Pursue the business truth

Pursue the business truth

A version was published as a LinkedIn article on December 13, 2019. The export does not establish that LinkedIn was the first-publication venue. Adapted for the Almanac on August 9, 2026.

It is easy to fall in love with the state of being a startup founder.

Contests, community events, product building, and public visibility may all have a place. But they can also become comfortable substitutes for the harder question: does the original hypothesis support a viable business?

That question should govern the startup phase.

The founder's work is not to preserve the romance of the role or the product. It is to understand which actions, conditions, and causes produce the outcome the business needs, then test those assumptions against reality.

Past knowledge and earlier success can help. They can also become something to defend. The difficult discipline is to keep pursuing the truth when it challenges the identity we have built around the company.

A startup moves forward by seeking, testing, and experiencing the business truth. The title matters less than whether the hypothesis survives.

Review notes

• Proposed Journal treatment as a historical founder argument.
• This adaptation preserves the 2019 position without presenting it as newly written.
• The unresolved short link and platform call to read more were excluded.
• The phrase "business truth" remains the author's framing and should receive owner review before acceptance.
• The exported article identifies a header image, but the source URL now returns 404 and publication rights remain unresolved. No image was copied into the candidate.