🦁 Founders' Animal Instinct
I was attacked by a badger while hiking in rural England last week. It clipped me with its claws as I tried to run away - luckily I could hop a nearby fence and flag down some golfers, who were kind enough to drive me to the nearest clinic. The doctors cleaned me up and sent me on my way.
This story isn't true. But I bet you believed it. And if you doubted anything, I bet it was the badger - not the golfers.
We have an idea that human nature is fundamentally selfish. That we look out for our own interests first, and that self-preservation is our deepest instinct. But what actually happens in a crisis tells a different story. People run into burning buildings for strangers, pull over for accidents, and interrupt their golf game for a dumb American who just got attacked by an imaginary badger. You didn't doubt the golfers because you would have done the same thing.
What if your deepest instinct isn't to get ahead at any cost - but to help?
I've been thinking about this a lot lately, partly because I just finished Rebecca Solnit's A Paradise Built in Hell, which documents how humans consistently behave with remarkable generosity and solidarity in disasters - not selfishly, as we're told to expect.
And partly because I see it in my work every day. The founders I've worked with who have built the most valuable, most enduring companies are almost universally motivated by service. They serve their users, their employees, their cofounders, their communities, their vision for the collective. The motivation to serve beats the motivation to win - every time, in my experience.
A lot of founders tell me they want to do the right thing but feel like they can't - that their competitors will cheat, that the market rewards ruthlessness, that leading with integrity is a liability. I haven’t found that to be true. I see it as a fear-based story we've absorbed from a system that benefits from us believing it.
I've watched a founder rebuild his entire sales strategy around “love” rather than transaction - treating every call as an offering rather than a pitch - and ride that approach all the way through Series C. I've watched another early-stage founder turn down a $500k contract with a tobacco company because it conflicted with his values, only to close more enterprise deals than ever with customers who valued exactly what he stood for. In both cases, leading from their deepest instinct - to serve authentically, not to grow at any cost - felt risky. And turned out to be one of the most commercially successful things they did.
Your startup is an expression of your deepest beliefs. If you believe your core instinct is to serve, your startup will reflect that. And in my experience, that's not just the more ethical path. It's the more successful one.
Who do you serve? And does your startup know it?
