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
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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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