The best founders will kill their first idea to save the company

When the newsletter’s writer, a venture investor, quoted Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison, he was pointing to a split between fixating on a plan and fixating on where it has to end up.

“The most successful entrepreneurs I know are extremely adaptable,” Collison said. “They are obsessive about outcomes but flexible about how they get there.”

The writer argues that some founders treat the company as a personal project and cling to their first vision. The strongest ones, in his view, treat it as a mission, and caring more about that first version than about getting somewhere is a way to fail.

That is where Brian Armstrong, the founder of Coinbase, comes in. Armstrong says, “action creates information.”

In the writer’s account, steady founders set feelings aside and judge each choice by whether it moves the venture forward. They act in order to produce fresh facts, then respond to those facts as plainly as they can, whatever they happen to feel about it.

Perhaps this is “the test of the stoic,” the writer suggests: “are you willing to send your baby down the river if you need to? Are you willing to give up what you love most right now, in order to save it later?”