all companies die. it’s still worth it to build one.
I’ve been going through a moment that most adults go through: they look at their parents and realize their lives, much like our own, are temporary and won’t remain the same as they were.
But for me, it’s been about companies. The early stage companies that dominated my thoughts and our tech news cycle for the past 10 years are no longer growing empires. They are just empires.
It intuitively makes sense, but companies die all of the time. I know 3 from personal friends that have been shut down in the past 2 years, one just yesterday. Building a company is a journey that in all cases, leads to eventual death.
A company innovates, becomes big or reaches success, doesn’t scale and gets eaten OR scales and eats others only to become bloated, the disease becomes terminal and the company dies by a thousand cuts over years, and it dies pretty much as quietly as it started.
For every crazy startup that nosedived in front of us in the spirit of FTX or more recently, Stability AI, there is another company that has served hundreds of thousands and has died without any of those thousands really caring.
A company is a living thing, run by living things, and grows and decays like they all do. The companies I thought would eternally light our way are starting to dim. I feel sad, in a sense. Watching these firms that I considered to be infallible titans turn into a sequel of the slow death of IBM has confronted me with the truth of it all.
You can win and rise to the top, but the top is never a position permanently occupied by anyone.
And much like the existential crisis that comes with thinking about human death, a very special existential crisis comes from company deaths. These deaths are in a sense, staggering because of their very scale and presence.
Billions of dollars, human employees who take the revenue home to keep their families alive and healthy, thousands of customers, manufacturing contracts, marketing teams, 3rd party consultants, storefronts, and logistics infrastructure. It’s as physical as anything else in our world, and it dies like it too.
Companies, especially at the top of their game, seem like inescapable presences, similar to countries in diplomacy and consistently having the power to change our world in ways that even governments cannot.
It’s actually quite funny to me how most founders and CEOs are men and that running a business has historically been considered by men to be outside the realm of capabilities of a woman, considering a company is much like raising a child or running a family. Most stay at home moms I know budget and financial forecast better than any Forbes 30u30 founder.
But you are, in essence, devoting yourself for an undefinable risk. I’m also someone who believes that building companies to make money is a great way to disappoint yourself. Something like 90% of startups fail, fewer live, fewer even than actually scale, and 1–2 become industry leading household names.
When facing the 90% failure, you have to wonder about the devotion that leads it there. The actual, tangible outcome that a company creates. What the purpose of it existing actually is.
And when you confront the reality that most companies are fated to, you have to ask yourself why. Especially, as a founder. Scaling an empire is hard, but getting a company WORTH scaling even going is much fucking harder.
When you are a ‘founder’, you are no longer a person. You are an agent of a company working to sustain its’ own existence outside of yours.
What’s the point of building a company that’s going to die?
For it to exist in the world at all.
To be a step forward, or a step to learn from. To be a sidenote in a book, or to just be at conference in time. To build a company even if it dies is to build a method of distribution in this world. Whether or not it takes on a life outside of you is really only secondary.
But, it’s about doing something to this world instead of letting it do anything it wants to us. All companies will die. But what we do to bring them to fruition is what survives within us.
