Most founders are not derailed by failure. They are derailed by the expectation that their progress should make sense. Nothing about the early journey is linear — not the learning, not the progress, not the psychology.
Founders do not realize this until they are already inside the chaos. Until then, they carry a dangerous assumption. If I am moving in a straight line, I am doing it right. If I am not, I am doing it wrong.
This assumption quietly destroys more companies than bad product decisions ever will. The straight line is comforting. It suggests that if you think hard enough and plan well enough, progress will stack cleanly on top of itself. This is the lie that pitch decks, investor blogs, social media threads, and tidy post mortems teach us. But talk to any founder who survived pre-seed and eventually found real traction. They will tell you the same thing. What success looked like on paper was nothing like what it felt like in real life. On paper, it looked inevitable. In reality, it looked like chaos. Pre-seed is not a linear ascent. It is not a puzzle you can solve. It is not a plan you can execute with discipline. Pre-seed is something different. It is a Drunken Walk. A stagger. A sequence of hard collisions with reality. A confusing and uncomfortable process of stumbling toward the first thing that truly works. This is not the part you push through on the way to the real journey. This is the journey. Once founders understand that the straight line is a lie, something important shifts. They stop panicking about the chaos. They start learning from it. That is the moment direction begins to reveal itself. THE STARTUP GRAPH NO ONE WANTS TO BELIEVEEvery founder begins with some version of this curve. A jagged, irregular, confusing shape that seems to mock the idea of progress. It does not look like momentum. It looks like failure. Only in hindsight, when you zoom out, do you understand what the graph actually represents. It is the raw process of discovery. It is the formation of founder intuition. It is the sequence of collisions required before a real direction becomes visible. Every wobble contains a lesson. This is why the straight line is a lie. Startups do not grow like plants. They evolve like organisms adapting to a volatile environment. They mutate. They adjust. They react to pressure until something finally clicks. Founders often feel embarrassed by the zigzags. They assume everyone else has a cleaner trajectory. But that is only because we rarely see the messy middle. We see only the polished outcomes. Every founder who eventually made it lived through the wobble, even if their public story looks smooth today. This is where Sam Altman’s now familiar reflection fits perfectly.
Altman is a reminder of something every pre-seed founder needs to internalize. The early line never looks straight for anyone. It only looks straight when you compress the painful years into a neat story. His reflection captures the heart of the Drunken Walk. Your early stumbles matter far less than the market signals you eventually learn to detect. WHAT THE DATA ACTUALLY TELLS USAcross multiple independent datasets, the pattern is consistent. About 90 percent of startups fail. These are not discouraging numbers. They are clarifying ones. Most founders misinterpret the statistics. They think the message is that founders are not good enough, or that teams make too many mistakes, or that execution was weak. But the real interpretation is simpler. Most founders expect the world to give them a straight line. The world gives them noise instead. The failure is not in the idea. The failure is in how founders respond to uncertainty. Founders who expect chaos learn from it. Founders who expect clarity break under it. Pre-seed is not a battle against the market. It is a battle against your expectations about how progress is supposed to feel. WHY THE STRAIGHT LINE MYTH PERSISTSThis myth stays alive year after year for three reasons that have nothing to do with how startups actually work. Reason 1: We tell startup stories in hindsightAirbnb’s early credit card debt now looks like evidence of grit. Hindsight flattens all the zigzags. Reason 2: Pitch decks reward simplificationFounders compress their chaos into tidy slides. We do not know where the next useful signal will come from. Reason 3: Social media hides the messy middleFounders only share insights once they have survived the stage that created those insights. This misunderstanding leads many first time founders to expect the one thing pre-seed never provides. Order. CHAOS IS THE ONLY HONEST MARKET RESEARCH AT PRE-SEEDFounders at this stage often try to avoid chaos by relying on structured tools. User personas. The problem is that these tools were built for environments where the variables are partially known. At pre-seed, almost none of your variables are known. Many of the ones you believe are true are actively wrong. This is why chaos is not a distraction. It is your only reliable teacher. At pre-seed: Customers do not yet know what they want. Real learning does not come from interviews. Real learning comes from repeated collisions with reality. These collisions feel like chaos. They are the curriculum. WHY YOUR FIRST PAYING CUSTOMER STRAIGHTENS