Founders say one thing and do another. Almost all of us. Not because we're liars, but because certain things sound right to investors, candidates, customers, and competitors.
The job is to live inside that dissonance while still executing logically. The danger is when other founders copy the words instead of the actions. They hear the sermon and miss the footnotes.
Below are some of the most common founder dissonances I see, and have lived.
"We're not raising"
You're never raising. Or at least you say you aren't.
Raising sounds desperate. The best companies supposedly do not need capital. They are default alive. Profitable by next quarter. Running on vibes and retained earnings.
In reality, plenty of great companies are always raising. Or at least always ready to. They keep the option open, build relationships, and quietly run a process when the timing is right. Saying you are not raising is often just leverage. It signals strength, even if you are two bad quarters away from opening a data room.
The mistake is believing the line literally.
"We don't do marketing"
You never have marketing. You just build and the users show up.
People hate ads. Reddit seethes when it realizes a post is an ad. Hacker News pretends it can smell marketing from three tabs away. Investors want growth to look organic, viral, and free. Cost of new revenue should asymptotically approach zero.
But almost everyone markets. They just rename it.
Content is marketing. DevRel is marketing. Founder Twitter is marketing. Launch posts, conference talks, open source, community Slack, tasteful blog posts, all marketing. Even the choice of what features to build first is marketing.
The dissonance is saying you do not market while spending enormous energy shaping perception. The mistake is assuming that means you should not invest in distribution at all.
"We don't have sales"
This one is my favorite.
Big sales teams are boring. Low margin. Operationally heavy. If it costs billions in sales ops to get to billions in revenue, something feels wrong. We want to be early Google, early Facebook, early Stripe, early ChatGPT. Product led. No sales team. Just pull.
People love to point to PlanetScale not having a traditional sales team. Or Notion. Or Figma.
But founders are always selling. Always. To users. To candidates. To partners. To investors. YC pushes founders to get their first dollar of revenue as fast as possible for a reason. Someone has to ask for the money.
Most companies eventually add sales, even if they delay it. The quiet truth is not "no sales," it is "founder sales for as long as possible, then very selective sales when the product demands it."
"We grind 996"
Everyone works insanely hard. Nights. Weekends. Holidays. It sounds great to customers and VCs. Who wouldn't want their vendor working infinitely hard? You are not buying employee happiness. You are buying output and future revenue.
But people break if they actually work 996 forever. A week, fine. A month, maybe. A brutal product sprint, sure. Years? Across dozens of people? Good luck.
The few companies that pull this off tend to be extreme outliers like SpaceX, where the mission, brand, and upside justify it. Even there, it often becomes a rotating triage system. People burn out, rotate off, recover, rotate back on.
Most founders cannot credibly demand 996. They do not have the brand, the comp, or the once in a generation mission. In a hot hiring market, the people who accept that deal are often underskilled, overpaid, or betting on lottery odds.
The dissonance is praising infinite grind while quietly trying to pace the team just enough to survive.
"We're not for sale"
You never want to be acquired. Even if you do. Even if you would take the call.
You are on a magical journey. Creating infinite value for the world. The most expensive things are not for sale. The price might be infinite.
This posture increases optionality. If you ever do want to sell, it pushes the price up. If you never sell, it keeps you focused. Saying you are not for sale is often just good negotiation hygiene.
The mistake is confusing posture with strategy.
"Quality first"
Everyone says this. Superhuman. Linear. Insert your favorite beloved product.
You are here to build quality. Beautiful software. Thoughtful experiences. No one wants to admit they are shipping junk into the universe. No one wants to build junk, buy junk, or be marketed junk. You are making art. This is a vocation.
Allow me to be boring for a moment. Quality costs money. Real quality costs a lot of it. Engineering time, design time, opportunity cost. You cannot subsidize quality infinitely. Eventually someone pays, either you or your investors.
Excess quality that users do not pay for is a form of charity. Sometimes it is strategic. Often it is risky.
You can try to capture value from excess quality through brand, culture, or word of mouth. That works sometimes. It is expensive and usually slow. The pragmatic path is to preach quality loudly and build it carefully, just past the threshold users will reliably pay for.
The point
Startups live on dissonance. Say one thing, do another.
Be careful when listening to other founders preach. Do not do what they say. Watch what they do. And even then, it is often hard to see clearly through the smoke.
There is no single correct answer on quality, marketing, or sales. It depends on what you are selling and to whom. A consumer app. A B2B SaaS CRUD tool. An enterprise database. AI data labeling. Each demands a different balance.
Still, in most rooms, you can safely say the same things. We do not have sales or marketing. We are here to build quality. We are not raising. We are not looking to be acquired. We work harder than anyone.
Say those things. Then do something balanced, practical, and grounded in reality.
And learn to live with the dissonance.