You’re Not Undertrained for the Market, but Undertrained for Yourself.
The market is not the hardest part of building a startup. You are.
Your patterns under pressure. Your blind spots when time is scarce. Your health when adrenaline becomes a lifestyle.
That was the quiet theme underneath Garry Tan's sharing at Stanford Initiative for Entrepreneurs' Resilience & Well-Being
One line stayed with me:
You can’t change your pre-training. But you can change the prompt. And you can change the post-training.
That sentence explains why so many capable founders stall—not from lack of effort, but from unexamined defaults.
Resilience is not grit
Garry made an important distinction:
Resilience is not trying again and again in the same way. That’s not strength—that’s fool.
Real resilience is:
Awareness of your circumstances
Willingness to pivot
And surrounding yourself with people who raise your standard
Isolation doesn’t make founders tougher. It makes them slower to see reality.
The cost of skipping inner work
Garry spoke candidly about 2008–2011: no coach, no therapist, no time to examine his own “bugs” from "pre-training".
It later took eight years of therapy treatment to unwind what could have been addressed earlier.
His advice today is embodied, not theoretical: sauna, cold plunge, meditation—not as hacks, but as ways to become more integrated and conscious under pressure.
I see this constantly in my coaching work: founders optimize the company and neglect the operator.
Startups compress your life
As CEO of Y Combinator, Garry quoted the found of YC Paul Graham :
A startup compresses forty years of work into four.
You don’t get decades to grow into leadership. You get intensity, consequence, and exposure—fast.
That only works if your mental and physical pre-training can carry it.
Otherwise, intelligence isn’t the limiting factor. Awareness is.
Meritocracy, rejection, and community
Paul Graham has long argued that startups are brutally meritocratic: if you don’t build something people want, reality responds quickly.
YC isn’t perfectly meritocratic—but they try. Today, applicants can even submit raw coding transcripts to show real ability, not polish.
Still, 99.7% of applicants are rejected. Many are rejected multiple times.
Rejection isn’t the lesson. How you metabolize it is.
That’s also why Garry recommends communities like YPO for pre–Series A founders—not for status, but for perspective.
Why coaching matters—especially early
Garry’s advice was direct:
Hire a personal coach—even if you don’t have money.
Not because coaches have magic answers. But because clearer awareness leads to thousands of better decisions—and those compound.
As a coach, this is the gift I want to leave you with:
You don’t need to be tougher. You need to be clearer.
Clear about your patterns. Clear about your constraints. Clear about who you need around you.
That clarity rarely happens alone.
I’m noticing more founders reach out not because things are failing— but because they sense something important is being delayed.
Serious builders eventually invest in themselves. The only question is: early—or after the damage is done?