THE LINEIn the Drunken Walk, almost everything is ambiguous until something is not. The first thing that is never ambiguous is payment. Not praise. Money. A single person paying even a small amount for something unpolished forces clarity. It proves several things immediately. The problem is real. This is the first signal that cannot be misread. One paying customer produces more truth than one hundred flattering conversations. WHY THE WALK FEELS LIKE CHAOS BUT FUNCTIONS LIKE COMPRESSIONHere is the deeper insight almost no one explains clearly. The Drunken Walk is compressing thousands of data points into your intuition. Every contradictory comment. All of it is training your mind to detect genuine patterns, sense real demand, ignore false signals, separate interest from intent, and recognize when something feels right before metrics confirm it. This intuition is not magic. And it only forms in chaos. A straight journey cannot produce it. This is why the founders who survive pre-seed become the ones investors describe as insightful or intuitive. The intuition was not a gift. It was earned inside the fog. WHY STRAIGHT LINES PRODUCE WEAKER FOUNDERSIf the early journey did unfold in a smooth, predictable line, you would be significantly worse off. You would develop weaker pattern recognition. A straight path feels pleasant. The Drunken Walk feels unpleasant. The chaos you feel now is not a tax. THE STRAIGHT LINE IS A LIE, BUT DIRECTION IS REALWhen you finally stumble into something that works, the line does not become straight. But it becomes directional. Maybe it is a user who keeps coming back. You wobble less. Direction does not feel like clarity. You stop asking what should we build. That shift changes everything. THE WALK MAKES YOU WORTH BETTING ONPre-seed is not an obstacle on the way to product market fit. Pre-seed is the forge. The Drunken Walk produces intuition, humility, resilience, rapid learning ability, sensemaking skill, pattern recognition, and strategic adaptability. These are the traits investors bet on. These are the traits customers feel in your product. These traits separate enduring companies from forgettable ones. You do not gain these traits on a straight path. You gain them by surviving the part of the journey everyone else tries to avoid. YOU ARE NOT BEHIND. YOU ARE NOT FAILING. YOU ARE EARLY.If you are in the fog right now, here is the truth. You are not lost. You are not inadequate. You are not doing it wrong. You are in the part nobody glamorizes but every real founder remembers. You are discovering the truth the straight line always hides. Direction comes from movement. Keep walking. Because somewhere inside this jagged and exhausting curve is the moment everything changes. The moment the line bends upward. Not because of luck. Because you earned the signal. - Before you build anything, make sure someone wants it enough to pay. I put together a free 7-day email course on revenue-first customer discovery — how to pull real buying intent from real conversations (without guessing, overbuilding, or hoping). If you’re a builder who wants clarity before code:
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Thursday, December 4, 2025
The Straight Line Is a Lie: How Startups Really Find Direction
Monday, December 1, 2025
The Curiosity Driven Founder
The Curiosity Driven FounderWhy Your Brain’s Most Underestimated Network Determines Your Startup’s Fate
Some founders seem to gather insight at an unnatural pace. They process complex situations faster. They pivot with less emotional friction. They notice market shifts earlier. They connect dots that appear invisible to others. They build a sense of direction in chaotic environments that should overwhelm them. This pattern is not intelligence. It is not experience. It is not grit. It is something more fundamental. These founders are unusually curious in a way that is both cognitive and behavioral. They continue to learn while everyone else has quietly stopped learning. They keep expanding their models while others are protecting their assumptions. Curiosity is not a soft personality trait. It is a neural and psychological system that changes how founders absorb information, detect opportunity, reduce uncertainty, and adapt to the world around them. Early-stage founders do not fail because they are not disciplined enough. They fail because they stop learning soon after they start building. Your brain was not designed to thrive inside predictable environments. It was designed to thrive inside ambiguous ones. Curiosity is the mechanism through which it does so. Startups are nothing but prolonged ambiguity. If your curiosity weakens, your startup weakens with it. This is the operating manual for understanding how curiosity works within the founder brain, why it matters more than grit or speed, and how it quietly governs early traction long before most people recognize it. Founders Do Not Win Because They Work Hard. They Win Because They Learn Fast.We often believe they succeed through effort. We build long task lists, push through fatigue, and treat progress as a function of hours. Although effort matters, it sits on the wrong level of the stack. Early-stage companies live in an environment defined by unknowns.
