Founder Brain Rot

I've had my first business since I was 14. I sold fidget spinners as a kid. I borrowed money to buy clothes in Paris and sold them back in Prague for a profit. Both my parents run their own businesses. At university, I had an offer from Deloitte that I negotiated harder than anyone else in the cohort and then turned down to keep working on my startup. The first real "job" I ever had working for somebody else was as a C-suite executive. I am 25 years old and I have never been a junior anything.

And yet, for some reason, I keep thinking about what it would be like to just have a normal job.

This is going to sound strange to most people. The entire startup narrative goes in one direction: you grind through corporate, you get fed up, you leave to start something. The stories we celebrate are the ones where somebody escapes the machine. What almost never gets talked about is the reverse, where founders who skipped the machine entirely find themselves genuinely curious about what it's like inside it.

Peter Steinberger and the same itch

I was watching Peter Steinberger on the Lex Fridman podcast this week. For anyone who doesn't know, Peter built PSPDFKit over 13 years, bootstrapped it, sold it for over $100 million, took three years off, came back to coding, and then built OpenClaw which just became the fastest growing project in GitHub history with over 180,000 stars. The guy has had Meta and OpenAI both putting offers on the table. Zuckerberg WhatsApp'd him directly. He spoke with Satya Nadella. And when Lex asked him about it, one of the things Peter said was that money isn't really the motivator. He's never worked for a big company and he's genuinely curious about the experience. That's it. Pure curiosity about a thing he's never done.

I heard that and immediately thought, yeah, I know exactly what that feels like.

Now our situations are obviously different. Peter already had his massive exit and basically had a three year existential crisis before finding his way back to building. I haven't had that big exit yet. I'm still very much in the "build another one, then another one, then another one" mode. But that same underlying pull is there. This itch to understand what this very common human experience actually feels like from the inside.

The practical justification

For me, a lot of the initial justification was practical. I want to be better at running teams. If the people who work for me have all had "normal" jobs before and I haven't, then there's a gap in my ability to relate to their experience. I've never had someone delegate a task to me and then override my authority on it while still holding me accountable for the result. I've never had to navigate a chain of command where my instinct to just go straight to the founder would be considered wildly inappropriate. I've never been in a position where the buck doesn't stop with me, and that's a very different psychological experience than being the person where it does.

When I did my stint as CCO at Marble Aerospace, that was the closest I got. I had a boss for the first time in any meaningful sense and I learned a ton from it. Not all of it was pretty. One of the biggest things I noticed was around how authority gets delegated. I'm someone who delegates authority, not just tasks. If I give you ownership of something, I don't get to step in and override you while still holding you responsible for the outcome. That's contradictory. Either you have the authority or you don't. But I watched how others didn't operate this way, and I saw firsthand the friction it causes. People get confused. Morale drops. Nobody knows who's actually in charge of what. It was genuinely useful to see that, because it confirmed a bunch of instincts I already had about how I want to run my own teams.

But the other thing I noticed, and this was more uncomfortable, was how easy it becomes to make excuses when the buck doesn't stop with you. When I'm the founder, if something goes wrong it's on me. There is no "well, the CEO decided to..." because I am the CEO. Having a boss gave my brain this little escape hatch where I could rationalize failures as not fully my problem. I really disliked that about myself in that role. It made me lazier in a way I didn't expect.

The paradox

The paradox with all of this is that I can never actually get the junior experience. That's the thing I find most interesting about this whole pattern. When a fresh university graduate starts at Deloitte or wherever, they're at the bottom. Zero authority. They learn by being told what to do, screwing it up, getting corrected, and gradually earning more responsibility. That's a formative experience that shapes how you think about hierarchy, authority, and your own position in an organization. I never had that. And I can't go back and get it now, because if I do take a job somewhere, I'm coming in at a level of seniority that people twice my age usually hold. Nobody is going to treat me like a junior. Nobody is going to give me the experience of being at the bottom of a hierarchy. That ship has sailed.

It's not something that bothers me. It's more of a statement of fact. There's a version of organizational understanding that comes from starting at the bottom and working up, and I will never have it. So instead I try to build my understanding from the top down, and I notice the gaps.

One of the biggest gaps is around how people think about hierarchy and authority. My natural instinct when dealing with a problem is to go to whatever level of seniority is required to fix it. When I got my job at Marble, I went straight to the founder. That's just how I think. If there's a problem and the CEO can fix it, why would I talk to three middle managers first? But I've watched friends who have normal career paths, and they genuinely believe they can only go one level up. A first year hire talking directly to the CEO? Unthinkable. Meanwhile, I'll text founders, talk to shareholders, whatever it takes. I don't have that learned deference because nobody taught it to me.

The upside of skipping the ladder

And honestly, I think this is actually an advantage more often than it's a disadvantage. Founders who never went through the traditional career path don't have preconceived notions about how things are "supposed" to work. I've adjusted my management style more times than I can count, and every time I did it, it was because I tried something, it didn't work, and I tried something else. There was no "this is how you manage people" template sitting in my head from a previous career telling me otherwise. The first time I had somebody work for me I was not a good manager. But I had the flexibility to just go figure out what works because I wasn't anchored to some corporate playbook I'd internalized over a decade.

I also think there's something about how founders like myself sit in conversations with people. I will meet with very senior politicians, high ranking military officials, whoever, and I don't think of myself as less than them. They might be way more experienced and I have respect for that, but there isn't that dynamic where I'm looking up at them. We're on equal footing. And I've noticed junior people who came up through traditional career paths often don't have this. They literally act as if they're less than, and it changes how they communicate, how they negotiate, how they present ideas. Not having learned that deference is something I'm genuinely grateful for.

So where does that leave us

So where does that leave us. I think the curiosity about traditional employment that founders like Peter and myself have isn't really about wanting a "normal" experience. It's about filling in a mental model. When you've only ever been the one making the decisions, you have a blind spot for what it actually feels like to be on the receiving end of those decisions. You can try to empathize, you can read about it, you can watch your team and ask questions, but there's something about lived experience that books and observation can't fully replicate.

For Peter, post-exit and financially comfortable, it's essentially a life experience he missed and he's got the freedom to go explore it at Meta or OpenAI or wherever with basically zero downside risk. For me, still building and still very much in the grind, I justify it more practically. It helps me run teams better, it helps me understand the people I work with, it fills in gaps in my perspective. But I think at the core it's the same thing. We're both curious about the one career experience that almost everyone else has and that we skipped entirely.

I haven't met many founders with this exact profile. Most people I know in the startup world either had corporate jobs before founding or are too early in their journey to have noticed this gap yet. But the handful I have found who share this background, who went straight from school to building, they all have some version of this same itch. And I find it genuinely interesting that even someone like Peter, who has absolutely nothing left to prove and could spend the rest of his life doing whatever he wants, still feels that pull.

Maybe the grass is always greener. Or maybe there's something fundamentally incomplete about only ever seeing organizations from the top. I don't know. But I do think it's worth talking about, because the startup world tends to frame the founder path as strictly superior to the corporate one, and the truth is more complicated than that. Both paths give you things the other doesn't, and if you've only ever walked one of them, you're always going to wonder about the road you didn't take.