The cost of casualness
They don't care, so they lose.
Passion first, passion second
If there’s one thing I’ve learned about business, especially sales, it’s that passion is contagious. You should never trade something you enjoy for something you don’t care about just because it seems more lucrative. I know this sounds obvious and I don’t want to state something you already know.
The thing is, when you browse LinkedIn, you notice a lot of people creating businesses they’re not truly passionate about. One day they focus on AI, the next on crypto, then payments, and by the fifth day, they’re marketing something completely different. They just don’t really care. They’re casual about it.
There are elements of casualness in the startup world that you don’t find in traditional business. Traditional business get no light, no glory, no fame. So whatever you do, you’re doing it for your inner scorecard, not your outer scorecard. You don’t do it for recognition. You do it for actual money. And if you want to make actual money, you’d better do something you like, something you believe in.
Think about craftsmen, people working with wood, stone, food. The guy making pizza like it’s a religion. The woman weaving textiles with the same rhythm her grandmother used. The artisan making leather key holders no one even asked for. The stonecutter carving things nobody will see, just because it needs to be done right. Nobody cares about their niche. Nobody’s watching. And they don’t care either. Because they care.
They obsess over the grain of the wood, the temperature of the dough, the way the blade moves across marble. They're not casuals. They don't need funding rounds or media coverage. They don’t pivot. They don’t post.
They are their product.
That’s the exact opposite of what most startups have become. Instead of craftsmen, we have opportunists. Instead of people in love with the process, we have people addicted to applause.
I’ve really met some disgusting profiles in the startup world over the last few years. People who are very good at raising funds and pretending they care, about impact, about team, about values. But really, they just want to be famous. They want cash. They want recognition. They want to spend VC money in nightclubs. I’ve seen it. The party was good. I don’t drink, but hey, a cup of champagne doesn’t hurt, especially if it’s paid by some idiot betting on the next unicorn. But this behaviour has a cost, and that cost is already being paid. Tons of startups are paying it now.
The first cost: no stamina
The first cost of casualness is that if you don’t truly care, you won’t be able to do it for long. You’d better get profitable by pure luck if you want to survive. That’s why so many VC-funded businesses end up dying. Sometimes they even give the money back. VCs occasionally ask them to give the money back. But most often, the founders just no longer care.
And because they only cared about the outer scorecard, they can’t function without glory. They wanted free cash. They knew how to raise it. But when there’s no spotlight? They vanish. When you don’t really care, you’re a casual. Just like people commenting on boxing videos. They sound cool. They watch the fights. But they don’t know boxing. They can’t fight. They’re casuals. And that’s fine, everyone is casual about most things.
But if you’re casual about the thing you’re building a startup around, you’re in trouble. There’s no true empathy in your product. You’re not your first customer. You’re not your product. You’re not in it. You're a tourist.
The second cost: mediocre products
Casual founders build casual apps. Casual design. Casual thinking. No attention to detail. They can become founders of fintech, insurtech, accounting softwares, or payments platforms. They raise funds, don’t care about the product, and build something just utilitarian. They end up competing on price.
Great brands are built on passion. Think Apple. Think McDonald’s in its early days. In-N-Out. James Dyson. Nike, Sony, Christian Dior, IBM, Michael Dell, Stripe … and so on.
People don’t just buy AirPods because they’re technically the best. They buy them because it’s Apple. Because the brand has personality. That personality came from Steve Jobs’ fashion, his obsessions, his vision.
Passion creates brands. Passion creates identity. Passion means there’s something autotelic in your work, done for its own sake. When you buy it, you buy a piece of the person who made it. You can’t do that with a casual. You don’t want a piece of a casual a casual baker baked casually jaded about his life.
Can you imagine walking into a clothing store run by a founder, picking up a jacket, and asking, “Hey, why did you design this?” And the guy says: “I don’t know. I had some VC money. I paid a designer. Now you can buy it.” That’s how people build software now. Except they dress it up in fancy marketing.
A world of infinite leverage
I genuinely believe that in the last few years, the explosion of investment in startups didn’t translate into more great products. Proportionally, there were more great products built before.
More capital means more founders, but not necessarily better ones. Many of them build things that don’t solve anything real to them. They're just casuals.
I recently saw a product where AI turns flat-lay photos of clothing into model pictures -so you don’t need a real model. It was good. But it had no soul. No aesthetic sense. No variety. No detail. Just a tool made by people who don’t care about fashion. A casual app.
So again:
First cost of casualness: You won’t last. No stamina. You die.
Second cost of casualness: You build average product. You die.
And in a world of infinite leverage -as Naval Ravikant pointed- the best one wins everything. Not 60%. Not 80%. Everything.
If you're the best, people follow only you. One product. One newsletter. One tool. One person, in one language, for the whole world. That’s what's coming. The world is going to be radically unequal, even more than it is now. Not because of injustice, but because of scale. Leverage. The passionate will win. The casuals will lose.
Stripe will probably dominate fintech. Crypto built by nerds with soul will crush crypto built by VC bros and weekend tech tourists. Because the real ones stay up at night solving hard problems for the sake of it. Like Satoshi did. Like the best still do.
That’s the real consequence of casualness: you don’t stand a chance.
Don’t be a casual.