I've had 4 conversations in the past year where someone said: "I have young kids / I have an existing life I'm happy with. I don't know if starting a company is compatible with that."

And each time I say: "You don't have to start a startup!" Which is a little bizarre.

It seems that we have forgotten a simple fact: there are more ways to build a massive company than to start a startup!

This seems very obvious, but then we don't appear to act like this. Just to drive this home, let's go at this from another angle.

We all know there are many ways to live life.

You don't have to get married. You don't have to have kids. You don't have to own a house or buy a car. You could freelance instead of taking a job. Hell, you could live on a boat.

We call this 'having agency'.

So why do folks lock onto ONE template of business?

- Raise money from investors

- Work hard for the entire duration

- Need a Very Good Idea and must Focus

- Growth at all costs

- Only relax after exit

Why this template?

For the same reason we used to think that you MUST live in suburbia with 2.1 kids and a house and a car.

Dominant narratives constrain our options, whether we know it or not.

The vast majority of business narratives today are anchored in startup narratives, and so we lock onto one form of doing business.

Which means hustle porn.

Which means giving up personal life / kids / family / <insert sacrifice> in order to GO HARD.

And in so doing we become blind to alternative ways of doing business.

I'll use a trite example: Patagonia. Patagonia did $1.47 billion in revenue in FA 2024. Yvon Chouinard built it without investor money. He took months off every year to surf and fly fish and climb mountains.

He structured the business so he could live the life HE wanted.

Also: Chouinard built an office with no private offices. Added an on-site child-care centre. Offered flexible hours and job sharing. Provided healthy meals.

The company atmosphere stayed "more familial than corporate." (His memoirs is titled "Let My People Go Surfing" — the ‘people’ here were his employees.)

Then, after a crisis in 1991, Patagonia gave up high growth. They just decided to ... stop. Said "we'll take whatever organic growth we get — whether that's 5% or 25%".

Also they'd give away 1% of annual revenue or 10% of profits to environmental causes, whichever was higher.

Patagonia too kumbaya for you? Ok let's talk about Buffett. In 1969, Buffett shut down his investment partnership and took control of two companies he had in the partnership portfolio because it was MORE RELAXING.

You might recognise one of those companies, Berkshire Hathaway.

He then turned Berkshire into one of the largest companies in the US. And he had an enjoyable time of it along the way.

VERY ODD, no? There's a longer story there, but I'll save it for the full essay.

In truth, there are many configurations of business that work.

The question is: what configuration works for YOU? What life do you want to live? And how do you want to live it?