Category: Thought
Upside-down startups.
Working as a tech auditor for VCs, I’ve witnessed a surprising pattern: startups that operate more like personal development journeys than companies. This piece explores why some founders unintentionally build “upside-down startups” - and what it takes to turn them right-side up.
Tags: Thought.
Some startups are built on vision and a clear customer problem - the kind you validate by talking to dozens of users and losing sleep over what they actually need.
Others… are built upside down.
I’m talking about startups where the real product isn’t what’s on the pitch deck -
it’s the CEO’s personal growth journey.
Where “company scaling” actually means working through childhood patterns,
and “strategic decisions” become therapy sessions with a cap table attached.
And I say this not hypothetically.
Over the years, working as a tech auditor for VCs, I’ve seen behind the curtain of dozens of teams. You get a very clean X-ray view of what’s actually driving a company - both the tech and the psychology.
And the pattern is surprisingly consistent.
A lot of founders come from education systems built in the
19th-century Russian model,
a system designed to produce perfectly obedient citizens chasing a race that doesn’t exist.
A system where collaboration feels suspicious, responsibility feels scary, and success must always be individual.
When those mindsets enter a startup, the company flips upside down:
- Teams optimise for “me”, not “we.”
- Leadership prioritises personal validation over customer needs.
- Culture becomes reactive - driven more by the CEO’s emotional weather than any roadmap.
- Decisions get made to protect egos, not to build products.
As an auditor, I’ve seen companies with brilliant engineers, solid market opportunities, and cash in the bank… collapse slowly because the founder was fighting their internal battles instead of the external ones.
These upside-down startups don’t fail because of tech.
They don’t fail because of competition.
They fail because they’re accidentally structured around the CEO’s unresolved issues.
And the outcome is predictable:
🚫 No real teamwork
🚫 Constant misalignment
🚫 Zero focus
🚫 Massive burnout
🚫 A talented team orbiting around someone else’s self-discovery journey
Meanwhile, competitors who actually listen to customers quietly eat the market.
The fix?
Founders need to flip the company right-side up.
Not with another OKR workshop.
Not with another “Let’s define our values” offsite.
But with some honest self-awareness.
Companies scale when leaders grow before they build - not while everyone else is forced to participate in their therapy arc.
If you’re building something, build it for your customers, not for your childhood ghosts.
If you’re leading a team, let it be about the team, not your reflection in the pitch deck.
And if you recognise yourself in any of this…
Congratulations - that awareness is already more modern than the education system you escaped from.
Michal
