I remember sometime last year we were buying a company for about $8 billion. It had been founded in 2001, same CEO from the very start, grown in a traditional space into billions in value. We had a diligence call to discuss all aspects of the business.

Two hours on the phone, only 3 folks from that company. This CEO knew EVERYTHING. Every lease, every IP registration, every environmental permit, every material contract. This guy was the company and has basically dedicated his life to every live wire since 2001.

It’s one of those moments when it hits you, the sheer time, belief, and obsession it takes to will a company into existence. The commitment and mental range required is insane. And yet without it, none of the companies we casually name-drop would exist.

If you think about it, a company doesn’t really exist. It’s a well protected hallucination reinforced by law. Even when you’re standing at the feet of a company’s headquarters, that is still not a “company” but just one contract, a lease or sale contract with the company name.

A company is basically just a dense web of contracts: the first is with the state, then with investors, employees, with landlords, with vendors, with lenders, with customers and so on. For a large company, it’s THOUSANDS of contracts.

Great founders know this. They can tell you when the lease expires, when the next procurement order is due, which lender is tightening covenants, when options vest, what the strike price was. They carry the company in their heads long before the market recognizes it as real.

Being used to advising large-cap companies, makes me sometimes blind to this whole process because the infrastructure is invisible it’s already there. You need projections? There’s a polished deck. Want level-three cash flows or SBC schedules? Whole teams have it on hand.

Then you step into a smaller company and you see the raw, existential struggles: cobbling together payroll, negotiating with a local bank for a line of credit, deciding between QuickBooks and Excel. The things you barely notice at scale are survival issues here.

Entrepreneurs don’t get nearly enough credit. They are the lifeblood of this world. To take an idea, something that exists only in your imagination, and to grind it brick by brick into an actual company that begins to sustain others, is one of the wildest human feats there is.

And if I think about it right, raw entrepreneurial spirit is the greatest test of genius. Risk, skin in the game, the willingness to put your own life into the furnace; it’s almost impossible to fathom.

I insist always that it’s flattening when we reduce founders to “they had the right connections”. Sure, some do. But so do countless others who never build anything that survives. Irrational, sustained commitment to force reality to bend around an idea is in short supply.

Entrepreneurship is, at its core, the art of refusing to accept non-existence. Which is both philosophically and practically incredible to sustain. And the people who succeed at it, even with all their flaws, deserve more credit than we usually give.

@Mrpossidez On a scale of 1-10, how hard do you reckon it’s? My guess is somewhere around 7

@Jaspee_X I’ll put it at a 10. Trust me on this, I’ve seen both sides of companies top to bottom. It is very hard

@Mrpossidez It truly is

@tosinolaseinde Yes o. Truly remarkable stuff

@Mrpossidez You'd have to be neurodivergent, a systems thinker...to clock things this way. It resonates...I like your thought process.

@kkay_ccee My 2 “e” tests unfortunately say so. Thanks for the second sentence!

@Mrpossidez It’s tough building but it’s tougher holding and getting it to the peak

@Nwekeprince101 Agree

@Mrpossidez Wish I could buy you a drink for this write up... The moving parts can be so much......crazy mehn

@Chris_Nwoji I totally understand that. It’s a lot really

@Mrpossidez After reading this, you can only imagine the kind of dedication, commitment, will power and zeal it takes to start a company or be an entrepreneur, but people are our here saying why don’t you start a business “any business” likes it a piece of cake.

@Mrpossidez Wow what a thorough breakdown. You outline the weight and scale of entrepreneurship really well

@Mrpossidez I took a gulp from the glass of Guiness on my desk after reading the concluding paragraph. Yeah, cheers to you too 🍻

@Mrpossidez Building is a challenging endeavour that requires grit, resilience, and determination to keep progressing. Kudos to every entrepreneur working on their projects, it takes a lot, you are brave!

@Mrpossidez Especially in countries like Nigeria,