Most founder failures are learning failures. They do not understand their user deeply enough. They misread the market. They ignore weak signals. They cling to their first idea. They stay inside a narrow feedback loop. They repeat the same weekly routine without updating their mental models. Curiosity is the engine that prevents all of these mistakes. It is the mechanism that pushes the founder to keep asking better questions, keep exploring unusual inputs, keep revising assumptions, and keep looking for truth even when pressure makes comfort feel more tempting.
Curiosity without execution is insight without outcomes. The founders who win combine both, but curiosity comes first. It tells you what is worth executing in the first place. The Brain Science: Curiosity Primes the Mind for High Learning VelocityModern neuroscience has mapped curiosity with surprising clarity. In a widely cited 2014 study, Matthias J. Gruber and colleagues placed participants in an fMRI scanner and measured how their brains responded to curiosity. The findings were striking. Curiosity increased activation in the ventral tegmental area, a dopamine-rich region associated with motivation. It increased activation in the hippocampus, which is responsible for memory formation. It increased activation in the nucleus accumbens, which is involved in anticipation and reward. Even more surprisingly, people remembered unrelated information presented during states of high curiosity. This means curiosity enhances the brain’s overall learning state, not just the specific thing you are curious about. For a founder, this matters because early-stage problems rarely arrive in clean categories. You are navigating user behavior, incentives, psychology, market dynamics, technical constraints, competitive pressure, monetization models, human motivation, and your own bias. If your brain is in a high learning state, you absorb more from every conversation, every data point, and every signal. You move through complexity with less friction. Curiosity creates a cognitive multiplier. It increases plasticity at the very moment you need it most. Why Founders Lose Curiosity Even When They Need It MostAlmost every founder begins curious. The early excitement of ideation creates a natural information-seeking behavior. Everything is new. Every conversation feels important. Every question is open. The founder's mind is alive. Then the work begins. You ship a product. Routine enters. Pressure increases. The brain shifts into execution mode. Novelty declines. Cognitive loops become repetitive. The neural circuits responsible for curiosity depend on novelty, uncertainty, and what psychologists call prediction error. Once your week begins to look similar to the previous week, the curiosity network quiets. Many founders interpret this as increased discipline or focus. In reality, it is often the opposite. It is a reduction in cognitive openness. The founder becomes more rigid. They begin to default to what they already know. Their ability to update becomes slower. They cling to assumptions. They stop exploring. They protect their identity. They lose touch with users. They lose sensitivity to nuance. They drift into a version of autopilot. This is how startups die without obvious mistakes. The founder simply loses the curiosity that created the spark. Curiosity Is Not About Novelty. It Is About Model Building.People often confuse curiosity with novelty seeking. That is not what drives successful founders. The richest form of curiosity is not a desire for stimulation. It is a desire for deeper and more accurate internal models of the world. A founder is essentially a model builder. You build a model of what users value. A model of how your product should behave. A model of how distribution will work. A model of why your pricing structure makes sense. A model of your competitive landscape. A model of the friction points inside your funnel. Weak founders operate with shallow models. They attach themselves to early assumptions and then simply execute. Strong founders operate with evolving models. They are always learning, always revising, always refining, always testing. Their models become more dimensional, more predictive, and more resilient to shocks. Curiosity is the psychological force that drives these revisions. It pushes the founder to ask questions that feel uncomfortable. It allows them to abandon a belief that no longer aligns with reality. It enables them to change their mind without losing momentum. The founder who updates fastest wins. Research Shows Curious Entrepreneurs Outperform OthersEntrepreneurship research rarely becomes mainstream because founders gravitate toward tactical advice. Yet several rigorous studies have demonstrated the central role of curiosity in entrepreneurial success. In a 2024 study published in the Journal of Business Research, Samuel Adomako and colleagues found that founders with high entrepreneurial