The Best Part of Founding a Company: You Get to Choose

The Best Part of Founding a Company Nobody Warned Me About: You Get to Choose

Everyone tells you about the hard parts of starting a company. The uncertainty, the cashflow, the weeks where you're holding several things together at once and hoping none of them slip. All true.

But nobody really told me about the part I've come to love most. As a first-time founder, you get to choose. Who you build with. Who backs you. Who you serve. And, quietly underneath all of it, who you get to be while you do it. It's the one thing I didn't expect, and the one I wouldn't give back.

Keeping the Band Together

The team is the first place you feel it.

Most jobs hand you your colleagues. You inherit a team, a manager, a way of doing things set long before you arrived, and you make the best of it. Building your own company flips that. For the first time, the people around me are there because we chose each other.

Our first investment partner was Paloma, and what drew us together was less the cheque than a real alignment on values and how we see the world. That mattered more than I first realised. And to be clear, it's not about assembling people who are all the same - it's almost the opposite. A shared foundation of values is exactly what lets you bring in people who are nothing alike and still have them pulling in the same direction. So it was no surprise that the engineers who first started building Gondola from within Paloma have now come across and joined us properly. You don't have to manufacture that kind of fit. You just have to notice it and hold on to it.

The clearest example is my co-founder, Adam. I couldn't have chosen better, and a lot of that's down to how different we are. Adam's got deep domain knowledge and the ability to stay locked into hard technical work - he picked up much of the compliance side naturally, the way some people just gravitate to what they're wired for. I'm wired differently. I'm at my best where the outcome isn't yet clear - strategy, vision - and on the people side of things, whether that's our team, customers, or partners. What makes it work is the combination: our differences are genuinely complementary, but underneath them we're strongly aligned on values. That alignment is what keeps us harmonious - we never have to fight each other on the things that matter most, how we treat our people, how we treat our customers, and what we want this company to be.

Choosing Who Backs You

The same freedom shows up on the cap table, and it caught me by surprise. Raising money is usually framed as founders auditioning for investors, and early on it feels that way. But somewhere along the line the relationship becomes mutual, and you realise you're choosing too.

I send a monthly CEO report round to our investors. In a recent one, almost in passing, I mentioned we might look to raise a bit of additional capital. One of the first replies came back within the hour: "Send information, keep on charging." No hedging, no due-diligence dance, no waiting to see who else was in. Just support, and a nudge to get back to building. It told me more about the kind of person I want on the cap table than any term sheet could. The people who leaned in on our bridge were existing investors who already know us, have watched how we work, and wanted more involvement because they believe in what we're building.

It also matters in a way that goes beyond the sentiment. It means I don't have to go out and hunt for capital ahead of what'll be our seed round. That's enormous. Every hour a founder spends chasing money is an hour not spent serving customers and growing the company, and at this stage that focus is the most valuable thing we've got. The good feeling of not being alone in believing in what you're building is real - but the freedom to stay focused because of it is what actually moves the company forward.

Because money isn't just money. Every investor you take on is someone you'll be speaking to for years, in good quarters and difficult ones. Getting to choose people whose values line up with ours, who back the way we do things and not just the number on the page, is a luxury I only understood once I had it. I'd rather build slowly with the right people than quickly with the wrong ones. Being a founder means you get to make that call.

Choosing Who You Serve

The same goes for customers, and it's easy to forget you've got a say here at all. When you're starting out, every prospect can feel like one you can't afford to turn down. But the best relationships we've got are with people who are a genuine fit - who value what we do and are a pleasure to build alongside.

Getting to lean into those, and occasionally offer an honest "we might not be the right fit for you" rather than chase every deal, has made the work better. The customers you choose deliberately, rather than simply accept, tend to be the ones who end up championing you.

Getting to Represent Your Own Brand

Then there's the part that's harder to put in a pitch deck, but matters just as much. When it's your company, you get to decide how you show up. And you get to show up as yourself.

The easy assumption in a lot of business - ours included - is that being taken seriously means putting on a certain costume: the suit, the corporate voice, the careful sanding-down of anything that might read as personality. I've never really bought it. Some of the best work happens when people drop the act.

