Startup Culture and Motives

I’ve been part of multiple startups, almost always as a founding team member, rarely as a founder. I don’t think I’m proud of it, and I even if I’m slightly proud. the pride sits next to some hard lessons about startup culture: why those environments are genuinely useful when you’re early in figuring yourself out, and why at some point you have to stop defaulting to yes.

This note continues from Walking Contradictions: I Don’t Love Leadership , and from the weight of being trusted , where I got into why people kept pulling me into these things when I was never the one seeking them out. this piece is less about the leadership and more about what I saw once I was inside.

Why Startups Kept Finding Me

I only understood the pattern recently, looking back. startups kept referencing and recommending me for three reasons I can now name clearly.

First: startups love people who are young and visibly curious. if you can signal that you’ll learn whatever the situation demands, that’s more valuable early on than any specific credential. I was young and curious, and apparently it showed.

Second: startups reward action over planning. I’m extremely practical. I don’t stall in the design phase when something needs to be built. people seemed to value that before I valued it myself.

Third, and this is the real one, startups reward people who wear multiple hats. I’m into design, UI/UX, motion, video editing, growth. I can write interfaces and maintain them, build dashboards, work with large datasets, scope and build ML models, absorb a new domain fast. that range is genuinely rare, and founding teams are always short of it.

Those three things together made me a recurring name on shortlists I never put myself on.

When the Market Changed

Something shifted around late 2024. before that, the people I saw entering startup environments tended to be rigorous, genuinely capable, with clear reasons for being there. then the culture started to move, and startups became fashionable in a way they hadn’t been before. all kinds of people started thinking in that direction, and the quality of the invitations I was receiving started to reflect that. I began filtering harder.

There’s one story I want to tell here. I’m keeping the details anonymous because this isn’t about the individuals, it’s about the pattern.

Incentives and Starting Startups

A software product I’d been adjacent to, not a founding member, just an external friend they pulled in occasionally for data and modeling work, had gotten thousands of users in its first few months. the early days were exactly what you’d expect: a group of people who knew each other pushing code to a shared repository, no formal equity conversation, everyone operating on the assumption that it would be sorted out later. I knew that moment was coming. I was watching from a distance and not committed to anything, which was lucky.

After about a year the product started generating revenue. and the moment liquidity arrived, the drama followed. one of the founding members was cut out by the others, told he hadn’t contributed enough, because his contribution had been marketing and selling rather than writing code. I had seen his contributions. they were real. but the technical members decided his work didn’t count, and he was dismissed.

I didn’t know about that story, he sent me a message: do you have time for a call? He almost never did that, so I knew something was off. one minute into the call he told me he had an investor lined up behind his back, and wanted to build a new product, had already gotten some extremely talented people onboard, and wanted me to join. I asked what the product was. he said they hadn’t figured that out yet, but they would.

Something was wrong. I kept asking. after enough back and forth he told me what had actually happened. and it was clear: the entire motivation for this new startup was retaliation. vengeance, not a problem he wanted to solve. not a market he’d been thinking about. revenge against the people who had cut him out, dressed up as entrepreneurship.

I declined. the reasons were obvious to me, but I’ll name them clearly because I’ve had to explain this to other people since.

How to Read a Founder’s Motive

A startup built on a fragile motive is a startup I can’t trust. money is a motive. fame is a motive. proving something to someone who wronged you is a motive. none of those are bad feelings to have, but none of them are stable enough to carry a product through the periods where everything is going wrong, which is most of the time. if the reason for building doesn’t survive the first rough quarter, the whole thing falls apart and takes everyone down with it. I can’t sign up for that.

The second reason I declined was cultural. I didn’t dislike him as a person. but I couldn’t see him building an environment I would want to work inside. and that matters more than the opportunity itself.

When to Stop Saying Yes

I’ve become protective of startup invitations, and I think that protectiveness is correct, not because startups aren’t valuable, but because not every startup experience is worth it, and the bad ones cost more than a missed opportunity. they cost time, trust, and sometimes the working relationships that matter to you long after the startup is gone.

What I’ve settled on: look for startups that are also an investment in you. they should be giving you something that compounds, skills, exposure, relationships, responsibility you couldn’t find elsewhere. and don’t be afraid to decline something just because it feels like an opportunity. some opportunities are losses dressed up as wins. learning to tell the difference early is one of the most useful things you can do before aging.