The Founder Effect

Founders are weird. Not because they try to be—but because they can’t help it.

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Rishabh mentioned a friend who once tried to get a real tiger into a room. Totally impractical. But not totally out of the question. That kind of thinking—irrational, obsessive, allergic to normal—is the same energy that shows up in product, culture, and leadership.

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Zach’s latest fixation? Player pianos. The old-school mechanical ones. They make no sense in a world with Spotify. But that’s the point. Founders go deep on things that don’t need to exist—because that’s how breakthroughs start.

Energy Sets the Ceiling

Frank Slootman says your energy is the limit. Rishabh took that to heart. At his last offsite, he cranked the volume. Loud, animated, over the top. It felt forced. But the team met him there. The founder needs to set the tone. That’s the rule.

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Even something simple—like saying “I’m excited to be here”—changes how people respond. It’s not fake. It’s tone-setting.

Misreads Come Standard

Zach doesn’t smile much unless he means it. People assumed he was cold. That’s the tradeoff of founder visibility: you get misunderstood constantly. Doesn’t matter if you’re kind, fair, thoughtful—if your face says otherwise, the room believes your face.

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Same with Rishabh. He mentioned some math on employee tenure. Someone took it as “we’re firing someone every two weeks.”

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That’s founder gravity. Your offhand comment becomes the headline.

The Last 10% Is the Real Work

Rishabh is rolling out self-serve at FERMAT. Zach’s wrapping Lens at Foreplay. Both are feeling it: the last 10% of a product takes as much energy as the first 90%.

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Rishabh’s a fan of the painted door MVP—like adding a fake Apple Pay button to measure clicks. It doesn’t have to work. It just has to test.

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Zach’s taking the opposite approach this time. No shortcuts. No placeholders. Just quality. Because this product matters more. It has to land.

Time, Structure, and Chaos

Zach works when the spark hits. He’s a flow operator. Rishabh blocks time and runs his day like a machine. Neither is right. Both work. But the wiring is different.

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You can’t copy someone else’s calendar. You have to match it to your default mode.

Volatility Isn’t the Problem—It’s the Point

We talked tariffs, macro shifts, ecommerce chaos. Rishabh made a sharp point: difficulty isn’t the issue. Volatility is. You can’t plan for variance.

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Zach shared some wild data: millions of ecommerce prices changed overnight. Everything’s in motion. The brands that win are the ones that adapt fastest.

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That’s what founders sign up for. The ground keeps moving. That’s the job.

Calm Under Pressure

Zach sets his floor at death or bankruptcy. If he’s above that, he’s good. That frame keeps him grounded. Rishabh told a story from the SVB collapse—100% of FERMAT’s funds were frozen. He didn’t panic. He worked the weekend.

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That’s what it looks like to operate through chaos.

Closing Thought

Being a founder means getting misread, misunderstood, and thrown into volatility. It means obsessing over pointless things that later turn out to matter.

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And it means realizing the only way out is through. Every time.

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Until next time.