Calm Founders, Calm Startups

In the early days of a Startup, chaos feels like a feature, not a bug. Deadlines overlap, customers change their minds, investors want updates yesterday, and your product breaks exactly when you need it most.

You get pulled into the noise. Every email feels urgent, every notification demands a reaction, and every piece of bad news feels personal. That’s the express lane to burnout, bad decisions, and eventually, a bad product.

Empty your Mind, be Formless.

Calm is not a personality trait. It’s a trained discipline. And the training starts with a simple principle: control what’s in your control, ignore what’s not.

“You have power over your mind—not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.” ― Marcus Aurelius.

For founders, that means:

• You control how well your team communicates, not whether the market shifts overnight.
• You control the quality of your product decisions, not the timing of a competitor’s big launch.
• You control how you respond to a crisis, not the fact that crises will happen.

Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, once said building a startup is like “jumping off a cliff and assembling an airplane on the way down.” Calm isn’t about slowing the fall, it’s about building with steady hands mid-air.

Be Proactive

The easiest way to lose your sanity is to run your company like a firefighter who never puts down the hose.

A customer complains → You drop everything to fix it → The fix breaks something else → Now you’re fighting two fires.

Jeff Bezos is famous for not reacting to every piece of bad news immediately. Amazon has “Type 1” and “Type 2” decisions — irreversible ones get full attention fast; reversible ones can wait. That’s how you stay proactive instead of reactive. I really like the idea of labeling problems before acting on them;

• Now: Mission-critical, can’t wait.
• Later: Important, but not urgent.
• Never: Not worth your time.

Buffer Your Weeks

Just as servers require capacity buffers to handle traffic spikes, you need emotional buffers to handle chaos spikes.

• No back-to-back meetings to protect thinking space.
• A 24-hour cooling-off or the “sleep over it” rule before making emotionally charged decisions.
• Maker time blocked on your calendar, non-negotiable.
• Walk-and-think breaks.

Cal Newport calls it deep work. Naval Ravikant calls it having a mind like still water. Whatever you call it, uninterrupted time is the only way to make high-quality decisions under pressure.

In any crisis, ask yourself, “What’s the next smallest, smartest step we can take?” Then do only that before reassessing.

Being calm isn’t about ignoring problems. It’s responding without panic, keeping your head when your team is losing theirs.

When Slack went down in 2018, CEO Stewart Butterfield didn’t send frantic emails. Instead, he publicly updated users with transparency and a touch of humor. The result? Users stayed loyal. Calm in the storm builds trust.

Calm Founders Build Calm Companies

Your mood sets the tone for the whole company. A frantic founder creates a frantic culture. A steady founder creates a problem-solving culture.

Yvon Chouinard of Patagonia famously avoided the Silicon Valley “always on” culture, prioritizing thoughtful decisions over rushed growth. It worked.

Calm is contagious. It’s not just self-preservation. It’s leadership.

A Startup will always have storms. The calm founder doesn’t wait for them to pass but navigates through them, steady at the helm, so the rest of the crew can keep building.

I remember the readings and the video where Bruce Lee says;

“Be like water making its way through cracks. Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find a way around or through it. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves.

Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle, and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, and it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow, or it can crash. Be water, my friend.”