If you need a spreadsheet to decide whether to start a company, you probably shouldn’t start one

When I was 12, I walked around my uncle’s warehouse in the Netherlands. He’d started a jewellery import business and grown it into a big business. I stood there thinking: he started with nothing and built all of this, that’s what I want to do!

I also noticed the Porsche. And the house. I wanted those too. (I gave up on the Porsche a while ago.)

That wasn’t a career decision. I didn’t weigh the pros and cons of entrepreneurship versus getting a job. I didn’t have the vocabulary for any of that. Something clicked, standing in that warehouse, and it never unclicked.

I meet people every week who want to start a company. They’ve done the research. They’ve read the books. Some of them have compared the risk profile of founding versus staying in their corporate job. A few have actual spreadsheets.

If you need a spreadsheet to decide whether to start a company, you probably shouldn’t start one.

I know how that sounds. But I’ve watched people try this for 25 years, and the pattern holds. The founders who survive the first two years (the ones still standing when the money runs out, the co-founder leaves, the product doesn’t work and needs to be rebuilt from nothing) almost never chose this the way you choose an MBA program. They chose it the way you choose breathing. They couldn’t not do it.

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Right now, founding looks like a career option. AI tools let one person build a product in a weekend. Capital is around. The stories are everywhere. So people jump. They leave a corporate job, register a company, start showing up at startup events. For a while, it feels like being a founder.

Then the other stuff starts. The financial spreadsheets you hate making. The contracts you can’t afford to get wrong. The client who’s unhappy and threatens to sue you. The 19th pitch that doesn’t land. The employee who wants more salary and 20 days off.

Corporate life trains you to be a specialist. You get good at one thing, inside a structure someone else built. Founding is the opposite. You do everything nobody else wants to do, for as long as it takes, with no certainty any of it will work. Most people from corporates come with the exact opposite preparation for this.

That’s where the itch matters. When all of it hits you at once (and it will), the only thing keeping you in the chair is that you can’t imagine sitting anywhere else.

If you’re weighing whether to start a company the same way you’d weigh a job offer, you’re in the wrong frame. The people who build things that last didn’t weigh it. They just started. Usually before they were ready. Usually before anyone around them thought it was a good idea. And they kept going, no matter what.

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