curiosity consistently delivered stronger product innovation, stronger process innovation, and stronger venture performance. The mediating factor was persistent information search, which means curious founders continuously gather and evaluate new inputs. A 2022 study published in Behavioral Sciences found that entrepreneurs who score high on curiosity show greater adaptability, higher opportunity recognition, better creative ideation, and stronger resilience during uncertainty. Harvard Business Review summarized related research showing that curiosity reduces confirmation bias, improves analytical decision making, fosters better team communication, and increases overall problem-solving quality under uncertain conditions. The evidence is not subtle. Curious founders outperform because they accumulate insight faster, revise their models more often, and navigate complexity with greater precision. Curiosity Creates Resilience in a Way Grit CannotGrit is the ability to push through discomfort. Curiosity is the ability to transform discomfort into interest. These are not the same thing. Most founders attempt to survive difficulty through grit alone. They push harder. They try to work longer. They power through stress. But grit eventually collapses if the founder’s cognitive world remains narrow and repetitive. Curiosity creates a different experience. When a founder is curious, the brain interprets difficulty as data. Challenges turn into puzzles. Failure becomes a signal. Unexpected outcomes create fascination rather than fear. The founder stays cognitively alert instead of emotionally exhausted. This is resilience of a higher order. It is not effort-based. It is perception-based. Curiosity changes how the founder interprets reality. It creates psychological endurance because every setback becomes meaningful information rather than a demoralizing event. Startups reward the founder who can remain present in uncertainty without shutting down. Curiosity is the mechanism that makes this possible. Most founders talk about curiosity as if it were a binary state. You are either curious or you are not. In reality, curiosity behaves more like a spectrum. Different founders operate at different altitudes of curiosity, and each altitude produces a very different style of thinking, learning, leadership, and strategy. The most important insight is that founder failure is almost always tied to being stuck in one of the lower zones, while exceptional founders operate in the upper ones. Many of the most respected thinkers in tech have been saying this for more than a decade. They may not frame it as neuroscience, but the underlying pattern is identical: curiosity drives discovery. Paul Graham captured this principle with unusual clarity.
This is not just advice about ideas. It is a statement about how founders should engage with the world. You do not generate insight by sitting in a room and forcing novelty. You generate insight by maintaining a curious orientation toward problems, contradictions, irritations, and unmet needs in your own life. This is early-stage curiosity in its purest form. It is the mental stance that sets great founders apart long before a product exists. And it sets the stage for understanding the different levels of curiosity that founders operate from. Once you see the spectrum clearly, you start to understand why some founders plateau early while others continue to grow in complexity, sophistication and insight. Here is the Curiosity Spectrum for Founders.
The shift from Zone 1 to Zone 4 is not a shift in personality. It is a shift in cognitive behavior. Founders do not become great because they are inherently smarter. They become great because they gradually move upward along this spectrum. Zone 1 founders cling to assumptions. This upward movement determines a founder’s ceiling. The higher you operate on the spectrum, the more dimensional your thinking becomes, the more competitive your strategy becomes, and the more resilient your mind becomes when the market is chaotic. This sets up the next idea. Curiosity does not just make you more open. It makes your thinking more dimensional. Many experienced founders intuitively understand what this spectrum represents. They may not use the same terminology, but they describe the exact same shift. They talk about progress emerging not from certainty, but from asking better questions. They talk about navigating industries they do not fully understand. They talk about curiosity as the energy source behind unconventional thinking. Here is an example from Christian Rebernik, a founder who has built and led multiple ventures.
This pattern shows up again when you study the origin stories of companies that defined entire categories. When Reid Hoffman interviewed Brian Chesky about Airbnb’s early days, Chesky described his entire approach as curiosity-driven. Not analytical. Not automated. Human curiosity applied directly to the real world.
