A Note From the Field: Stop Playing Founder
Board meetings won't save you. Product-market fit will.
👋 Merhaba, I’m Burak. Each week, I share lessons from 26+ years of building, investing in, and mentoring startups across emerging markets, from the early internet days to today’s AI revolution. 🧿
A short note from the field.
I recently received an email from one of our portfolio companies. I read it. And I was furious.
I’ll be honest, my reply was a little harsh. Maybe more than a little.
Because the pattern was obvious. They weren’t building. They were playing the company game. Looking for positions. Obsessing over titles. Polishing their LinkedIn pages. Designing org charts instead of talking to customers.
I won’t name them. That’s not the point.
The point is: I see this pattern everywhere. And I wanted to write about it. Not to call anyone out, but to be honest with founders about something that quietly kills startups.
The Pattern
I’ve been watching this for years.
Founders, early-stage founders, copying big company culture. Big company processes. Big company behavior.
They have 3 people on the team. Zero revenue. No product-market fit.
But they act like they’re running a 100-year-old holding company.
The Symptoms
Here’s what it looks like:
Board meetings with no board
Fancy titles nobody asked for
Corporate language in every Slack message
Layers of hierarchy in a 5-person team
Formality everywhere, urgency nowhere
And the biggest red flag of all?
No product-market fit.
Many of these founders come from white-collar corporate jobs. They’re used to structure. Hierarchy. Politics. Titles that mean something in a system of 10,000 people.
So when they start a company, they recreate the only thing they know.
The corporate machine.
I Call This “Startup Theater”
They are playing founder.
They are performing CEO.
But internally? They are not acting like entrepreneurs.
They want to look like a startup founder to their social circle.
They don’t want to be one.
There’s a big difference between building a company and performing one.
So What Is a Startup, Really?
Let’s go back to basics.
Steve Blank said it best:
“A startup is a temporary organization designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model.”
Read that again. Slowly.
Temporary organization.
The goal is not to stay a startup. The goal is to find something that works and grow.
Designed to search.
You are not there to execute like a Fortune 500 company. You are there to ask questions:
Who is our customer?
What problem are we actually solving?
What is the right product?
What is the right price?
Do we even have product-market fit?
Repeatable and scalable.
You’re not just looking for any business model. You’re looking for one you can repeat. And scale.
That’s the whole game.
Search First. Scale Later.
You are not a visionary CEO building an empire.
You are a founder searching.
Testing. Talking to customers. Running MVPs. Breaking things. Rebuilding. Iterating. Getting your hands dirty.
You’re trying to find something repeatable and scalable.
If you act like a large corporation before you find your business model, you’re skipping the most important phase.
And that phase? It’s supposed to be messy.
Messy is normal.
Uncertainty is normal.
Experimentation is normal.
That’s not a bug. That’s the feature.
The Bottom Line
If you want structure, stability, and status, join a corporation. Seriously. There’s nothing wrong with that.
But if you want to build a startup?
Stop playing company.
Stop the theater.
Drop the titles.
Cancel the unnecessary board meeting.
Get out of the building.
Talk to customers. Ship something. Learn fast.
Search first. Scale later.
That’s how real startups are built.
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