Stay Light Like Air

The first time I raised, I was a bit cocky. I turned down investors because I was sure I could raise at a higher valuation, and I learned that the hard way, watching the window close on me while I held out.

I still pulled it off. I had a genuinely new model, something nobody else was doing, in a market that wasn’t saturated yet, and I closed the round about a month before a cyclical crypto crash. Suddenly I had real money and a comfortable runway.

That’s exactly where the trap was hiding.

Because I had runway, I told myself I could keep the whole team through anything, even while I was pivoting between ideas. But on the ground, something quieter was happening. I had a team, so I felt I had to give them jobs. So I kept iterating on small ideas and launching things faster, just to keep everyone busy. I was stuck in that loop for a long time, and it was a dead loop, I wasn’t focused on the actual business, the real approach, the real moves I needed to make. The runway didn’t save me. It made me heavy.

Here’s the lesson: a startup is already heavy by itself. You don’t add weight as a founder, your job is to stay light, because light is what lets you run.

And light goes way beyond cash. Cash matters, control your spending, and when you’re unsure of a direction, it’s completely okay to wind down a big chunk of the team and move leaner. The thinner you are, the faster you move. But money is only the first kind of weight.

The second is the team’s spirit. Someone who isn’t actually interested in the problem is deadweight, even if they’re talented. They flatten the meetings, cool down the ideas, make the chemistry heavier. Your one job as a founder is to keep the team energized, and a disinterested person quietly drones that energy down. Cut the rope. Let them go.

The third is the worst: people who won’t risk enough. The ones hedging their bets, another job on the side, another income, a quiet plan B, even while they’re paid full-time. As a person, hedging is fine, even smart. Inside a startup it’s poison. Because the great founders are right: there’s no plan B. If you have one, you won’t push plan A with everything you’ve got. And the moment your committed people see others hedging, they get jealous, they start hedging too, and suddenly nobody is all in. A startup is an asymmetric, full-value play. If everyone risks nothing, you don’t have a startup, you have people farming each other and wasting each other’s time.

So you cut the hedgers first. Even the good ones. Not to punish them, to respect the people who are all in, and make sure their sacrifice is seen and paid back with the full upside. That’s what makes the committed ones push even harder.

And you, the founder, can’t hedge either. If you’re hedging, why would anyone invest in you or follow you? Be the first one all in, carrying no weight.

A startup has to stay thin to run fast, like a footballer who has to sprint, cut, and change direction mid-game. You only get that flexibility by dropping every weight you can: the cash, the team size, the people who don’t care, and the people who won’t risk it.

---