This is Zone 3 and Zone 4 curiosity in action. Chesky did not rely on dashboards or high-level summaries. He relied on direct sensory experience. He leaned into the unknown. He went to the source. He placed himself inside the user context and allowed reality to reshape his assumptions. This is what high curiosity looks like when it crosses into operational behavior. It is the difference between founders who assume and founders who learn. Between founders who build abstractions and founders who build truths. This is the pattern you see repeatedly among founders who operate in the upper zones of the Curiosity Spectrum. They do not anchor themselves to being right. They anchor themselves to discovering what else could be true. They go deeper than the obvious. They explore industries where they do not have expertise and allow curiosity to close the gap. This is not motivational advice. It is a cognitive tactic. Founders who stay in Zone 1 or Zone 2 cannot access this depth because they avoid the discomfort of uncertainty. But founders who consistently operate in Zone 3 or Zone 4 treat uncertainty as an invitation. They metabolize the unknown instead of resisting it. That is why they move faster, learn faster, and see more than their peers. This leads directly to the next idea. Curiosity not only expands what founders notice. It expands how many dimensions they can think across. Curiosity Expands the Dimensionality of a Founder’s ThinkingHigh-performing founders do not simply think more. They think across more dimensions. They integrate more variables. They see more relationships between elements. They connect dots from unrelated domains. They treat contradictions as starting points for insight. Curiosity is the force that expands the dimensionality of your thinking. It introduces new perspectives, new analogies, new mental models, new constraints, and new possibilities. Curiosity increases the cognitive surface area through which ideas can attach to your mind. This is why many of the best founders read widely across fields that have no immediate connection to their startup. They pull ideas from anthropology, behavioral economics, design, psychology, architecture, sociology, and philosophy. Cross-disciplinary exposure becomes a competitive advantage because it creates a richer toolkit for solving problems. Dimensional thinking is rare. Curiosity is how you build it. Contradiction Seeking Is the Highest Form of Founder CuriosityThe most important and least understood form of curiosity is the ability to actively seek contradiction. Most founders are unconsciously looking for validation. They want users to confirm their idea. They want metrics to confirm their direction. They want investors to confirm their thinking. Validation feels good. Contradiction feels uncomfortable. Yet contradiction is the fastest path to truth. Curious founders ask questions that might embarrass them. They run experiments that might disprove their strategy. They keep looking for signals that force them to reconsider. They treat every user conversation as an opportunity to destroy a false belief. Research from University College London showed that highly curious individuals display greater activation in brain regions that support cognitive flexibility. They are more willing to entertain conflicting information. This trait is essential for founders because early data is noisy, users are inconsistent, and markets do not conform to your preferences. If you want to find the right answer, you must become very comfortable being wrong. Curiosity Has a Higher Ceiling Than IntelligenceFounders often overestimate the value of intelligence and underestimate the value of curiosity. Intelligence is a static trait that creates the capacity to process information. Curiosity is a dynamic trait that governs what information you are exposed to in the first place. A highly intelligent founder with low curiosity will explore a narrow slice of possibilities. A moderately intelligent founder with high curiosity will explore a wider set of ideas, ask more questions, test more assumptions, and revise their models more aggressively. Over time, the curious founder will develop far more accurate and useful internal models than the intelligent founder who remains within a narrow cognitive range. Startups reward breadth of understanding combined with depth of insight. Curiosity is the only trait that grows both breadth and depth at the same time. The curious founder eventually sees more, understands more, and adapts more effectively. Their ceiling is simply higher. Founders Who Treat Curiosity as a Resource Build Better CompaniesCuriosity compounds. It compounds across conversations, across experiments, across reading, across user interviews, and across mistakes. A founder who stays curious accumulates insight in the same way an investor accumulates capital. It builds a foundation that supports better decisions at every level of the company. Curiosity improves the product because you understand your user better. Founders who cultivate curiosity do not need constant external validation. They develop internal grounding. They remain adaptive even when pressure is high. They do not cling to outdated models. They keep evolving. In early-stage environments, the ability to evolve is worth more than stability, more than brilliance, and more than planning. Curiosity is the trait that produces continuous evolution. Final Thought: Curiosity Is the Founder’s Real Competitive AdvantageCuriosity is not entertainment. It is not a distraction. It is not optional. It is a core cognitive system required for navigating uncertainty. A founder who remains curious stays alive in the mental sense. They continue to perceive, adapt, learn, synthesize, experiment, and revise. The founder who does not remain curious becomes fixed. They operate on stale assumptions. They fail to notice change. They stop learning long before the market stops teaching. Startups reward those who learn longer than others can endure. Curiosity is the mechanism that keeps you in that game. It is not the loudest trait. It is not the one that gets quoted on social media. But it is the trait that silently determines whether a founder builds something that lasts. Curiosity is the real competitive advantage. If you protect it, it will protect your company. - Before you build anything, make sure someone wants it enough to pay. I put together a free 7-day email course on revenue-first customer discovery — how to pull real buying intent from real conversations (without guessing, overbuilding, or hoping). If you’re a builder who wants clarity before code:
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The Straight Line Is a Lie: How Startups Really Find Direction
Pre-seed progress never feels linear. It feels like confusion, backtracking, and contradiction. Here’s why that chaos is not a problem but t...
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