Startup Founders and Amor Fati: Turning Chaos and Setbacks Into Startup Momentum

Hey Reader,

The worst thing that can happen to you isn't rejection, runway, co-founder walking, or even building a product no one wants. It's resenting the hits. Believing they shouldn't have happened.

A lot of our conversation is that shitty moments are part of the process, a view that you should be grateful for the stress. But there's another way of looking at it... love of the fight.

If you can broadly accept my thesis:

• Everything that happens is your fault, because ownership is the fastest way to process momentum (My Fault).
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• Everything awful, hard, or unfair is pressure you signed up for, ergo a privilege (Pressure is a Privilege).

Then there's a third law of this game: wind direction.

Not every hit is your fault. A lot of the sh*t comes from outside. The market turns. A competitor emerges. Your engineer quits, (not because you operate a dictatorship). Everyone ghosts you. People screw you over. Relentless kicking by fate.

Turning what you'd normally call shit luck into leverage is known as Amor Fati. Not "make lemonade out of lemons" but the process of wiring your brain to convert impact into advantage and to understand and actually learn to love it and accept it as part of the game.

The difference between you did it wrong and what I am talking about is:

My Fault = blame → accountability → corrective action.

Amor Fati = chaos → acceptance → conversion.

They are complementary and not mutually exclusive:

• When it is your fault: own it.
• When it isn't (or isn't only): convert it.

In reality most blows are a mixture, part your fault, part fate, because nothing about being a founder is binary. Amor Fati isnt about letting you off the hook but instead says stop wasting energy on the part you can't control.

It's a mindshift of basically saying that regardless of the cause, this is mine now and here's how I intend to turn it into leverage. This is founder chaos. This is the game.

The game is knowing that no one has this clean and perfect path, it doesn't exist, it's always squiggly. Everyone has some version of bad. So if we know this to be true, maybe we should stop waiting for different weather and work out how to be better prepared, or perhaps train for the weather we're in. As in, get out of it, or beat it. Pick one.

Amor Fati as in, f*ck it, whatever you throw at me, however hard the universe conspires against me, it's all just chess. It's all just hundreds of experiments, tiny moves, constant calibration. As a founder you have to love that. If you're going to love this journey for everything good that happens, then you have to love it for your capability to experience and solve the bad.

I want to give you a clear example of why you have to love the game, one that should remind you why you're the right CEO despite the overwhelming evidence of your incompetencies in so many areas.

Look at AI. The winds shifted almost overnight. Every fundraising dollar, every acquisition, every conversation is now AI. You might not have seen it coming, but you, the founder, the f*cked-up, chaotic founder - you. The expectation is that you felt the shift, sensed the change, immediately worked out what you needed to do and adjusted direction. That's the superpower that a store-bought CEO or your co-founder who thinks they can run this company better than you doesn't have.

The proof is in the 3+ year-old companies that have split into two camps:

• The ones who smelled it, repositioned, and caught the wind.
• The ones bolting a chatbot onto their homepage, praying it makes them look "AI powered."

That's Amor Fati in practice. Not fighting the enormous waste of time you spent building a platform that AI can now solve in 3 minutes, but accepting it for what it is and learning to deal with it. And in that moment, you might look stupid, maybe humiliated, definitely not glamorous. Fighting your way out looks like a disorganized sequence of prayers. It doesn't look like strategy. But it is.

This ties back to the game, loving the journey, because anyone can step on the field, but not every player has the same competencies. We hear it in the term "founder DNA." Anyone can get on the field, anyone can play the game, thats not the point. The point is that when the wind shifts and how you see, how you build, how you lead - thats the difference between good and great.

What separates insane founders isn't just raw speed. It's velocity, the ability to move quickly while making mostly right decisions in the right direction. From the outside, people only see the speed. They don't see the invisible layer. Your insane processing of the change and your capability to reframe and set the course.

The Practical Usage

The way you might have seen this come up in real life is in things like weekly pre-mortems - where we talk about why something we are going to do will fail, and get ahead of it, learn to see and practice for failure. Or micro-dosing pain... like demoing on dev, or having a hard customer call (stress inoculation!). All of this is flexing your responsive muscle to outside events.

The real system you can actually implement right now, the one that turns Amor Fati from a philosophy quote into a founder practice is the 24-Hour Reframe SOP.

Every piece of shitty news, shitty customer support ticket, shitty anything... lost deal, churn, primary dev leaves - all of it should run through this system.

Within 24 hours of the event you write three lines:

• Signal: What did this teach us about the market?
• System: What broke? How do we patch or prevent?
• Shot: What new action happens this week?

The Shot goes on the calendar, if it doesn't the reframe didn't happen.

And then if you need KPI, you might use:

• TFR - Time to First Reframe: How many minutes from hit to Signal/System/Shot written.
• TAH - Time to Action After Hit: How many hours until the first outbound, fix, or change.

That's it. Take stoic Amor Fati that feels like a philosophy quote and execute on it.

Stop fighting the weather. Adjust your sails. Train yourself and your team to convert every insult into signal.

"The fire doesn't wait for dry wood. It learns to burn whatever is thrown at it."

If I can be of service, feel free to grab time.

LFG.

-- James

p.s. To the 680+ people who replied asking for the micro app from last weeks newsletter. I am working on it.