Oct 11, 2026
Every year, a founder sits down across from me at office hours and asks some version of the same question: What are the steps?
There aren't any. And I've stopped apologizing for that.
There are plenty of maps for entrepreneurship: canvases, frameworks, sixteen-week playbooks. Some of them are useful. I teach a few. But a map only works for territory someone has already crossed. If your company is real, nobody has been where you're going. That's what makes it yours.
Ex nihilo
The old phrase is ex nihilo: out of nothing. It sounds esoteric. It isn't. It's the most accurate description I know of what founders actually do.
At the start of Launchpad in March there is no company. No product, no customer, no revenue, no team. By June there's a thing in the world that people pay for. Nothing about the earlier state predicted the later one. You didn't follow a route to get there. You made the route by walking it.
That is the magic part. I use that word on purpose. Starting a company is one of the few acts left where a small group of people can make something real out of an idea and sheer will. A roadmap would ruin it. If the steps were knowable, someone would already have taken them.
What you bring instead
So if there's no map, what carries you? In my experience, three things, in this order.
Passion. Not enthusiasm; enthusiasm fades by week three. I mean a problem you can't stop thinking about, one you'd work on even if no one paid you.
Perseverance. Most of your experiments will fail. The founders who make it aren't the ones who fail less. They're the ones who get up faster and run the next test.
Perspiration. Nobody wants to hear this part. Ideas are cheap, and now AI makes the first version cheap too. What stays scarce is the work: the hundredth (at least) customer call, the sale you had to ask for twice.
Passion, perseverance, perspiration. Put them together and something strange happens: a company appears where there wasn't one.
That's what Launchpad is for. We don't hand you a map. We put you in the territory and make you start walking.
— Perry