The Founder’s Private Desires Eventually Become the Company’s Costs

Originally published on Substack.

Work with someone long enough, and you may develop a very direct impression: they are not really trying to solve the problem. They are using the problem as an outlet for emotion.

An ordinary disagreement over a product can be escalated into a battle of principles. A routine delay can be interpreted as a betrayal by the team. A single dissenting opinion can trigger prolonged criticism, sarcasm, and displays of power.

This condition can sometimes be understood as the repression of desire. Among its more difficult forms may be sexual repression, a subject that East Asian cultures are often reluctant to discuss openly.

When desire remains chronically unfulfilled, it tends to seek an alternative outlet. Some people lack the ability to process their own sense of deprivation. They turn workplace problems into emotional release valves and make the entire team pay for their private frustrations.

1. The Most Dangerous Costs in a Startup Rarely Appear on the Financial Statements

Every company should keep two balance sheets.

The first is maintained by the finance team. It records cash, receivables, liabilities, and equity.

The second is kept by no one. It contains the founder’s anxiety, the co-founder’s resentment, the manager’s unmet need for control, and the fears the team has swallowed for months without ever expressing.

When the first balance sheet deteriorates, the company may still be able to raise capital.

When the second one deteriorates, the company may continue growing—and may even grow faster—for some time. Then one day, the accumulated cost erupts all at once in the form of resignations, internal conflict, whistleblowing, litigation, or a governance crisis.

Psychology describes one common mechanism as displacement: when people cannot confront the true source of their stress, they redirect their emotions toward safer and weaker targets.

Startups are particularly vulnerable to this pattern.

A founder cannot scream at investors. Customers cannot be offended. The market will not change simply because the founder feels misunderstood. Pressure therefore flows downward through the hierarchy: from the founder to senior executives, from executives to middle managers, and from middle managers to frontline employees.

External uncertainty is ultimately converted into internal, predictable harm.

Pressure does not automatically become an organizational problem. Unprocessed pressure, when combined with power, does.

2. Uber: When Aggression Evolves from Competitive Advantage into Organizational Virus

Uber’s early success is difficult to separate from Travis Kalanick’s aggression.

At a time when ride-hailing still operated in a legal and regulatory gray zone, a cautious founder who waited for permission at every step might never have built a global business. Kalanick’s obsession with competition, his willingness to challenge rules, and his almost compulsive drive for execution were once among Uber’s most valuable strategic assets.

The problem is that a founder’s greatest strength is often also their most dangerous weakness.

When the imperative to win expands from the marketplace into internal management, dissent is no longer treated as information. It is treated as disloyalty. Employees are no longer people working together to solve problems. They become people to be conquered, screened, or removed.

In 2017, Uber faced a succession of allegations about its workplace culture, executive departures, and governance investigations. A video of Kalanick arguing with an Uber driver offered the public a glimpse of a leadership style that had ceased to be contained.

In the end, the man who helped Uber break through market resistance also became a source of resistance the company had to overcome.

The Uber story does not prove anything about Kalanick’s private life. It demonstrates something else:

A founder’s emotional patterns are interpreted by the organization as permission.

If the founder humiliates subordinates, middle managers begin to regard humiliation as part of a high-performance culture.

If the founder treats disagreement as betrayal, the organization gradually learns to report only good news.

If the founder uses anger to drive execution, the company eventually becomes dependent on fear to coordinate work.

Emotion is not a private possession inside an organization.

For an ordinary employee, a bad mood may affect one day of work. For a founder who controls hiring, firing, promotion, and resource allocation, a bad mood can become an institution.

3. WeWork: When Identity Hunger Consumes Commercial Boundaries

Adam Neumann was never satisfied with running a shared-office company.

He wanted WeWork to transform the way humanity worked, elevate global consciousness, and expand into housing, education, and fitness. He even spoke of ambitions such as becoming a world leader or the world’s first trillionaire.

Ambition itself was not the problem. Nearly every great entrepreneurial story begins with a level of ambition that appears unreasonable to others.

The real problem emerges when a company is no longer merely a commercial organization, but a vehicle through which the founder proves his own worth.

At that point, strategic boundaries begin to disappear.

In 2019, as WeWork prepared to go public, it revealed massive losses, governance failures, conflicts of interest, and uncontrolled expansion. The company had once reached a valuation of $47 billion. Under the scrutiny of public markets, that valuation collapsed rapidly. The IPO was postponed, Neumann stepped down, and thousands of employees lost their jobs.

From a founder’s perspective, the most important warning in the WeWork story was not a single extravagant purchase or one grandiose statement.

It was the disappearance of the psychological boundary between the founder and the company.

The company had to keep expanding because stopping would have felt like admitting that the founder was not as extraordinary as he imagined.

The team had to keep affirming the vision because questioning the business model felt like questioning the founder himself.

Bad news could not travel upward because once facts punctured the narrative, the damage would extend beyond valuation. It would also wound the leader’s identity.

This is a common form of identity hunger.

When people lack stable sources of value in their personal lives, they may demand that the company continuously provide applause, loyalty, power, and admiration. The more capital they raise and the larger the organization becomes, the harder that hunger is to satisfy.

A company can carry a founder’s ambition. It cannot indefinitely finance the founder’s self-therapy.

