All about the money

Image created by ChatGPT with DALL·E

There are two types of concerns I get when talking to founders (and other ambitious people) about money:

1) They care about getting rich, but feel like they shouldn’t.

2) They don’t care about getting rich, but feel like they should. 

Let me address each one in turn. 

1. “Is it bad if I want to make a bunch of money?” 

I was a bit surprised at first when I kept hearing this from my tech founder clients. Why wouldn’t wealth creation be a valid and healthy goal, assuming it is indeed wealth creation—real value creation, not grift or fraud? Isn’t it obvious how wealth can be deployed in service of building the fully-lived life you envision?

But the moral stigma against money and wealth runs deep in our culture, and I find that many of my founder clients have internalized it to their detriment. This is probably exacerbated by my idealistic coaching: when they pick up on the principled vision of builders that animates my approach, they assume I must frown upon the pursuit of financial upside as overly “mercenary”. 

The first thing to note is that the potential to make truly astounding amounts of money is fairly unique to founders. It’s the monetary reward for fast growth, typically achieved by shouldering the pressure of racing to capture a new market fast enough and generally being beholden to a bunch of growth-hungry venture capitalists.

Many of the other facets of being of a founder can be achieved in other roles. You want autonomy? Be an independent contractor or consultant. You want social impact? Start a nonprofit, or be a public intellectual or influencer. You want to build and innovate in tech? Be the head of product or engineering at an innovative startup you like and believe in, where you don’t also have to fundraise or manage a team or build a company culture from scratch. You specifically like the idea of building a company culture from scratch? Build a lifestyle business that you can grow and run at your own pace and on your own terms.

Startups are a mode of business defined by rapid scale. This isn’t exclusively or primarily about money—I’ll return to this in a bit—but it is tightly and non-accidentally coupled to money. It would be weird for a startup founder to not care a lot about money.

Second, it is also weird that having lots of money is not seen as an obvious and enormous benefit. Money is liquid economic influence. One can do many amazing things with money, and the more creative and higher-agency one is, the more one can do with it.

More money means more ambitious projects. Money can fuel companies, political advocacy, art, and research. Money can be spent to perfect the furniture of one’s life in widening circles. Why wouldn’t a builder want lots of money? Money can be used, generally, to build, and more specifically, to build your own life, along many dimensions of that life. Everyone should want to make some money, but ambitious builders should be especially excited about the prospect of making lots of it. The more the better.

And yet many of the founders I work with don’t mention outright that this is a major part of their motivation. In fact they often get slightly sheepish or defensive when the topic comes up, insisting that it’s about the “mission” and the “impact” and “not really about the money”—as if a for-profit startup’s “mission” and “impact” could be meaningfully decoupled from the corresponding financial returns.

As a case-in-point of the stigma I’m talking about, look at this bar plot (shared by fellow Substacker

David Rozado

). It shows the relative likelihoods that OpenAI/ChatGPT’s Content Moderation Filter would flag as “hateful” a negative statement about a group. Notice where “wealthy people” fall.

Setting aside the broader political/ideological debate occasioned by this plot (which others are carrying on just fine without me on Twitter), let’s just pause and reflect on the fact that “wealthy people” got shortest shrift from OpenAI/ChatGPT—a model funded, of course, by some of Silicon Valley’s wealthiest investors, and built and trained by extremely well-compensated engineers.

This fits what I’ve observed in my own coaching practice: political leanings notwithstanding, many founders have a needlessly fraught, guilt-ridden relationship with wealth. As a result, they either downplay their financial ambition and lower the bar on the value they create—or they lean into the kinds of unscrupulous, short-sighted practices they’ve been led to believe are inherent in making money.

What if we applied the builder’s mindset? That is, what if we viewed money not through the moral lens of assumed impurity/exploitation/emptiness that is our cultural default, but strictly in relation to the fully-lived life one can aspire to build for oneself? Seen from this angle, money is one of humanity’s greatest technological innovations: a standardized medium of exchange that allows us to interrelate and multiply the value of our individual efforts, while honoring the full diversity of human talents, needs, goals, and circumstances. Money is a medium and measure of wealth, that is, of goods—whether material or intellectual—that enable and improve human life. It is the circulatory system of an economy, that is, of the human activity of working. People with lots of money can meaningfully influence that system, can incentivize it with very real rewards, can work to shape their world in ways they consider beneficial and worthy. (For more on this countercultural view of the moral meaning of money, see this epic “money speech” from Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, which was the inspiration for much of what I’ve written here.)

