The Wrong Scoreboard

On what it means to be a founder — written the week SpaceX went public and immediately bought Cursor for $60 billion.

There’s never been a better time to be a founder. I want to say that first, and mean it, before I complicate it.

A single person can now build a real product and take it to market. Not a prototype — a product. You can design it, build it, ship it, write the copy, run the support, and find your first thousand customers without hiring a soul. The work that used to require a team of twenty and a seed round now fits inside one person with good taste and a handful of subscriptions. That isn’t hype. That’s just Tuesday now.

AI did that. It collapsed the distance between an idea and a thing people will pay for. And there’s a quiet irony worth sitting with: the more AI automates, the more valuable the one role it can’t automate becomes. It can write the code. It can’t decide what’s worth building. It can draft the email. It can’t choose who to send it to, or care whether they reply. It can execute any task you can name — but it can’t be the one who notices the problem, carries the risk, and refuses to quit. That’s the entrepreneur. If you’re hunting for the title that’s actually AI-proof, it’s that one. Not because the entrepreneur does more, but because the entrepreneur is the source of the why that everything else hangs on.

So: best time ever. I believe that.

And then there was this week.

The numbers stopped feeling like money

This week SpaceX went public in the largest IPO in history, closing its first day worth more than two trillion dollars. Days later — basically before the confetti was swept up — it spent sixty billion of that on Cursor, an AI coding company founded in 2022. Four years old. Sixty billion dollars.

Read those numbers again and notice they’ve stopped feeling like money. They’ve become weather. Something that happens above you, to other people, on a scale you can’t reach by simply trying harder.

And if you’re a founder grinding on four thousand dollars of monthly revenue, or quietly deciding whether to keep the lights on for another quarter, the honest reaction to a week like this is a small, cold question: am I even solving the right problem?

The chasm here isn’t an emotional hurdle—it’s a mathematical meat grinder. Look at the baseline: the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that half of all new businesses vanish within five years. But if you hunt for venture-backed glory, the odds turn predatory: three out of four startups won’t even return a single dollar to their investors. The mythic dream of becoming a billion-dollar unicorn? AngelList data reveals it’s an elusive 2.5% anomaly—a one-in-forty longshot for the lucky few who even secure a seed round. Ultimately, venture capital is an industry of ghosts ruled by a ruthless 90/10 power law. Out of thousands of desperate pitches, top firms back a mere couple hundred, and just a dozen or so outliers generate 90% of the returns that keep the entire ecosystem alive.

Now hold that dream up against this week. A unicorn is worth a billion dollars. Cursor just sold for sixty of them. SpaceX is worth more than two thousand. The outcome you’re statistically unlikely to ever reach is itself a rounding error next to the outcome on the news. That’s the real shape of the gap — not founder versus founder, but the entire ordinary universe of building set beside a handful of freak events with their own gravity. It is, if you let it be, deeply demotivating.

The trap inside the question

But here’s the trap hidden in that cold question. “Am I solving the right problem?” quietly assumes the right problem is the one that ends in a number like that. It accepts a scoreboard you never agreed to play on.

The SpaceX outcome, the Cursor outcome — those aren’t benchmarks. Even the unicorn most founders quietly play for is a one-in-forty long shot; these are that long shot raised to a power. They’re lottery-scale events of timing and capital and luck that can’t be reverse-engineered into a plan. Measuring your work against them is like a club runner being demoralized by Usain Bolt. He isn’t your competition. He was never the point.

The right problem isn’t “why am I not building a sixty-billion-dollar company.” It’s quieter and harder: am I building something that genuinely matters to the people I’m building it for, and that I’d be proud to spend my one finite life on? Solve for the exit and you’re optimizing the single variable you barely control, at the expense of all the ones you do — the problem you pick, the people you serve, the craft of the thing, whether it lasts, whether it’s actually yours.

Both things are true

And here’s the part worth holding onto: the exact same forces minting these monstrous outcomes — AI leverage, near-free distribution, the collapse of the team you used to need — are also what make this the best time in history to build something small, profitable, and entirely your own. Both are true at once. The record-breakers are a rounding error. The real story of building is the vast, quiet majority — and that’s where you get to live, with nothing to apologize for.

Naming the hardship isn’t cynical. The loneliness is real. The odds are real. The noise of other people’s billions is real, and this week it was loud. But the answer to it isn’t bigger ambition. It’s clearer purpose. Being a founder today means having the nerve to set down the scoreboard somebody else handed you and keep building toward the thing you actually came here to make. The entrepreneur remains the sole custodian of intent.

So change the scoreboard. The right one isn’t calibrated to infinite scale; it’s calibrated to human leverage. Did you notice a real problem today? Did you apply your specific, non-automatable taste to solve it? Do you own the autonomy of your days? If the answer is yes, you aren’t failing. You are operating at the highest level of human agency available. Let SpaceX have the stratosphere. Your job is to rule the ground you stood up on.

The best time ever to be a founder. Still true. Maybe more true on a week like this — not less.

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Sources: startup survival rates, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics via GrowthList; venture-backed failure rate, Upsilon; seed-stage unicorn odds, AngelList; venture power-law concentration, BIP Ventures; SpaceX first-day valuation, CNBC; Cursor / Anysphere acquisition, CNBC.