Founder Scars: The new literature of the wounded
What happens when your work becomes who you are.
“Anything is possible.”
Someone I worked for used to say that.
I’ll never forget it. It was the first time I’d heard someone speak with such unfiltered ambition. It almost scared me. I grew up being reminded of what not to do, never to think that big, never to want that much. The whole idea that “the sky is the limit” felt foreign, almost reckless.
Here’s the thing. The sexy and unsexy truth of being a founder is that it’s almost impossible to separate your work from who you are.
“I don’t know who I am.”
A friend said that during his self-introduction after selling his company. Even an exit can leave you feeling that way, so imagine how a failure feels. When your business collapses, it doesn’t feel like just the company failed. It feels like you did.
A friend’s mother took her own life after her factory shut down. She couldn’t bear the debt, the shame, the sense that she’d lost not just her work, but her worth.
The idea of being a founder is deeply romanticized, partly because of the visibility that comes with it. Investors take big bets, and they need faces, ambitious ones, to rally behind. But having a business takes far more than being visible or articulate.
In the late 1970s, China’s Scar Literature gave voice to a generation marked by trauma, writers who turned personal pain into national healing. Decades later, another kind of scar has emerged: founder scars.
It’s easier to read about building a business than to actually build one. The process itself isn’t glamorous. You’re convincing investors you have talent, convincing talent you have money, and convincing yourself you can hold it all together. Some days you’re the strategist. Other days, you’re just trying to get an ad to run or a form to load. You wear multiple hats, trying to keep the one that still fits your strength, while finding people who can wear the ones you can’t stand.
What you don’t see are the scars, the doubts, the emotional debt, the isolation that grows when your identity becomes your company. These scars don’t appear on pitch decks or press releases. They live in the silence between funding rounds, in the emails you never send, in the sleepless nights when your purpose and your survival start to blur.
On many days, in many hours, you’re calculating productivity and profitability, measuring every minute against an outcome. It becomes hard to be fully present, even when you want to be.
“I won’t be able to stop working if it’s my business.”
An ex-colleague once said that to me, an intrapreneur, not a founder. She was right. Even when I wasn’t working, I couldn’t stop thinking about my business.
In the startup world, first-principles thinking is celebrated. You’re always peeling back layers to get to the fundamental truth of why something exists.
Can I automate this? How can I solve this faster? How do I generate more output with the time I have? Why are we paying for this? Why are customers paying? Why?
It’s almost impossible to stop thinking, but you still need to pulse-check yourself, to avoid overthinking, and to stay focused on execution and what truly matters to your business. The reality is, you want to win by moving fast, but with speed comes breakage. If things aren’t breaking, you’re probably not moving fast enough.
That mindset, embracing controlled chaos in pursuit of progress, is, in many ways, deeply Chinese. It’s an engineering instinct shaped by survival: build, iterate, fix, repeat. (But that same mindset can be dangerous when applied to something as complex as a country. Check the podcast below!)
The 996 culture has become a global debate, especially in the startup world. The truth is, many careers demand a high level of dedication to succeed, especially when it’s a craft you’ve chosen for yourself. A lawyer friend once had to pull out her laptop during her grandfather’s funeral. The deal was on, whether she was ready or not.
Being a founder is the same. Even when you’re not ready, you still have to perform in your pitches.
A founder friend once told me that he and his cofounders would calculate the “value” of every person they met at a networking event, then update each other in a shared Slack channel. I can’t help but wonder, how much joy is left when every moment is measured?
“You need to enjoy what you do.”
A friend who spent 25 years in investment banking told me that. Another founder echoed it: the pressure never goes away, but there’s a strange satisfaction in surviving it. Every challenge you overcome becomes a scar, a proof that you endured.
Over 90% of startups fail. And yet we keep building, as if statistics don’t apply to us.
Maybe it’s not about proving we’re the exception, it’s the act of building, of trying, of breaking and rebuilding again, that becomes the story, the scar that heals into something worth remembering.