Conviction > Capital: Why Startups Die Before They Begin

Startups are glorified. In fact, they're over glorified. Everyone wants to build one, but no one wants to take the risk. It's not that people don't want to work hard. There's no shortage of hardworking students at top schools. But growing up with immigrant parents, we're all told the same story: study hard, get into a good college, land a stable, high paying job. Security over uncertainty. Safety over risk. Yet somehow, everyone still wants "startup" on their resume.

I was lucky enough not to fall into that mindset. Not that it's bad, it's just not for me. I grew up around a startup that made it. My dad and his friends built Cask Inc., later acquired by Google. They took the leap when they had families, mortgages, and real responsibilities on the line. Watching that shaped how I think about risk. I feel blessed to take my shot now, when the only thing on the line is me: my time, my effort, my future.

It feels almost impossible to find co-founders who share that mindset. Everyone in the Bay is qualified. Everyone has the skills. People my age are doing things that would've been rare just a few years ago: publishing research, building real products, leading teams. But even then, few are willing to take the risk. They believe in ideas, they talk about innovation, but when it comes time to jump, they hesitate. Skills can be taught, attitude can not. It's not ability that's missing, it's conviction.

The Funding Trap

This lack of conviction fuels one of the biggest misconceptions in startups, that you need to raise before building any traction. It's much easier to chase validation from investors than to face repeated rejection from customers and keep going. But raising money without proof isn't confidence. It's avoidance. It's the fear of taking real risk and the absence of conviction that push founders to seek external validation before doing what truly matters, finding customers.

I've talked to multiple successful founders and they all say the same thing: getting from 0 to 1 is the hardest part. And if we as founders aren't united in our conviction, if we can't believe before anyone else does, how can we ever expect to make it there? How can we expect investors signing multi million dollar checks to believe when we don't? That's unrealistic. If you can't believe when there's nothing to believe in, you're not a founder, you're an employee.

And that's the cycle where most startups die. People want to be founders, they find an idea, they start building, but they never go all in. Before finding customers, they try to raise. They walk into a VC meeting expecting investors to find the conviction for them. When that doesn't happen, belief disappears. No funding, no traction, no conviction. The startup doesn't fail because the idea was bad. It fails because no one truly believes.

The Culture Problem

It's just the culture in SF. If you aren't raising pre seed and pre revenue, people assume your idea isn't good enough. But that's not the truth. The founders who claim to raise before traction are often exaggerating, and those stories feed into a culture built on perception rather than proof.

Unfortunately, we fell into that culture too. We believed we needed to raise pre-seed to make anything real. That if someone else believed in us first, we'd have a chance to make it. But that's not how it works. We worked tirelessly on building a product, and once we had something tangible, we started applying to accelerator programs. Unashamed, we were rejected from every single one. Yet every program told us the same thing: come back with more traction. They believed in the team, they saw the market, but they needed proof of execution.

After months, we learned the lesson we should've known from the start: customers are greater than investors.

The Real Validation

The validation of having someone pay for your product is unmatched. That's the real proof that you're building something companies are willing to pay for. So after months of chasing the wrong thing, we've redirected our attention. Refocused. I've found people willing to take the risk. And as I like to say, risk it for the biscuit.

The best part is, we're in a completely different place now. I've just recently found people who believe in the same vision, who aren't afraid to take the risk or sacrifice short-term comfort for long-term belief. We're not obsessing over funding rounds or accelerators anymore. We are still applying but our focus stays in building something people actually want. Every day feels clearer because we finally know what matters: shipping, improving, talking to users. The conviction that was once all over the place is now shared, that makes all the difference and puts us in the best position to succeed.

At the end of the day, conviction isn't something you pitch. It's something you prove. You don't find it in term sheets or accelerator acceptances. You BUILD it through late nights and customer feedback. That's what I've learned through all of this, the only way to earn belief from others is to show that you never needed their belief in the first place.