Should you become a founder?

Lauren's answer is striking because she explicitly decouples it from the outcome: "even if I was sitting here today and I built these five clinics and nothing had worked, I would have grown and gained so much in the past year." The growth was the return; the fact that Good Mind came out the other side with "quite a cool little idea" is, in her words, "just kind of a bit of a cherry on the top."

That's from someone who did a lot of crying, went through "dark nights of the soul," battled "perennial imposter syndrome," and quit LinkedIn to protect her mental health. The founder year was, in her words, an invaluable experience — ending the episode "really excited for what's next, and just excited for more novel therapies in medicine."

Will says to anyone considering it, he recommends you don't, because it's so hard, there's a lot of luck, and even if it works out "it's a very long journey" with "really no easy route." If you only "might wanna start a company," then "your company's probably not gonna work." But if you feel you "need to be a founder" so strongly and passionately that you have to, "then you better be prepared to put in a lot of work." He also says to "know the game that you're playing in" — the venture capital game means going "super hard" and "super big" in a "very risky, volatile, crazy kind of space."