The condensation on the glass of lukewarm gin is the only thing feeling real in this room, a slick, cold reminder that gravity still exists even when everyone else is pretending to fly. I’m standing in a converted warehouse in East London, the kind with exposed brick that costs an extra 102 pounds per square foot just to look unfinished, and I’m listening to a man named Marcus explain how his fintech startup is ‘disrupting the very fabric of liquidity.’ He says the word ‘crushing’ at least 12 times in 2 minutes. His eyes are wide, vibrating with a caffeine-induced tremor that suggests he hasn’t slept since 2022, but his mouth is fixed in a permanent, terrifying grin. Across from him, a woman in a structural blazer nods so hard I’m worried about her cervical spine. She’s ‘killing it’ too. They are both, I happen to know from a mutual friend in venture debt, exactly 22 days away from missing a payroll that totals 822 thousand dollars. They are performing for each other, for the room, and for the ghosts of the investors who might be lurking near the artisanal cheese platter.

The Acrid Tang of Polish

Peter R.-M., a quality control taster I once met during a chaotic stint in the beverage industry, used to say that you could tell the quality of a spirit by the ‘mouthfeel’ of the first sip-if it burned too high in the throat, someone was hiding a cheap grain. Business has a mouthfeel too.

When you talk to a founder who is caught in the loop of Success Theater, the conversation has this acrid, metallic tang. It’s too polished. Every question about churn is met with a pivot to ‘user engagement depth.’ Every concern about burn rate is neutralized by a story about ‘strategic scaling.’

It’s exhausting. I find myself wanting to grab Marcus by his structural blazer and shake him until he admits he’s terrified. I won’t, of course. I’ll just sip my gin and watch the performance continue.

The 42-Pound Weight

The pressure to perform optimism is a 42-pound weight we expect founders to carry while they’re already sprinting uphill. If you admit it, you risk a down round or, worse, being labeled as ‘losing grip.’ So, you frame it. You lie to your board, which means you eventually start lying to your team, which means you eventually start lying to yourself in the mirror at 2 AM. By the time the truth becomes unavoidable, the gap between the theater and the reality is 102 miles wide. You can’t bridge that with a pivot. You just fall in.

The Isolation Chamber

I’ve made this mistake myself. Once, in a previous venture that I’d rather forget, I spent 22 days pretending our primary API hadn’t crashed while I was in the middle of a funding bridge. I told everyone we were ‘optimizing the backend for hyper-growth.’ In reality, I was sitting in a dark room with a developer who was crying into a bag of pretzels. We could have asked for help. We had mentors who could have stepped in. But the theater demanded I stay on stage and keep singing. By the time I finally admitted we were broken, the bridge was gone, the investors were furious, and the pretzels were stale. It was a failure of honesty, not a failure of tech.

“The theater demanded I stay on stage and keep singing. By the time I finally admitted we were broken, the bridge was gone.”

This culture of forced positivity creates a profound isolation for leaders. When everyone around you is ‘killing it,’ and you’re struggling to figure out why your 52-page strategy document isn’t yielding a single lead, you assume you’re the broken variable. You assume that if you were a ‘real’ founder, you wouldn’t be feeling this leaden weight in your chest. So you double down on the mask. You buy a more expensive hoodie. You post more frequently on LinkedIn about ‘the grind.’ The ecosystem becomes more brittle with every fake smile because we’re building on a foundation of curated illusions rather than raw data.

Reclaiming Cognitive Capacity

We need a different model, one where the ‘Success Theater’ is replaced by a ‘Reality Workshop.’ This isn’t just about being vulnerable for the sake of it-I’m not interested in a group hug. It’s about efficiency.

Imagine what we could do if we reclaimed that other 58 percent. If we can talk about the 12 things that are going wrong without the fear of immediate social or financial execution, we can actually fix those 12 things.

Finding the Reality Check

There are partners out there who actually understand this. They are rare, like a spider that stays out of your hallway, but they exist. They are the ones who don’t want the ‘everything is great’ pitch; they want the ‘here is exactly where we are bleeding’ conversation.

A true partner model, like the one practiced by

AAY Investments Group S.A., allows for these honest dialogues. It moves past the superficial performance and into the grit of actual problem-solving. When you don’t have to spend your energy convincing your capital provider that you’re a god, you can actually get back to being a human who builds things. It’s the difference between a hunter who only wants the trophy and a partner who wants to make sure the ecosystem actually survives the winter.

“He’s so deep into the character of the ‘Successful Founder’ that he’s forgotten he’s also the CEO, and the CEO’s job is to look at the blood and find a bandage, not to paint the blood gold and call it a feature.”

The Ticket Sellers

I wonder if we’ll ever reach a point where ‘struggling’ isn’t a dirty word in Silicon Valley or the City. Probably not. The theater is too profitable for the people selling the tickets. The consultants, the ‘growth hackers,’ the gurus-they all need the myth of the effortless unicorn to stay in business.

If everyone admitted that building a company is a 12-year slog through a swamp of uncertainty and 2 AM panic attacks, the glamour would evaporate. And without the glamour, how would they sell the 422-dollar-a-head conference tickets?

The Work That Doesn’t Need a Stage

I think about the spider again. I feel a slight twinge of guilt for the shoe. It was just doing its job, existing in the space it found itself in. It wasn’t pretending to be a butterfly. It wasn’t ‘disrupting’ the hallway. It was just a spider. In a world of founders pretending to be gods, there’s something remarkably refreshing about a creature that just is what it is.

We are building a house of cards on a table that’s shaking, and our solution is to keep adding more cards while shouting about how stable the table is. It’s a 102-level masterclass in collective delusion. The only way out is to start pulling the cards down ourselves, to look at the bare wood of the table, and to start fixing the legs. It’s not ‘crushing it.’ It’s not ‘killing it.’ It’s just work. And work, real work, doesn’t need a theater. It just needs the truth, even if the truth has a 42 percent chance of being uncomfortable.

I finish my drink and head for the door. I have a 12-minute walk ahead of me, and I need to think about my own theater. I need to think about the 22 emails I haven’t answered because I didn’t have a ‘positive’ enough update to give. Maybe I’ll just send them anyway. Maybe I’ll just tell the truth and see if the world ends. I suspect it won’t. I suspect the world is actually waiting for more people to stop acting and start talking. But until then, the lights are bright, the gin is cold, and the performance goes on for another 102 minutes.