Holy cow. How am I just now seeing this? You managed to perfectly express my mentality about startups and business. I wish that I had this article before like, you know, when I was a San Francisco cofounder trying to argue with my fellow cofounders how maybe if we went over 50 hours/week we just, you know, maybe wouldn’t build that feature until Monday. Or maybe that we didn’t need to be on a trigger-finger alert for any email from a customer that came our way with the slightest complaint, dropping all work for days to immediately rewrite some feature to fix their issue. Guess how all that went?

You put it so eloquently when you write that “I wanted to work for myself. Walk to my own beat. Chart my own path. Call it like I saw it, and not worry about what dudes in suits thought of that.” And yeah, as you point out, it does sound trite until you actually contemplate/experience the alternative. Yet the constant pursuit of VC is another suit. We shouldn’t have to apologize for our love of freedom.

Thanks for writing this, you’ve given this entrepreneur renewed hope. I would love if you wrote a kind of “Lean Startup Circle” book but for founders that align more with your/Basecamp’s mentality.