Founder Independence

Building on 250 years of independence

Happy Thursday, 👋

As we get close to celebrating the United States 250th anniversary of independence, it helps to remember that before independence became a holiday, it was a decision.

On July 2, 1776, the Continental Congress voted to declare independence. Two days later, on July 4, 1776, Congress adopted the words of the Declaration, and those words became part of the country’s history. The result was a choice to leave an existing system and accept responsibility for building a new one.

A founder may not be declaring independence from a king, but the pattern is familiar. A founder looks at the way things work and decides the current system is no longer good enough. Something can be built differently. Once that decision is made, the inherited comfort of the old system begins to disappear.

At its origin, a startup is a founder’s declaration of independence from the current way of operating. It is a practical argument that customers, employees, and capital should gather around a better system. Independence requires giving up stability, absorbing risk, and proving that the new system can survive as a viable business.

The Status Quo Has Gravity

The systems people leave behind, whether inside a larger company, a university, or an established industry, usually provide more support than they notice.

The colonies faced a much larger version of this trade. They were separating from a powerful empire that provided trade relationships, military protection, administrative structure, and a familiar operating structure. They viewed the system as deeply flawed and increasingly unacceptable, but leaving it still meant losing many of the benefits it provided.

Founders face a smaller version of the same trade. Most founders leave a salary, colleagues, benefits, technical infrastructure, and the comfortable rhythm of belonging to an existing institution. Even a frustrating job can provide underrated benefits such as a salary, benefits, and a built-in peer group. The same can be true for students leaving a university setting, where they may have been surrounded by peers, mentors, and an environment where experimentation is encouraged.

From the outside, entrepreneurship can look like freedom. From the inside, that freedom often begins with an unexpected silence: no assigned priorities, no meetings on the calendar, no default team, and no established operating system to guide the next step. It is now up to the founder to build their own structure while staying focused on the vision that led to their independence.

A Declaration Starts With a Grievance, But Cannot End There

The Declaration of Independence did not begin as a vague statement that things could be better. It translated a list of grievances into a specific case for change. Those grievances led the colonies to declare independence and begin building a new governance structure.

Strong startups often begin the same way. A founder notices repeated friction that everyone else has normalized. The early founder sees those patterns and asks a dangerous question: why does it have to work this way?

That question starts the process, but it is only the beginning. The difference between questioning a process and building a company is the founder’s ability to turn insight into a product or service customers actually adopt.

This is why the best startup ideas often sound obvious after they work. Once a better system exists, the old system appears almost absurd. Before the product exists, though, the friction is usually hidden inside habit. People adapt to broken processes until someone makes a better way available.

Once a founder has detailed their frustration, the work shifts from talking about the problem to building a better alternative. The Declaration of Independence was the beginning, not the final system. The hard work was turning grievances into action and coordinating the effort to build a new country. Founders face a similar progression: from frustration to insight, insight to product, and product to adoption.

Independence Is Not Isolation

One of the most common misunderstandings of independence is that it means isolation. After declaring independence, the colonies still needed alliances, financing, military coordination, governance, trade, and legitimacy. Independence required new dependencies on different terms. The act of leaving one system made it necessary to build a different network of support.

Founders learn the same lesson quickly. Leaving a company to start something new can feel like liberation from endless meetings, budgets, and office politics. It can feel energizing to hand in a resignation letter, but then reality arrives. A new company needs customers, capital, service providers, and a process to keep everything moving in one direction.

This is why founder loneliness is such a real part of company building. Many founders leave environments where support was automatic, even if imperfect. Once they leave a job, they often find themselves sitting in a coffee shop with a laptop and an idea, but without a structure to guide the next step.

The best founders do not confuse independence with doing everything alone. They build community deliberately. They recruit early employees who raise the standard, find investors who can provide advice as well as capital, and build customer relationships that sharpen the product.

As investors, we usually ask whether the founder can attract the right forms of alignment around what they are building. A founder may begin with a declaration of independence, but a company is built by getting others to believe the mission is worth joining.

No Limits

The Declaration’s most famous phrase, “all men are created equal,” remains one of the most powerful ideals in American history. In startup terms, that ideal is a reminder that the right to attempt something new should not be limited to pedigree, geography, title, school, or network.

Starting conditions are not always equal. Access to capital, mentorship, customers, and networks remains uneven. But talent is broadly distributed, and the ability to see a better way is not confined to the obvious places.

Some of the most interesting founders do not come from the expected backgrounds. They emerge from inside industries where they have lived the problem directly. They see broken workflows, watch customers struggle, and understand the limitations of systems that may appear stable. They may not have the standard startup origin story, but they often have something more valuable: a clear view of customer pain points.

In that sense, founders sign their names to an uncertain future because they believe in the possibility of creating something different. The signature may be a resignation letter, an incorporation document, a first customer contract, or an offer letter to the first employee. Each one is a public act of commitment. Each one says the founder is willing to take responsibility for the argument they are making.

Although a declaration creates an emotional commitment, execution is what creates the company. Founders need to be careful not to treat independence as an escape, but as the moment responsibility increases. The Declaration signers understood that sending a letter across the Atlantic was not the finish line. The hard work was just beginning.

Final Thoughts

The 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence is a reminder that durable change begins when someone decides the old system is no longer working and accepts responsibility for building something new.

That was true 250 years ago, and it remains true for founders today. A startup, like a nation at its beginning, is based on the argument that the future can be organized differently. It might begin with dissatisfaction, but it requires clarity to identify what is not working and courage to attempt something new.

Deciding to be independent is only the beginning. On July 4, 1776, the Continental Congress approved the Declaration of Independence without knowing how the story would end. There was no certainty that the new system would survive. The 56 signers who eventually put their names to the Declaration were attaching their reputations, fortunes, and lives to an uncertain future.

They were challenging one of the most powerful empires on Earth without having the benefit of electricity, internet, modern medicine, cloud infrastructure, or air conditioning. It was not exactly the ideal launch environment.

Founding a company today can still feel uncertain. It can cost savings, comfort, relationships, sleep, and reputation. Markets can be indifferent. Customers can be slow to move, and investors can be skeptical.

But perspective matters. Most founders today are not risking execution for treason if the plan fails. They are not sending a defiant message to a king across an ocean and hoping the response is manageable. They are building in a world with cloud services, AI tools, remote collaboration, capital networks, accelerators, advisors, and communities of other builders. None of those resources removes the risk, but they do make the attempt more possible.

As we celebrate 250 years of independence, we are reminded that progress depends on people willing to move from dissatisfaction to responsibility. It requires people who can see a broken system, refuse to accept it as permanent, and then do the hard work of creating an alternative others choose to join.

The signers of the Declaration had conviction, courage, and a willingness to carry the consequences of their choice. They did not know whether independence would work. They only knew the existing system had become unacceptable, and that the possibility of building something better was worth the risk.

A startup is an argument that the future can be organized differently. The country we celebrate this week was shaped by people who took extraordinary risks with far fewer tools, far less comfort, and far greater consequences than most founders face today. It simply reminds us that progress has always depended on people willing to leave the safety of the familiar and accept responsibility for creating something better. For founders, that is the invitation: stop waiting for the old system to improve, and start building the one that should exist.

Wishing everyone a great weekend,

-Eric.