Dear founder,
I don't know you or what you do in your spare time, but if you keep relatively abreast of news in the tech space, you'll be familiar with Matt Mullenweg's very public fight with WP Engine, which shows no sign of letting up any time soon. It's tempting for you to believe that Mullenweg is uniquely bad in character, and that you or your underlings could never disgrace themselves publicly in the way he has. Do not believe this. There are millions of little Matt Mullenwegs in this world, and if you've founded a start-up, you're at serious risk of being one of them.
Now, there has been some speculation about Mullenweg currently being in the midst of a manic episode, and I think there is grounds to believe that. Still, I know quite a few people that suffer or have suffered from manic episodes, and none of them, to the best of my knowledge, have held an entire technical ecosystem hostage over a perceived injury to their ego in quite the same way that Mullenweg seems intent on doing, so mania isn't a particularly effective explanation in this instance.
Rather, the underlying flaw causing Mullenweg's behaviour is hubris: extreme pride coupled with dangerous overconfidence and complacency. In legal usage in classical Greece, it would translate as the use of violence or other coercion to shame a victim for one's own gratification, or in the words of Aristotle:
"...to cause shame to the victim, not in order that anything may happen to you, nor because anything has happened to you, but merely for your own gratification. Hubris is not the requital of past injuries; this is revenge. As for the pleasure in hubris, its cause is this: naive men think that by ill-treating others they make their own superiority the greater."
The seed of this is, so far as I can tell, an underlying belief that other people exist for your gratification, and aren't themselves fully human, with human motivations and cares and their own rich lives. We try to train this perception out of people while they're growing up, but unfortunately it doesn't always succeed.
And if you've founded a start-up, you're particularly vulnerable to falling prey to hubris. Founding a start-up takes ambition, a high tolerance for risk and a degree of arrogance: you have to genuinely believe that you can do better than the entire rest of the world at solving a problem. And laid out like that, the risk factors are clear: ambition is highly correlated with pride and overconfidence. A high tolerance for risk often comes with a belief that you're special or, in the words of gen Z, have "main character syndrome": the idea, in short that you're somehow set apart from the rest of humanity and fated to succeed where they failed. Finally, believing that you can do better than the entire rest of the world implies by definition that other people are worse than you, and it's a very small step from there to deciding that they owe you gratification, whatever they might think about it.
Receiving investment only makes this problem worse: having your idea and your value validated by being given money and lauded by some of the highest and most respected members of our society only reinforces the idea that a start-up founder is set aside and superior to the great masses of people around him, and that he may do as he will with them.
So, dear founder, watch for this tendency in yourself. If you're vulnerable and you get the right push, the rot sets in shockingly fast. It can begin with such simple things as the rush of having employees under you: having people who depend on you for money and who wait on you to obey your commands can be a remarkably heady feeling. It can quickly become tempting to make unreasonable demands of them, or to rely on their presence and adulation to make you feel important. Before long, you can persuade yourself that your employees owe you loyalty and deference, and you begin to think yourself a Greek tyrant, ruling by diktat and coercion ahead of consensus and legitimacy. After all, as a great leader, do people not owe you their unquestioning support and obedience?
Or it might start with your product. You are, after all, the cleverest and most technically brilliant person of your generation: why else would you be funded by these investors? It goes without saying, therefore, that any critique of your product is ill-founded: perhaps it's an attempt to sabotage you, or perhaps your underlings simply can't understand your genius. You increasingly shut any dissenting voices out, pushing away good counsel from investors or consultants, and only listening to voices telling you that you're right. Even when your product starts to crumble, you're still attached to what you've done, because there's no way other people could be right while you're wrong...
The pattern repeats itself again and again in the tech world. From the florid breakdowns of Elon Musk and Mullenweg, to the more subtle but still fatal hubris of people like Sam Altman, to the outright fraud of people like SBF and Elizabeth Holmes, there's no shortage of tech start-up founders that have fallen into hubris, with disastrous consequences for themselves and others. Importantly, it isn't always obvious in the way that Mullenweg's breakdown is: Sam Altman is a deeply mediocre man who has failed at every business venture he started, but because he's more coherent and less overtly irrational than Mullenweg, he is allowed to keep trying, fuelled by hubris, until something brings him down for good. And these are the people who, thanks to luck and skill in other areas, have succeeded despite these grievous personality flaws. What on earth makes you think that you have what protected them? Facts? Or merely your own hubris talking again?
Now, you might counter by saying that all these people are successful and I'm not, so my opinion is of no matter (neatly demonstrating hubris at work, by-the-by). Matt Mullenweg himself employed a similar line of argument when responding to David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of Ruby on Rails. Do not do this. Firstly, all of these people are deeply unhappy: happy people do not lash out at companies, demanding 8% of their revenue in perpetuity, when they personally already have billions of dollars. They do not buy Twitter because people say mean things about them on the platform, and they most certainly don't claim that the woke mob stole their "son" from them and turned them trans. If you want to emulate people who behave like that, your judgement is deeply flawed. Secondly, hubris is deeply corrosive to any company you might build, and as I've stated above, these people are above all lucky. Odds are, if you behave like them, things will start falling apart for you much, much faster. For example, if you keep on making arbitrary demands on your staff and behaving with impunity, changing norms of conduct at random and insisting on behaviour for your workers that you'd never dream of keeping to yourself, you simply won't be able to retain good staff. If you treat consultants or other "inferior-but-important" professionals like lawyers or accountants in the same way, you'll eventually wind up with no professional services. You'll produce a bad product with the aid of whatever staff you can get, who will simply execute your orders without bringing any of their knowledge or expertise to bear, and you'll burn all your budget on running it. You'll overpromise and underdeliver to clients and investors, and eventually everything will start to crumble beneath you. And when at last you're alone, standing in the wreckage of your business, you'll only be able to scream incoherently at the "inferiors" whom you systematically abused for your own pleasure.
You might not end up publicly humiliated in quite the same way as Mullenweg has, and you'll probably not end up in prison like SBF. But the bill will come due. And if you want to avoid an unhappy fate, you'd best learn a little humility and treat the people who support you and whom you rely on for your success well.
Ngaa Mihi,
Iris
P.S. Also, maybe take some time to read the classics: Sophocles Oedipus Rex is particularly relevant here. People have been warning about this tendency in leaders for a very, very long time, and having a good knowledge of history and literature can help you avoid an awful lot of serious mistakes.