to her company. That is a sentence I have written in three notebooks since. Size the company to the life, not the life to the company. It rearranges almost every downstream choice.

She works four days a week, properly, with a phone that does not have email on it. She pays herself a salary that lets her live somewhere green. The company grows at fifteen percent a year, which is not a number that gets you a TechCrunch article, and is a number that compounds into something serious over a decade. She told me she will probably never sell. She might pass it to one of the team. She has not decided.

What I want to say about her, mostly, is that her company is boring in the precise way that strong companies are boring. The boredom is the strength. There is no week-to-week drama. There is no narrative. There is, instead, a set of practices repeated long enough to become a shape.

I think we under-write the boring company. I think the loudest case studies are usually the most fragile ones, and the quietest ones are usually the ones still standing in twenty years. I think there is a generation of would-be founders who are being told the only legitimate ambition is to grow fast and exit, and I think that is, gently, a lie.

If you are building something quiet, you are not building something small. You might be building the thing.

Yours,
Enova