Founders and Shamans

Something became extra clear during a call with my friend and Ivorian founder Bacely Yorobi.

We were supposed to be talking about his company — a voice-first AI lab called Scorton — and the usual founder questions around geography, PMF, funding, and whether the U.S. still matters.

Instead, somewhere around minute twenty, I found myself saying the line that mattered:

the product is a reflection of the system that builds it.

I mean that literally.

The people building the thing, the state they're in, the tensions they carry, the addictions they haven't resolved, the stories they're telling themselves, the alignment or misalignment between cofounders, the feeling in the room — all of that distills into the product.

You can see it more clearly in small companies because the signal is not diluted yet. But it happens in big companies too. A product starts sharp, coherent, maybe even generous. Then the organization gets tired, fearful, political, overworked, addicted to the wrong metrics... and the product starts feeling like that too.

The app becomes anxious. The interface starts begging. The notifications get needier. The product begins acting out the unresolved psychology of the company behind it.

That is not metaphor to me anymore. That's mechanics.

I've been living with some version of this lesson for twelve years through Talk and Comment, the app that refuses to leave my life.

It started as an experiment in 2013. It is still shaping my life in 2026.

That alone should tell me something.

A thing does not stay in your orbit for that long without teaching you how it wants to be built.

And one of the strangest lessons is this: founders spend too much time trying to impose their will on an idea and not enough time learning what kind of system the idea can actually survive inside.

Underneath the fundraising and geography talk was a deeper question:

What kind of environment births a healthy thing?

That question matters as much for companies as it does for children.

If the system around the thing is unstable, coercive, resentful, or fundamentally misaligned, the thing being born inside that system will carry those distortions.

This is why cofounder alignment matters far beyond "we work well together."

It is not just roadmap agreement or equity math. It is whether the system formed by these people can produce something whole.

One person in a winning cycle and two people in a losing cycle can create real tension even if the deck looks good and the vision doc is clean. A team can be technically competent and still unable to give birth to a healthy company because the underlying field is off.

Startup Twitter has no language for this, so it squeezes everything into founder conflict, execution risk, or communication breakdown.

Sometimes that's true. Other times the company is just inheriting the emotional weather of the people building it.

Bacely said something in the call that pushed the thought further. Humans are visual entities, he said. We create things that reflect what we are inside.

That matches how I experience the world when I'm paying attention: as forms, pressures, colors, shapes, tensions, entities. Not just biography and narrative. More like: what kind of object just entered the field, and what is it showing me?

If a hostile client shows up in your life, you can turn them into your personal villain and build an entire story around being disrespected. Or you can treat that encounter like training resistance at the gym. A shape appeared. It pressed against your shape. Something got revealed.

That doesn't mean roll over. It doesn't mean don't fire the client. It means the first question is diagnostic:

What is this situation revealing about the system?

Once you see the world that way, the founder's job changes. You are no longer just building features or raising rounds. You are tending the field that produces the thing.

You are reading signals. Watching resonance. Adjusting the room.

The most actionable line from the call was simpler: you do not start with the full vision. The map renders as you move.

You strum strings and wait for resonance.

A landing page is a string. A customer conversation is a string. A note you post online is a string. A prototype is a string. A market you visit is a string. You touch the field and listen for what comes back.

That feels much closer to the real work than sitting in a room trying to think your way to certainty.

This is where founders and shamans start looking suspiciously similar.

Both shape reality for other people through story, symbols, and coordinated belief.

Both take something invisible and give it a form other people can act around.

Both are dealing with artifacts that don't fully exist until enough people agree they exist.

A shaman tells a story that reorganizes a tribe's perception of the world. A founder tells a story that reorganizes capital, labor, and attention around a new object.

The tools are different. The mechanics are not that different.

This is why I don't find it strange when spiritually attuned people make strong founders, or when the best founders sound a little mystical if you let them talk long enough.

They are both in the business of sensing a reality that hasn't fully arrived and helping other people step into it.

Of course this goes bad easily.

A manipulative founder is just a bad shaman with better typography.

A delusional founder is just someone mistaking attachment for vision.

And attachment is where a lot of companies die.

The more tightly you grip the specific outcome — this round, this valuation, this market, this exact narrative of success — the more likely you are to suffocate the very thing you claim to be building.

Detachment does not mean indifference. It means leaving room for the idea to tell you what it actually wants to become.

Especially if, like many founders, you are trying to use the company to prove something about yourself.

That is the part nobody says cleanly enough.

A lot of startup advice is secretly identity advice wearing a Patagonia vest.

Raise this. Network there. Move here. Hire them. Post more. Ship faster.

Some of that is useful.

But if the system producing the company is brittle, frantic, ashamed, over-attached, or internally split, then all that advice just scales the wrong thing faster.

The company grows, but it grows in the shape of the distortion.

You can see this everywhere now. Products that feel like nervous systems with too much cortisol in them. Companies optimized for persuasion rather than truth. Interfaces designed by people who are clearly not at peace and have therefore decided that your attention should suffer with them.

I don't say that with superiority. I say it because I can watch it happen in myself too.

On the good days, the things I build feel spacious, clear, almost generous.

On the bad days, they reach.

If that sounds too abstract, go look at the products you use most and ask a crude question:

what kind of people must have built this?

Not their LinkedIn bios. Not their company values page. Their actual interior weather.

You'll learn more from that than from most founder podcasts.

Some calls are not really about advice. They are about surfacing the sentence that was already waiting to be said.

This one gave me two.

The first: the product is a reflection of the system that builds it.

The second: founders and shamans are closer cousins than most people are ready to admit.

I think both are true.

And I think a lot of the companies that matter in the next decade will be built by people who understand that before the market gives them permission to say it out loud.