Existential Thought - Am I an Entrepreneur — or a Bad Person?

The Price of Building Something That Doesn’t Yet Exist

Fact:

There is a strange moral lag built into ambition.

When you are trying to build something that does not yet exist—something unproven, unfunded, unfinished—you often look irresponsible at best, unethical at worst. You are asking for belief before evidence. Trust before results. Patience before proof.

You are asking for faith of the unseen and unknown.

And in that gap… of time, of results, of evidence - character is judged.

I’ve noticed that unless you succeed in the end, it is very easy to be labelled a “bad person” for attempting success at all. It is quite some leap from “trying something” to “bad person” - but here is the truth… "You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs." And breaking eggs can easily and often be perceived as “bad” if your omelette does not look right, taste good or ends up as waste.

Founders are praised retrospectively, not contemporaneously. We all celebrate them once the outcome feels inevitable or undeniable. Before that, founders are scrutinised, doubted, and quietly condemned—especially when the path requires us to stretch, improvise, negotiate aggressively, or survive on other people’s faith and/or goodwill.

There is a phrase often used casually by many entrepreneurs when asked how they managed to set up their business: beg, borrow, and steal.
It sounds flippant. It isn’t.

But too often, it is necessary.

To build anything meaningful, you often have to ask for more than feels comfortable. You borrow time. You borrow credibility. You borrow energy. Sometimes you borrow money you don’t yet know how you’ll repay. Sometimes you ask people to work harder, wait longer, or believe deeper than the evidence suggests they should.

From the outside, this can look selfish. Or manipulative. Or reckless. Or entitled.

From the inside, it often feels like survival. The only way forward.

Here’s another uncomfortable truth: the same behaviour is judged entirely differently depending on the outcome.

If you fail, your ambition is reframed as arrogance. Your persistence becomes delusion. Your asks become impositions. The people you involved are seen as victims of your optimism.

If you succeed, the narrative flips.

Suddenly, the borrowing was vision. The risk-taking becomes courage. The sleepless nights are discipline. The people who stood by you are celebrated as early believers—and the debts you can now repay are quietly and easily forgotten or part of the success story.

The moral verdict arrives after the result.

Take Soho House. Today it is spoken about as a cultural institution. But before it became inevitable, it was fragile. Nick Jones was running close to the edge for years—expanding slowly, trying to protect the soul of the brand, and resisting pressures that would have made the business safer but sacrificing on its appeal.

When Richard Caring stepped in to support the business, it wasn’t because Soho House was a guaranteed success. It was because it needed help to survive. From the outside, it looked like compromise and it was. But from the inside, it was oxygen and it was necessary. Without that intervention, the story we now celebrate might never have been written.

The same pattern played out with Innocent Drinks. For years, Richard Reed and his co-founders were held up as paragons of ethical capitalism—quirky, values-driven, and proudly independent. Until the moment survival required scale. Richard will tell you he was on the verge of collapse and something had to give.

When Coca-Cola entered the picture, critics were quick to say Innocent had “sold out.” But the reality was simpler and harsher: the company could not survive on morals alone. Without capital, distribution, and infrastructure, the values everyone admired would have disappeared entirely.

Am I an entrepreneur - or a Bad Person?

The behaviour didn’t change. The outcome did. And with it, the moral judgement shifted.

That doesn’t mean anything goes. There is always a line that should never be crossed. Lines matter regardless of outcome. But it does mean we should acknowledge how often ethics are judged through hindsight bias.

Most founders live in a grey zone long before they live in the spotlight.

They are not villains—but they are rarely saints. They are people navigating uncertainty with incomplete information, making decisions under pressure, often choosing between bad options and worse ones.

The Personal Cost No One Likes to Count

What’s discussed even less is the personal toll.

Ambition exacts a price that balance sheets don’t capture. Relationships strain. Friendships fade. Health erodes quietly. Burnout becomes normalised. The chase for precision—doing something right, not just profitably—can come at the cost of sleep, sanity, even self-recognition.

Many founders never fully recover what the process takes from them. Some lose marriages. Some lose years with their children. Some lose themselves. And for those who don’t “make it,” the sacrifice is almost never honoured—only judged.

This is the tragedy of ambition: the world only forgives the cost once it can enjoy the outcome.

Which raises a harder question—one that rarely has a clean answer.

Who Really Carries the Burden?

Should a founder be the only person responsible for ensuring a vision survives?

When a company cannot pay wages for a month due to underfunding, slow income or delayed revenue, is that failure solely the founder’s? Or does responsibility distribute across a team who signed up for the mission, accepted the risk, and perhaps did not—or could not—contribute “enough”?

Founders are expected to absorb risk while projecting certainty. Employees want stability. Investors want returns.

Everyone wants belief rewarded—yet belief, by definition, precedes proof.

We celebrate “skin in the game,” but rarely agree on whose skin, how much, and for how long.

Because building something new is inherently ambiguous. You are promising a future that doesn’t yet exist and asking people to behave as if it already does. That creates tension. Resentment. And sometimes collateral damage.

Modern culture struggles with this ambiguity. We prefer clean narratives—heroes or villains, visionaries or frauds. But real creation lives in between. Most enduring businesses were once inconvenient, uncomfortable, and misunderstood. Their founders were often seen as obsessive, demanding, or unreasonable—until the thing they were building worked.

Then the world not only forgives them but elevates them to positions so high, they can only fall from.

Or worse, the world pretends it believed all along.

Why Legacy Is the Only Justification

This is why, increasingly, I believe that if you are going to pay this price—personally, emotionally, relationally—then what you build must justify the cost.

Not just financially. Structurally.

It must be designed to endure. To distribute stewardship. To remove the burden of constant extraction and replace it with continuity.

This is where Le Haus enters—not as a hospitality product, but as a corrective philosophy.

Le Haus as a Legacy System

Le Haus is not a hotel model.
It is a stewardship system disguised as travel.

Buy once. Stay forever.

Founder Membership is not a subscription. There are no renewals, no escalations, no expiry dates. Membership is designed to endure—just like the physical assets it unlocks.

Every Founder Membership directly contributes to portfolio expansion. As new villas, beach clubs, and residences are added, the value of the membership increases without additional cost to the member.

This is intentional.

Le Haus prioritises your future through rest, wellness, and legacy. It removes the burden of ownership while preserving its upside. It replaces fragmented luxury bookings with continuity. It transforms access into belonging.

Members are not guests.
They are stewards of a growing ecosystem.

In a world that glorifies burnout and calls it ambition, Le Haus is built as an antidote: a model where growth doesn’t require constant depletion, and where success is measured not only by scale—but by sustainability of the people building it.

The Question That Remains

What does it really cost to build something that lasts?
Who pays that cost while the story is still unfinished?
And how quickly do we assign moral judgment to people operating without a safety net?

And whether what we build is worthy of the price we pay to bring it into the world?

The question is not whether founders should be scrutinised. We should be. Power and influence demand accountability. But the deeper question is whether we understand the difference between moral failure and unfinished outcomes.

Because if we only allow virtue after success, we quietly discourage the very risk-taking that progress depends on.

Founders live in a paradox: expected to act responsibly while operating in conditions that reward risk; judged morally while outcomes are still unresolved.

Some will fail. Some will succeed. Some will repay every debt—financial, emotional, reputational—they incurred along the way.

Others won’t.

But perhaps the real question isn’t whether a founder is a good person or a bad one.

Perhaps it’s whether we are willing to sit with uncertainty long enough to judge fairly—before the ending tells us what to think.