4. Theranos: When Fear of Doubt Becomes a System of Secrecy

Theranos provides a more extreme example.

Elizabeth Holmes fashioned herself into a young genius who would transform healthcare. As the story became more ambitious, the gap between technical reality and public promises grew wider.

When reality can no longer support identity, leaders usually face two choices.

The first is to acknowledge the problem and adjust the product, timetable, and expectations.

The second is to eliminate the people who bring the problem to their attention.

Theranos gradually developed a culture of extreme secrecy, departmental isolation, and suppressed dissent. Employees who raised technical concerns were marginalized, dismissed, or threatened with legal action.

The organization stopped using information to correct decisions. It began using power to protect the narrative.

This is the most dangerous organizational form of repression. It is no longer a matter of one person being in a bad mood. The entire company is forced to participate in the denial of reality.

Many founders like to emphasize conviction.

But conviction and self-deception are separated by one critical mechanism: whether bad news is allowed to reach the top.

Without such a mechanism, determination can easily become a demand that everyone in the company help the founder escape shame, failure, and the fear of losing control.

5. What We Really Dislike Is Not “People Who Are Not Having Sex”

Let us return to the original, slightly provocative judgment.

Sexual activity may be associated with stress, mood, and well-being, but most existing research establishes correlation rather than causation. It does not justify the simple conclusion that a lack of sex causes emotional instability at work.

People with active sex lives can still be volatile, controlling, and aggressive. People who have been single for years can be calm, disciplined, and clear about boundaries.

The true determinant of collaboration quality is therefore not the frequency of someone’s sex life. It is their psychological capacity to metabolize frustration.

Can they admit that they are anxious, rather than disguising anxiety as strategic urgency?

Can they accept disagreement, rather than interpreting it as a challenge to authority?

Can they experience a failed financing round, a customer rejection, or a delayed product release without turning the problem into a personal conflict?

Do they have sources of meaning outside work, or do they constantly require the team to prove that they are important, correct, and irreplaceable?

What startup teams fear is not a person with strong desires.

On the contrary, desire is one of entrepreneurship’s primary fuels. The desire to succeed, to create, and to influence the world is what drives people to accept risks that most others would refuse.

What teams fear is this:

A person with powerful desires but no capacity to contain them.

Their longing becomes control.

Their frustration becomes aggression.

Their loneliness becomes an excessive demand for loyalty.

Their fear of failure becomes an organization in which failure is no longer permitted.

6. A Founder’s Emotional Governance Is Corporate Governance

When investors conduct due diligence, they examine the cap table, intellectual property, customer concentration, and cash flow.

But in an early-stage company, the most serious single point of failure is often the founder.

Has the founder’s sleep been chronically disrupted?

Do they have relationships and a life outside work?

How do they treat people who deliver bad news?

After being rejected, questioned, or criticized, do they review the facts—or punish the people around them?

These may appear to be private matters. Eventually, however, they become operating issues.

A 2026 longitudinal study of high-pressure technology and fintech startups found that team-level emotional intelligence can improve resilience and performance through emotional regulation, a positive climate, and constructive conflict.

Entrepreneurship is not about eliminating emotion. It is about building mechanisms that prevent emotion from hijacking decisions.

For founders, this requires at least three things.

First, build a psychological runway.

We calculate every day how many months of cash the company has left. We rarely calculate how long our patience, sleep, intimate relationships, and sense of dignity can continue to support us.

When the psychological runway runs out, the founder may remain in the role, but their judgment has already begun to fail.

Second, institutionalize dissent.

Do not simply tell employees that differing opinions are welcome. Create designated devil’s-advocate roles, anonymous feedback channels, board-level challenge, and structured review mechanisms.

Where power differences exist, honest opinions do not survive on courage alone. They need institutional protection.

Third, do not use the team as an emotional outlet.

Employees are there to achieve commercial objectives. They are not there to repair the founder’s childhood, marriage, self-esteem, or identity crisis.

The smaller and more intimate the team, the more carefully it must guard against boundaries being erased by ideas such as brotherhood, mission, and absolute loyalty.

Conclusion: Desire Needs an Outlet, but Power Needs Boundaries

Founders are allowed to feel lonely.

They are allowed to feel anxious, intensely driven, and deprived for long periods of time.

The problem is not that these feelings exist.

The problem is whether the founder requires the entire organization to carry them.

Over time, I stopped judging whether someone was suitable for long-term collaboration by asking whether they were always emotionally stable.

That standard is unrealistic. Entrepreneurship itself is a machine that continuously produces pressure.

What matters more is whether they can recognize when they are becoming unbalanced.

When they are frustrated, can they avoid passing the damage to people with less power?

When their desires cannot be satisfied, can they turn those desires into creation rather than control?

Maturity is not the absence of desire. It is the refusal to let your desires become someone else’s disaster.

A company’s culture is often nothing more than the founder’s way of managing inner conflict, replicated hundreds of times.

The people we should truly fear are not those with unmet desires.

They are those who refuse responsibility for their emotions while holding the power to determine other people’s futures.

What forms of “emotional cost externalization” have you encountered in startups or at work—control, aggression, silent punishment, or excessive demands for loyalty?