When founders come in to pitch our firm — one as the CEO and the other as president — the conversation often goes like this: “Who is running the company?” “We are,” they both say. “Who makes the final decision?” “We do.” “How long do you expect to run that way?” “Forever.” “So you’ve decided to make it more difficult for every employee to get work done so that you don’t have to decide who is in charge, is that right?

The lesson for business is that we need founders. If anything, we should be more tolerant of founders who seem strange or extreme; we need unusual individuals to lead companies beyond mere incrementalism.

That we need individual founders in all their peculiarity does not mean that we are called to worship Ayn Randian “prime movers” who claim to be independent of everybody around them. In this respect Rand was a merely half-great writer: her villains were real, but her heroes were fake. There is no Galt’s Gulch. There is no secession from society. To believe yourself invested with divine self-sufficiency is not the mark of a strong individual, but of a person who has mistaken the crowd’s worship — or jeering — for the truth. The single greatest danger for a founder is to become so certain of his own myth that he loses his mind. But an equally insidious danger for every business is to lose all sense of myth and mistake disenchantment for wisdom.

Los fundadores deberían compartir una historia previa antes de fundar juntos una compañía, de lo contrario quedarán a merced del azar.

Thinking about what might happen if we ran completely out of money — laying off all the employees that I’d so carefully selected and hired, losing all my investors’ money, jeopardizing all the customers who trusted us with their business — made it difficult to concentrate on the possibilities. Marc Andreessen attempted to cheer me up with a not-so-funny-at-the-time joke: Marc: “Do you know the best thing about startups?” Ben: “What?” Marc: “You only ever experience two emotions: euphoria and terror. And I find that lack of sleep enhances them both.

Why did so few startup advisers and venture capitalists have any experience starting companies? As these thoughts rolled around in my head, I sent Marc Andreessen an instant message: “We ought to start a venture capital firm. Our motto for general partners would be ‘some experience required’ as in some experience in founding and running companies is required to advise people who are founding and running companies.” To my surprise, he replied, “I was thinking the same thing.

Marc Andreessen attempted to cheer me up with a not-so-funny-at-the-time joke: Marc: “Do you know the best thing about startups?” Ben: “What?” Marc: “You only ever experience two emotions: euphoria and terror. And I find that lack of sleep enhances them both.

Indeed, one of the crucial elements in taking a company from good to great is somewhat paradoxical. You need executives, on the one hand, who argue and debate — sometimes violently — in pursuit of the best answers, yet, on the other hand, who unify fully behind a decision, regardless of parochial interests.

In some ways, entrepreneurs are built to thrive in challenging times and conditions, says BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti. “I’ve noticed that times of crisis favor founder-led companies, because they’re headed by people who like improvising. They think about things through first principles and are okay adapting and changing their business.” “During times like this,” he adds, “you have to be totally open to changing everything that you’ve been doing and pursuing opportunities you didn’t know existed.” That plays to the strengths of founders. As does the fact that entrepreneurs are just used to struggling — they often relish the struggle.

It helps to have founded and run a company if you're going to help somebody run a company who is a founder.