So we do it our way, unashamedly. We dress how we're comfortable. We talk to customers like human beings - plain, direct, no vendor-speak dressed up to sound clever. We have fun with the people we work with. And when we take a position others find unusual, like the way we've leaned into AI, we back it because we believe it, not because it's safe. Building a brand that sounds like the people behind it, rather than like every other brand, is one of the most enjoyable parts of this.

And the permission proves contagious. When the person at the top shows up as themselves, the team does the same. People do their best work when they're not spending energy performing a version of themselves they think the situation demands. You can feel the difference in a room where everyone's got that freedom - it's faster, warmer, more real. Customers feel it too. They can always tell when they're talking to real people rather than a script.

Knowing What You Are, and What You Are Not

For me this goes a layer deeper than tone and dress code. I've written before about my ADHD, and about neurodiversity and leadership, because being open about it has been good for me and, I hope, useful to others wrestling with the same thing. Building a company where I can be upfront about how my brain actually works, rather than masking it to fit some idea of what a founder's meant to look like, has been freeing. It lets me lean into what I'm good at and be honest about what I'm not.

That plays out most clearly around our engineers. I'm the non-technical founder, working alongside people who are seriously, properly good at what they do, and I have deep respect for the depth they bring. My job isn't to match them there. It's to bring the perspective I do have - the commercial relationship between a technical product and the customers who use it, and how we deploy what we build to actually support growth. That's where my background is strongest, and the two views only compound if I'm honest about where mine ends and theirs begins.

So two of the most useful words I use are "not sure." Tell me more, walk me through it, why that way and not the other. Getting comfortable saying that has done more for how we build than any amount of pretending would have. It gives the experts room to be the experts, keeps me from waving through decisions I didn't actually understand, and quietly signals that not knowing something isn't a weakness to hide but the honest starting point for figuring it out. You can't build a culture where people admit what they don't know if the founder never does it first.

A Clearer Identity, Realer Relationships

There's a benefit here that took me a while to notice. The more transparent I am about who I actually am - the ADHD, the way I dress, what I care about - the clearer our identity becomes, and a clear identity works as both a qualifier and a disqualifier. Some people lean in. Others might decide it's not for them, and that's fine. The version of me that tried to be palatable to everyone wasn't more successful, just more tired. Being unmistakably yourself filters the room: you’ll draw the right ones in, and spend far more of your time with those who genuinely gravitate towards you. That's not a cost of being authentic. It's the return on it.

It also changes the relationships that make it through the filter, which might be my favourite part of all. When you're not performing a role, you can be more open. I find myself honest about what we're still working out, comfortable saying when something's hard, and taking a more relaxed view of these relationships than I once thought was allowed in a professional setting. A bit of vulnerability, it turns out, isn't a risk to the relationship. It's usually what makes it real.

And it's more fun. When you qualify in the people you genuinely enjoy, the line between work and life gets pleasantly blurry - I ran into a customer at a Ministry of Sound event recently, which isn't where you expect a customs software relationship to take you. It also means that as you spend more and more time with these people, it never feels like a chore. Dinner isn't two hours of quietly wondering whether you can carry a conversation. It just happens, because the alignment's already there. You get to know them as people rather than counterparties - what they care about, what they're dealing with, who they are when the agenda's put away. Business relationships are still business relationships, but the best ones don't feel like a transaction.

The Freedom Is the Point

Underneath all of it sits something I didn't see coming: gratitude, deeper than I knew I had in me. An investor putting money and faith behind you. A customer deciding, out of every option they had, to become your customer. Someone leaving a perfectly good role to join your team. None of it's owed. Each one's a person taking a real risk on something you're still building, and when you sit with that honestly it's hard not to feel floored by it. It never quite becomes normal, and I hope it never does.

That's the quiet privilege behind the freedom to choose. You get to pick the people around you - but they're choosing you back, and there's something deeply special in that. On the good days it's a source of energy. On the hard ones it's what steadies me.

So if you're early in your own founding journey, or thinking about starting, this is the part to look forward to. The hard parts are real. But so is this. You're not just building a product. You're assembling a small world of people - colleagues, investors, customers - and deciding, deliberately, what it feels like to be in it. Getting to make those choices, and to make them as yourself, isn't a perk of the job. Increasingly, I think it's the whole point.