Embrace Chaos

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The other day, I was on the phone with a business angel who was frustrated with one of our portfolio companies. As we talked, it became clear that he had never once responded to the company’s investor updates, sent quarterly with all the key data he needed. He had no real grasp of the critical factors driving the company’s success. Worse, his concerns weren’t even based on facts but on secondhand narratives from another investor.

So I told him straight: What the fuck are you doing? The only thing that makes sense is to sit down with the founder, have an honest conversation, and reset the relationship. Get your information from the source, not from some someone else distorting it along the way.

As we continued discussing the company, I reminded him that founders already operate within enough chaos, the last thing they need is investors projecting their own anxieties onto them instead of engaging with humility and clarity.

He asked me what I meant by chaos, so here we are…

Chaos is the default state of any company. It’s like watching a master chef effortlessly execute a recipe, making it look easy. They hand you the instructions, and you assume you can replicate it, until you try and realize that without hundreds of attempts, you’re nowhere close.

Entrepreneurship is exactly that: an endless cycle of trial and error, where the comfort zone is being outside of it. Chaos takes many forms, and I want to break down some of the most important ones.

Emotional Chaos

The first type of chaos is within you.

One day, you feel unstoppable. The next, you want to quit. Between those extremes, you deal with loneliness, doubt, frustration, and the constant feeling that no matter how much you do, it’s never enough.

People say entrepreneurship is lonely. It’s not because you have no one around you, it’s because, in the end, all the responsibility falls on you. You’re the one who has to make the call, take the risk, and move forward.

Accepting this emotional chaos is step one. If you don’t, it will consume you.

Operational Chaos

The second form of chaos is execution.

At the beginning, you do everything yourself. And you have no choice. Then you start delegating. And that’s when the panic sets in. You realise no one does things exactly the way you would. So, you step back in, correct things, micromanage. And then comes the self-doubt: Am I a bad leader? Am I just incapable of trusting people?

Answer: No.

A great entrepreneur has to be a micromanager in the early days, not out of a need for control, but because without a deep understanding of how everything operates, growth and scale are impossible. Founders live in a paradox: they hold a grand vision of the future while simultaneously being in the trenches, obsessing over the smallest details.

They are the link between strategy and execution, ensuring that every moving part aligns. Their role isn’t just to manage the chaos, it’s to create harmony within it.

People Chaos

When it comes to people, chaos is inevitable.

Everyone operates with their own mindset, emotions, and pace, which makes alignment one of the hardest challenges in a company. That’s why first principles and values matter so much, they create a shared foundation in the middle of this unpredictability. Except that they’re rarely set from day one, they are formed as you progress, as an extension of your leadership.

Set those first principles and value because without them, decisions become arbitrary, execution loses consistency, and the team starts pulling in different directions. But when values are clear, they act as a stabilizing force. They don’t eliminate chaos, but they provide a framework to navigate it, ensuring that even in uncertainty, people are moving towards the same goal.

A startup is not a family. It’s not a group of friends. It’s a high-performance team. If someone slows the pace, it’s a problem.

And let’s drop the myth that a great entrepreneur is some ultra-compassionate, endlessly patient manager. A great entrepreneur is clear, fair, and demanding. Because in a startup, motion is everything. If someone is holding things back, something has to change.

Managing Chaos

The goal isn’t to eliminate chaos, it’s to manage it.

A company without chaos doesn’t exist. The best founders understand this and don’t waste time trying to create a perfectly ordered system. Instead, they build structures that absorb chaos without breaking.

Managing chaos is about control without controlling. It’s about setting clear principles so that even in uncertainty, teams know how to act. It’s about designing an organization that thrives in unpredictability rather than fighting against it.

Great founders don’t seek stability; they seek fluidity, a system where things move fast, where people make decisions without waiting for permission, and where uncertainty isn’t a blocker but a driver of momentum.

Embrace Chaos

Chaos isn’t your enemy, it’s your greatest ally.

The best founders don’t suffer through it; they use it. They know that within disorder lies opportunity, and within uncertainty lies speed. When managed correctly, chaos becomes a competitive advantage, forcing agility, pushing creativity, and filtering out those who can’t keep up.

But leveraging chaos is a mental game. It requires the ability to stay sharp when everything around you is unstable, to make high-stakes decisions with incomplete data, and to push forward even when nothing feels certain. The best founders master this mindset. They don’t chase comfort, they train themselves to operate at peak performance inside the storm.

Because in the end, chaos isn’t what slows you down. It’s what propels you forward, if you know how to handle it.