Everything Is Up to You (Except When It Isn't)

A founder I work with sent me a message last week. He's a fellow NBA fan, and he wanted to talk about the San Antonio Spurs.

The Spurs have one of the youngest rosters in the league. Their best player - Victor Wembanyama - is twenty-one years old. Their head coach, Mitch Johnson, is thirty-seven and in his first season as a head coach. Most analysts expected growing pains this season. A rebuilding year. Maybe a playoff push if things broke right. Instead, they're 49-18. That's not a good season for a young team. That's one of the best records in the entire NBA. The Spurs are a genuine championship contender this year.

And the coach who built the Spurs into a dynasty - Gregg Popovich, widely considered the greatest coach in NBA history - suffered a stroke and hasn't returned to the sideline. The habits, standards, and mental frameworks he spent decades building are now running without him - in the hands of a coach who's never done this before and a roster where almost nobody is over twenty-five.

We spent a good hour talking about how this was possible. We landed in the same place. It's not the talent - plenty of teams have talent. What the Spurs built into these players was a way of thinking about the game that doesn't depend on any one person being in the room. The organization didn't just teach them how to play. It taught them how to think about playing. That's a different thing.

Then - naturally, because this is what we do - the conversation turned to startups.

The tension most founders carry alone

Here's something I've noticed with early-stage founders over the years. The ones who make it carry a belief that borders on irrational. They believe, at some fundamental level, that they are the determining factor. That effort and judgment and relentless execution are what will decide the outcome. That the future is, in some real sense, up to them.

And they're right.

They're also wrong.

Because the same founders - the honest ones, the ones who've been through enough to have perspective - will also tell you that luck and timing played a massive role. That they were in the right place at a particular moment in history. That things they couldn't have controlled happened to go their way.

Both things are true. And holding both at the same time isn't easy.

I used to think this was a contradiction. Now I think it's actually the job.

Two beliefs that serve different purposes

The belief that it's all up to you is what gets you out of bed and into a difficult customer conversation. It's what keeps you iterating after a product fails to land. Without it, you don't take the next shot. The research backs this up - believing you control your own outcomes matters, but only when it actually changes what you do. Belief that doesn't trigger action is just a story you tell yourself.

The awareness of external factors does something else. It's what keeps you patient when the market isn't ready. It's what allows you to pivot without feeling like a failure when circumstances change around you. And critically, it stops you from over-crediting your own skill when things go well - because founders who believe their success was entirely earned tend to stop questioning their assumptions, and that's when they stop learning.

It's worth noting that this trap doesn't just catch founders. I've watched a bank CEO attribute every good year to his leadership and every bad quarter to market conditions - same person, same institution, completely different explanations depending on the results. I've seen VC investors land a couple of successful exits and quietly convince themselves they had some special instinct - forgetting that the rest of the portfolio told a very different story. These are experienced people with decades of track record. If they fall into it, founders should assume they will too.

How much is really outside your control

More than most founders want to admit.

CB Insights recently analyzed 431 startups that had shut down. Poor product-market fit was the top cause of failure at 43%. But look at what else is on the list: bad timing at 29%, unsustainable unit economics at 19%, unfavorable market or competitive conditions woven through multiple categories. Add those up and a significant portion of what determines whether a startup lives or dies has nothing to do with how hard the founder worked or how good their decisions were.

That doesn't mean effort is pointless - far from it. But it does raise a question that most startup advice quietly avoids: if you accept that a real part of the outcome is out of your hands, how do you keep showing up with full intensity anyway?

Sports science offers a useful lens here. I came across a 2024 study on goal-setting in elite sport that put some concrete numbers behind this. Process goals - focusing on controllable actions like technique, effort, and routine - had the largest performance effect by a wide margin. Outcome goals, focused on results like winning or scoring, had almost no measurable impact on performance. The athletes who performed best weren't thinking about the scoreboard. They were focused on what they could control in the next moment.

In any environment where external factors have real influence on results - and startups are one of the noisiest environments there is - obsessing over outcomes is a losing strategy. Not because outcomes don't matter, but because you can't control them directly. What you can control is how you prepare, how you decide, how you respond, and how you learn.

The founders I've seen navigate hard stretches best weren't the most confident or the most fatalistic. They were the ones who knew the difference - and could bring conviction when it was time to act, and honesty when it was time to assess.

What I've seen work

The founders who hold this tension well didn't figure it out philosophically - they built specific habits. Two that I've watched make a noticeable difference.

The first is knowing - explicitly, not vaguely - what's actually yours. Product decisions. Customer conversations. The quality of your thinking. Iteration speed. Hiring choices. These are yours. Market timing, macro conditions, what a competitor decides to build, whether a VC partner had a bad morning before your pitch - these aren't. A founder I worked with last year kept a running list on a whiteboard: two columns, "ours" and "not ours." Every time his team started spiraling about something external, someone would point at the board. It sounds almost too simple. But over time it changed how the team processed setbacks - less hand-wringing about things they couldn't change, more focus on the decisions they hadn't made yet. Within a few months, the team was self-correcting without anyone pointing at the board.

The second is reviewing outcomes and process separately - and keeping them apart. A good process can produce a bad outcome. A bad process can get lucky. When you blend the two in the same conversation, you learn the wrong lessons. One founder I advise runs two distinct reviews after every quarter. The first asks: what happened, and what external factors played a role? The second - a few days later, once the dust has settled - asks: what did we control, did we execute it well, and what would we do differently? Same quarter, different conversations. The insight that shifted her thinking was realizing that a "bad" quarter where they'd executed well was actually a signal to stay the course, not to overhaul the strategy. And a "good" quarter where they'd gotten lucky was a warning, not a celebration.

That separation - outcomes in one box, process in another - is what lets founders keep their drive intact when results aren't coming, and stay honest with themselves when results are.

Back to my founder friend

When we finished talking about the Spurs, he said something I've been thinking about since. He said the thing he found hardest wasn't executing under pressure - it was keeping his process sharp during stretches when outcomes weren't coming. When you're doing everything right and the results aren't there yet.

That's the real test. Because outcomes tell you what happened. Process shapes what happens next.

The best founders I know have figured out that their job isn't to control the game. It's to show up every day, run their process, stay honest about what they can and can't influence - and keep going - and learning - anyway. Just like a team of twenty-two-year-olds in San Antonio, playing every game as if the only thing that matters is the next twenty-four seconds.

I help founders navigate strategy and funding decisions when the path isn't clear. If you're there, let's talk.