All that said, there is a sense in which it is deeply true that founding a company is “not really about the money”. Founding a company is about founding a company. It is about the activities of that company and the purpose of that company. It is not a mere means to money, interchangeable with any other means at your disposal. But common phrases like “it’s not a mere means to money,” or “it’s not about the money”, obscure the precise sense in which it is true, by suggesting that the money doesn’t much matter. Money matters a great deal, even if it’s not the direct, primary aim. That it is not first or only about the money, that it is not a mere means to money, does not mean it is not about the money or that money is an inessential end. 

Founding a company is “not really about the money” in the same sense that preparing a thoughtfully crafted meal is “not really about the nutrients”; it is about designing (and perhaps sharing) a specific sensory and aesthetic experience, expressing one’s creativity, etc. But the enjoyment you derive from all these aspects is contingent on trying to make a meal that is actually edible.  

To take a real-life example: recently I was meeting a new client—a seasoned founder who’d already successfully built and sold several prior startups—and I noticed he hadn’t checked the “mission-driven” box on a colleague’s referral form asking about his current company. Struck by how passionately he spoke about the problem his company was trying to solve, and the millions of lives that would improve if they succeeded, I asked: in what sense is his company not “mission-driven”? His answer: “it’s important to distinguish between a principled belief and a religion”—where “mission” has come to mean something more like the latter. Yes, he explained, solving this particular problem is currently what gets him up in the morning; but that’s partly because he’s seen evidence to suggest it’s a massive opportunity to create commercial value at scale. If at some point he and his cofounders see a new opportunity that better aligns with the market and with their distinct technical edge, he said, they will have no qualms about modifying the “mission” accordingly.

So what is his ultimate end game, I asked? “Wealth creation, nothing else,” he admitted, in a tone that implied he was bracing for some sort of moral indictment. 

And why does wealth creation matter to him, I asked? Because securing generational wealth for his family is a top priority. Well, and also because he thrives on it. 

Would he thrive on it if it did not involve solving problems in novel, high-tech ways for vast numbers of people? “No, I’ve tried that”; actually he left an “obscenely” high-paying job and took on a lot of financial risk to start this latest company.

Or would he still thrive on it if he considered the solution to be a mediocre one that appeals to people for base, irrational reasons? No, that wouldn’t do it either; what he thrives on is value creation, not the mere piling up of cash on false pretenses. Besides, he said, he loves excellence too much to tolerate doing something he considers mediocre for any stretch of time. 

Ironically, his approach struck me as far more “mission-driven”—in the original sense of being guided by long-range purpose and principles—than the approach of many founders who check the “mission-driven” box. Though by no means universal, a general pattern I’ve observed among the latter (often first-time) founders is that they prioritize virtue signaling about their “social impact” over the harder work of generating measurable economic impact. As founder and executive coach Casey Rosengren aptly put it: “To do meaningful work in the world, you have to care about margin as much as you care about mission.”

Money is not an end-in-itself—how could a medium of exchange be an end-in-itself?—but it is closely coupled to things that founders might rightly want. It enables them to buy things, both particular things (like the best possible education for his kids and grandkids, in my client’s case, or a vacation home or Lamborghini, which are no less legitimate to want in one’s life), and also more abstract affordances—e.g., the freedom of “‘fuck you’ money”, or the joy and self-efficacy derived from creating real value in the world, for which the money is a rough metric and reminder (a la the euphoric joy of receiving one’s first paycheck, or closing one’s first customer).

One can of course relate to money in pathological ways. For those whose standard of value resides not in a conception of their fully-lived life (a la the builder), but in the impressions or judgments of others (be it God or society or their parents or some other “drill sergeant”), money means whatever it purportedly means to those others—status, in some circles, or wicked materialism in others, or in still others, “privilege” to be forgiven with obligate philanthropy. 

By contrast, a builder’s relationship to money is not mediated by any of these external intermediaries. She understands that money is a medium of value exchange, and what she values is set by the life she wants to build and the world she wants to live in. 

There are also simpler pathologies, such as when fear or insecurity drives founders to pursue short-term monetary gains over the longer-term health and durability of their business. But such financial anxieties can be diagnosed and remedied by re-orienting toward the overarching goal of building one’s best life, which presumably includes a healthy and durable version of one’s business (or whatever one is building) as part of it.

Taking a step back from founders and others who have or are aiming at being ultra-wealthy: wealth is good, and, beyond that, the monetary system of exchange is something to be treasured. On a builder’s mindset, you choose what to build partly based on a personal assessment of whom you want to be trading with, and for what—all the while feeling deeply grateful for the sheer number of options your fellow human beings have made accessible for you.

