At Arkam, we believe company-building is as much about founder resilience as it is about market opportunity, product insight or execution. The early stages of entrepreneurship often involve repeated cycles of uncertainty, momentum, setbacks and learning, making emotional clarity an important part of the founder journey. In this article, originally published by Abhishek Mishra on Billion Express, he reflects on his experience building ShopG and shares a personal view on founder emotions, feedback, detachment and the discipline required to keep moving through the chaos of entrepreneurship.
“Entrepreneurship: Storms, Stillness, and the Loops in Between
Entrepreneurship is chaos and meditation at the same time.
I started ShopG in Feb 2019 and shut it down in Dec 2021. In between, I soaked, yelled, strategised, executed, burned, and got burnt—often in the same day.
(PS: ShopG was a social commerce platform for tier-II and tier-III cities in India.)
In a single day, I swung from the top of the world to being completely crushed. Watching my team embrace the ethos of ShopG made me feel like an all-powerful leader; but just hours later, tracking missed orders pulled the ground from under my feet. I loved every bit of what we were building, yet the whirlwind of emotions pushed my nerves to their limits.
And it’s not just me. The legendary Jensen Huang himself once admitted that if he had known what it would truly take to build NVIDIA, he might never have started. Ben Horowitz famously wrote about building LoudCloud in The Hard Things about Hard Things (please consider it the Bible of Founder Emotions):
“I slept like a baby. I woke up every two hours and cried.”
Even legends struggle because the journey of a founder is not a straight line, not a neat sine wave or a step function. It is unpredictable, messy, and often exhausting. A founder’s journey seems like Brownian motion from the outside, yet beneath the chaos lies relentless iteration toward a clear destination.
The Founder’s Emotional Cycle
As a founder, I went through repeating loops of emotion. Many of them hit across different parts of the business - all at once. I was at a Breakthrough in product but at a Stall in GTM (Go-To-Market) at the same time!
Here’s what it looked like:
Curiosity – Sparked by a customer problem or a hunch, or the classic “what if?”
Hunt – Chase the problem, dive into research, talk to customers, and iterate.
Breakthrough – That moment of clarity, an exciting insight.
Momentum – Positive feedback flows in, and I felt unstoppable.
Headwinds – Suddenly, criticism, rejections, or bugs slowed me down.
Stall – Frustration mounted. I wanted progress, but things didn't move.
Action – Dug deep, made hard decisions, pushed forward.
Deeper Insight – The struggle paid off, and I returned to Curiosity with sharper instincts.
These cycles are fast and frequent. Sometimes you’ll feel elated and defeated in the same hour. The trick is not to avoid the cycle but to return to your stable state faster. How? One of the principles that has helped me is adopting a "Buffer Mindset."
The Buffer Mindset
(PS: Self-invented term, please don’t google or ask the LLM Gods!)
In chemistry, a buffer solution returns to its natural pH even when an acid or base is added. Geeky? Let us try another way.
Imagine you have a glass of lemonade. If you add just a little sugar, it becomes sweeter right away. If you add a little salt, it becomes salty right away. The taste changes very quickly. Now imagine a magic lemonade. If you add a little sugar or a little salt, it still tastes almost the same. It doesn’t change much.
That’s what a buffer is in chemistry. Normally, liquids change when you add acid or base. But a buffer solution is like that magic lemonade—it keeps things balanced, even when you add a little extra acid or base.
That’s what founders need to learn: come back to the baseline, but faster. If you can do that, your ability to reset quickly while still stretching your limits becomes a superpower.
Feedback: The Founder’s Lifeblood
Even cricketer Jasprit Bumrah gets feedback and demands from the crowd. But unlike him, you can’t just gesture, "you take that wicket." You need to filter the feedback, absorb it, and act.
External feedback: Customers will love you and hate you. Employees will praise you and curse you. To some, you’ll be a visionary; to others, a privileged fool. You can’t control their views, but you can filter, absorb, and use the signal.
Internal feedback: The trickier one. Your insecurities, doubts, and ambitions will constantly talk to you. This is where detachment matters—caring deeply while not letting the noise paralyze you. It is becoming a witness to your own emotions.
Filtering here is critical and you need to learn to do it right. Filter everything and you will have nothing to learn from. Filter nothing and there is just too much garbage.
(PS: I list this as one of my superpowers. I can listen, filter, and forget what is not important almost immediately).
As my father says: “Kachra andar jaane mat do.” (Don’t let the garbage in).
To do it effectively, you need to understand how to deeply care and love something yet remain detached. Sounds like a paradox, right? But that's what you have to do. Regularly take yourself out of the equation and then look at the situation. Hinduism calls it Saakshi Bhav.
In Saakshi Bhav, you observe the situation detached. You observe emotions without becoming identified with them. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t care about praise or criticism. It means learning to treat both impostors the same, extracting the lessons from each, and continuing to refine your path forward.
The Real Takeaway
This isn’t a gospel or a playbook. It’s what I’ve observed in my own journey and while working with dozens of founders.
The real lesson? The journey is not linear. It’s loops, chaos, headwinds, and breakthroughs. Your job is to return to calm faster, filter feedback wisely, and keep marching forward. Because in the end, entrepreneurship is exactly what I said at the beginning: chaos and meditation, all at once.
A timeless classic for my favourite kind of people: founders
क्या हार में क्या जीत में
किंचित नहीं भयभीत मैं
संघर्ष पथ पर जो मिले यह भी सही वह भी सही
— Shiv Mangal Suman”
For us, the larger signal is that entrepreneurship rarely follows a clean, linear path. Founders are constantly moving through loops of curiosity, breakthrough, resistance and renewed insight, often while processing intense external and internal feedback. The ability to stay close to the problem, filter signal from noise and return to a stable state faster can become a meaningful operating advantage for anyone building through uncertainty.
