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Title: 6 Founder Lessons That Changed My Life

Read time: 5 min


Today, I want to talk about what it really means to be an entrepreneur, a founder, an operator. This one’s personal for me, but I’m happy to share.

Justin Welsh said it best:
“Being an entrepreneur isn’t about making the most money possible. It’s about never having to ask for permission again.”

This is 1000% the case for me. It was never about the money. It was always about control, about not letting someone else dictate my future.

In my early 30s, I made a decision. I was done building other people’s dreams. My girlfriend at the time, now my wife, looked at me and said: “You’re not an employee, Darren. You’re an employer.” I listened. I never looked back.

There’s nothing wrong with being an employee. I played that game for the first 11 years of my career. Most entrepreneurs, probably 98%, start that way, but if you’re reading this, odds are putting in 40+ hour weeks to make someone else rich just doesn’t sit right with you.

Going home, watching Netflix, retiring at 65 and being “comfortable” just wasn’t my jam. I decided I’d work like a beast for 15 to 20 years and live the rest of my life like a king.

I had considerable passion to get rich. Not because I wanted Ferraris, but because I desperately wanted independence.

~ Charlie Munger

In this issue, I’ll break down what I’ve seen work from some of the best founders and operators I’ve worked with, and share a few beliefs that have shaped me as a builder.

Let’s jump in!

1. Capital Responsibility

When you raise capital, you’re not just getting a check, you’re taking on a mandate. Investors are betting on your ability to execute, not just your product. That means you have a fiduciary responsibility to deploy capital intelligently, in areas where you’re blind, in people who fill the gaps, and in systems that give you leverage.

There are two sides to capital allocation: human and financial. The best founders use both to compound. They don’t just “spend to build,” they invest to accelerate. They find the right people, operators, coaches, tacticians, and they trust them to drive execution.

A CEO’s job changes at scale. You’re no longer building the company yourself. You’re building the team that builds it. That’s why the best CEOs become world-class recruiters and quite frankly, poachers because the business will only scale as fast as the people inside it can.

2. Sales & Product Split

Once your product is live, your only job is distribution. Don’t spin on the wrong ICP. Wrong message. Wrong channel. Wrong bet.

Sometimes the problem is:

• You’re pitching the wrong title

• Your TAM is too small

• Your industry ignores cold outreach (gov, edtech, dev tools)

• Or worst of all, no one cares about the problem

Here’s the antidote: cover every surface area.

• Keep outbound running, but tighten it

• Write content weekly, even if you hate it

• Show up at events, your buyers are there

• Hit podcasts, small ones add up

• Run paid if you’ve got the math

• Join niche communities, and lead in them

• And please, please pick up the phone

If two co-founders made 150 cold calls a day for 60 days, plus content, emails, LI , events, and pods, that’s 9,000 shots on goal, 5k emails sent and 1200 LI requests. I guarantee it would change your company.

But most won’t do it. Too uncomfortable. Easier to “work on the product” and call it strategy. It isn’t, it’s the recipe for burn and taking forever to validate your MVP, if you ever do.

TOFU isn’t email + LinkedIn. It’s everything.

3. Belief in something greater than yourself

I know this isn’t always easy to talk about, but I believe in a power greater than myself something beyond logic, something intelligent. I choose to call that power God.

Call it whatever you want, but having faith in something bigger I believe matters. I’ve had 47 trips around the sun so far, and I can say this world isn’t random. It’s designed to stretch us, refine us, grow us; and the things we avoid will consistently keep showing up, often in different forms.

In my own experience, every time I’ve been buried under something heavy, leaning into that power, that stillness made the weight easier to carry.

It doesn’t mean you stop working. It means you do all you can, and then you let go of what you can’t control. Sometimes the best offense is waving the white flag.

4. Health and Nutrition

I see the hustle porn videos, sleeping on the floor, bragging about 4 hours of sleep, grinding till 3am. I’ve been guilty of it too.

I’ve done it, but when I finally started prioritizing my health and nutrition years ago, everything changed. Productivity went through the roof.

Make no mistake: the greatest performance enhancing drug is sleep. Period.

If you really want to 10x your energy and output, try this:

• Sleep 7–8 hours. Your body repairs the most between 10PM–2AM.

• Eat real food. Whole, unprocessed, nutrient-dense.

• Move daily for at least 30 min. Push your heart rate past 150–160 BPM.

What works for me:

• I run 15–18 miles a week

• I lift 4 days a week on a split

Here’s my training schedule:

• Monday: Chest / Triceps

• Tuesday: Back / Biceps

• Wednesday: Run

• Thursday: Legs

• Friday: Shoulders

• Saturday: Run

• Sunday: Rest

Fuel the body, and protect the engine. You only get one.

 

5. Stay away from booze

I stopped drinking altogether 18 years ago. Haven’t had a sip since. Probably one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. My life became so much richer and fuller in every way imaginable, and there’s no way I’d be in the position I am today if I continued.

If you’re serious about building something great, you need to make decisions that support your future, not f**k it up.

Alcohol gives you nothing. Zero upside. It wrecks your sleep, dulls your thinking, weakens your discipline, and steals time you’ll never get back.

I realized a long time ago I didn’t need alcohol to unwind, celebrate, or to cope.

What I needed was clarity. Energy. Conviction. And I assure you won’t find at the bottom of a glass. Everytime something went wrong in my life, alcohol in some way shape or form was involved, so I made a decision to stop many years ago.

I challenge you to make that decision. Not just to drink less, but maybe to stop entirely.

It’s not about being perfect. It’s about being in control and becoming dangerous, and alcohol is the antithesis of that.

6. Money, Leverage, Systems

There’s three things every founder needs to stack the odds in their favor early: funding, leverage, and systems.

Money: Candidly validation costs money. Even with AI accelerating build cycles, if you’re not funded, you’re constantly making fear-based decisions. You can’t think long-term. You can’t test widely. And you sure as hell can’t hire the talent needed to win. The companies that break out are rarely the scrappiest, they’re usually the ones with the most room to breathe. Bootstrapping is super admirable, but in the end the ones with the longest runways typically win.

Leverage: Your job isn’t to know everything. It’s really to source the right inputs. That might be a book, a coach, a contractor, an expert, someone who compresses decades into weeks or months. That’s how you move fast. Founders who try to muscle everything themselves burn out and stall. Leverage isn’t a luxury. It’s a mandate.

Systematization: Every high-performing organism is built on systems. Think about it, the nervous system, the digestive system, the solar system. Your business is no different. You need to build a machine. Something repeatable, predictable, and scalable. A dollar goes in, thirty come out, but without systems, you’re constantly playing defense. You can’t scale what you don’t structure.

Don’t chase hacks, build infrastructure.

Key Takeaway

I think being a founder isn’t always about building product, or raising money or grinding 100-hour weeks. It’s about taking full ownership, of your time, your direction, your outcomes. That means taking responsibility for the capital you raise, the people you hire, the way you sell, how you care for your body, and what you believe in when things get hard.

Most people want freedom, but few are willing to build the structure that creates it. The best operators I’ve worked with don’t just hustle harder, they think clearer, move faster, and surround themselves with people who hold them to a higher standard. That’s what this game really is: clarity, commitment, and momentum.

If you want help building the system that gets you there, I coach founders through it every day. Reach out and let’s talk. 💪


That’s it for today, folks.

See you all next week!

Darren

P.S. If you’re a venture-backed company interested in coaching, book a call here.