Say you love science and want to spend much of your life doing research. Instead of resenting the fact that you need to convince someone—be it a graduate advisor, or a grants office, or a bunch of VCs, or the Head of R&D at a deep tech company—to pay you for the time, space, personnel, and equipment you’ll need in order to do your research, why not marvel instead at the wondrous fact that you live in a world where there are so many viable routes for getting paid to do research? None of them are easy, of course—but all of them make it infinitely easier to specialize in a more luxuriously forward-looking endeavor than would have even been possible to anyone but for, perhaps, an extremely small handful of well-born individuals 200+ years ago. The supremacy of money as the mode of value exchange—not heredity, not physical dominance, not royal or theocratic decree, but a universal currency by which any and all mutually consenting parties can identify and enact any trade they deem mutually valuable—is what has made it possible.

With this perspective in mind, you can make your own assessment of the different routes available to you, including what forms of value they unlock in exchange for what forms of payment, and what kinds of relationships you’d need to forge with whom in order to thrive in each one.

Perhaps convincing a panel of fellow scientists of your work’s long-term theoretical significance appeals more—and aligns better with the kind of research you actually want to be doing—than selling investors or industry executives on the nearer-term commercial applications of your work. Or perhaps it’s actually the other way around, and you’re just not seeing it because you’ve been inculcated with the academic ethos that research is “noble” and “objective” and “good” to the extent of its distance from any commercial application.

In making all such determinations, you will be able to think more clearly and act more purposefully if you check your anti-money bias and recognize that wealth is good, actually.

2. “Is it bad if I don’t want to make a bunch of money?” 

Ok, so this isn’t a question I explicitly hear very often; but I see lots of people acting from an implicit belief that this should be what they want, even though their heart’s not in it.

Usually there are some status- or fear-based motivations mixed in with this belief. Here, again, it helps to re-orient toward a framing of: what kind of life do I want to build? And what kinds of resources—monetary or otherwise—will I need in order to build it? 

Deciding how much money you want to make, and how to price the value of any particular resource in your life—including the time spent on beloved pursuits that don’t pay very well, is a strictly personal endeavor. There are a great many factors only you can properly catalog and integrate: do you have goals for yourself, your family, or your community that will require substantial capital? Do you want to own a house, live in a big city, have children? How much resilience do you want to have against unexpected illness or job loss, given your particular circumstances and fall-backs (or lack thereof)? Are you happiest when working on an endeavor that has little to no commercial value, such as writing for a relatively esoteric audience, and willing to work a day job to pay for it?

There may be nothing wrong with, say, driving an Uber for a few hours a day and spending the rest of your time on hobbies or service projects or time with family, if this life brings together your needs and interests in a self-sustaining, joyful way. You might get bored of your gig job after a while if you don’t learn new skills and take on new challenges, and even if not, you’ll eventually need a new income source when self-driving cars finally replace human-driven ones. But if you’re thinking through these kinds of contingencies and making active choices in light of them, then you’re fundamentally functioning as a builder, no less than if you were running your own globally-impactful company.

If you hate selling and managing, the cost of getting rich may be too high

Finally, a brief coda. One factor people often neglect to consider is that the most common routes to making immense quantities of money tend to involve two things: sales and management.

If you’re going to found a tech company, for example, it is worth considering just how much time and energy you’re willing to pour into understanding and engaging with other people, and in what capacities. Are you interested in selling a vision to investors, and selling a product to customers? Managing a team? Teaching and mentoring? Among all the founders I’ve worked with, there is a subset of particularly miserable and burnt-out ones—most, though not all, are CTOs or very technical CEOs—who left academia for the startup world on the misconception that they’d be “less beholden to others” and wouldn’t have anyone “telling them what to do” (you can imagine their disappointment after the first few investor updates). A common positive outcome for these founders is that they move on from their current leadership role and find a more specialized, product- or research-focused position either at the same company or elsewhere. 

The point is not that you shouldn’t try to start a company, or try to make a lot of money, if you don’t love selling and managing. The point is rather that you should take these personal costs and associated growing pains into account and then decide accordingly.

One should have an integrated perspective on the arc of one’s work activity and the arc of one’s remuneration. Integrating these two things means thinking about likely tradeoffs, making tough calls of prioritization, and revisiting the issue regularly and actively to make sure your personal life-building project is moving in the direction you want. Only you can know whether the tradeoffs are ultimately worth it to you, given the singular life you are building.