Things I learned founding a company

Failure is common. Successful businesses are extreme, extreme outliers -- the equilibrium state of 99.99% of all business activity is failure.

Anti-quitter. There's something to be said for successful founders being the kind of people who are just incapable of giving up on something. Goes like this: "this is basically terrible, this is an unpleasant experience, but I literally cannot stop myself from continuing". Lot of root causes for that, maybe risk-seeking, ego, delusional self-confidence, I think people get to this from different places but the commonality is this default state of "I am incapable of quitting". In most things it can be a very unhealthy default, but in starting a business it's a great bias because starting a business is a terrible idea.

Starting a business is a terrible idea (corollary to above). Why would you do this? The expected outcome is awful, it's somewhere around 1/2 an industry salary and like 100x the stress and personal life disruption. It's an irrational choice. You have to be someone who enjoys weird stuff and chafes at normality.

Giving a shit matters a surprising amount. Michael from Y combinator spoke about this in some video I can't find at the moment: basically the longer you do a business activity, if you're overcoming the basic hurdles, the more success becomes about whether or not you like your customers. If you give a shit about the people you are working for, then you're going to do better than the other people who secretly hate their customers. And it turns out, most businesses basically are full of people who hate their customers. So most business over the long term really face issues in delivering for that reason: if the leadership and employees hate or resent the people they're serving or the problem they're working on, they have a very serious problem.

You can do better than them just by really investing in enjoying spending time with your customers, enjoying going the extra mile, whatever you can do to set up your business to heighten that sense of affinity (love?) really contributes a lot to the bottom line in the long run, because people really notice when a business is trying hard and it's just easier to learn and deliver when you're emotionally connected to customers. That's why something like "craft and beauty" can be a huge deal -- while it seems like extraneous or wasteful in serving a business problem (does my bank website really need to be "beautiful"?) it gives the act of working more joy, strengthens the emotional connect in both direction, and really pays off far more than you'd think both in terms of reputation but also in terms of how long that initial default of high-motivation sticks around vs. peters out.