Most people start companies the wrong way.
They are making two foundational mistakes: 1) Being self-centered and focusing on what they can get out of someone else when building a product or service. 2) Starting a company for the sake of starting a company.
The first mistake can lead to success. And there are many moderately successful examples of it — people who found some market potential and exploited it to maximize the economic return given their ability.
The problem is they are not contributing meaningfully to the world. So despite meeting their own need of making money, there is not much to the things they do. No positive contribution to the world. And most of the time, no fulfilling connection to what you create beyond money.
If you reduce the building-things game to a pure economic expression of resource allocation, you will end up with soulless businesses. And there are plenty around.
I personally have little respect for these types of companies. To me, the real meaningful, impactful, and relevant work starts once you think and act from the grounds of what contribution you can make to the world. The things you can give.
This is what I'd call contribution first, capture second. And the moment you say that, many people dismiss it as charity work. Which I think is completely false. A business has two variables: how much value it creates for the world, and how much of that value you capture. These are not in conflict. You can build economically sound, even wildly successful businesses with this in mind. In fact, I'd go further — the true changemakers and outlier successes almost always originated from a genuine desire to contribute something real. To do something that matters. The capture followed.
On the second mistake: starting a company for the sake of it, and then figuring something out along the way that makes you money, is really just a base condition for the first mistake. If there is no substance driving you, self-interest fills the vacuum.
Relevant companies are not started for their own sake. Rather, there was something — a subject matter the founder cared about so deeply that a company became the only logical way to pursue it. The company was never the point. It was just the means through which something real was made to happen.
Relevant companies are not a means in themselves.
I have probably tapped into both mistakes to some degree. Society — especially in Europe — puts enormous cultural weight on the idea of being a business person, on self-interest as a virtue. That quietly gets into you. It subconsciously drifted my genuineness of intention for a while. But I caught myself and course-corrected. I think a lot of founders have this same drift and never notice it.
This is what I love about true technology companies. At heart, they have a new way of seeing the world, or a real contribution they want to make. They build from that substance outward. Everything else — the growth, the money, the scale — is downstream of that original genuine impulse.
And although we use the same vocabulary for founders on both ends of this spectrum — entrepreneur, builder, investor — they are not the same thing at all. One is building from contribution. The other is just building.