An Ode to All the Great Entrepreneurs Out There
I want to write something I don't write often enough. Not a critique, not an argument, not a lesson. Just gratitude.
This is an ode to the people who build things. The ones who looked at the world, decided it wasn't finished yet, and went and made the missing part themselves. Some of them are famous. Some of them are known to maybe a few thousand people. A few of them I've laughed with until my stomach hurt. All of them gave me something.
It starts, for me, with Steve Jobs.
Not because of the turtlenecks or the keynotes or the myth that's been polished smooth in the years since he died. Because of the thing underneath it. He genuinely believed an ordinary person deserved a beautiful, powerful machine on their desk, and he refused to ship anything that betrayed that belief.
People forget how absurd that was. Building a personal computer, a real one that a normal human being could love instead of merely tolerate, is staggeringly hard. It is not one breakthrough. It's ten thousand of them, stacked, each one held to a standard most people would have abandoned around breakthrough number forty. It takes a kind of patience that looks, from the outside, like stubbornness. You have to care about the part nobody will ever see, and you have to keep caring about it for years.
Jobs had that patience. It's one of my favorite things about him, and it's the reason he's one of my favorite entrepreneurs of all time. He taught a whole industry that taste is not decoration. Taste is the work.
He didn't start the line, of course. He stood on the shoulders of people who'd been doing this for a century.
Thomas Edison, turning the lightbulb from a flicker in a lab into something that lived in your house. Nikola Tesla, who understood electricity in a way that still feels like it came from the future. These were the original builders, the ones who took forces of nature and made them serve a person standing in a kitchen. Everything we make today is a footnote to what they cracked open first.
Then came the generation that put computing in everyone's hands. Bill Gates, who understood, earlier and more clearly than almost anyone, that the software was going to matter more than the machine. Michael Dell, who started a computer company out of a dorm room and turned "build it exactly the way the customer wants it" into an empire. Larry Ellison, who built Oracle into the quiet database engine that still runs underneath half the business world, mostly out of sight. Mark Zuckerberg, who took a college project and turned it into the thing that connects a third of the planet to each other. Different temperaments, different methods, the same instinct. Take something expensive and rare, and make it ordinary and everywhere.
And then there's Elon.
He deserves his own paragraph, because what he is doing right now is, to me, almost incomprehensible. Reusable rockets that land themselves. Internet falling out of the sky onto places no cable will ever reach. Cars that rewrote what a car even is. A serious, straight-backed plan to make us a multi-planet species. Pick any one of those and it would be the achievement of a lifetime. He is running several at once, in parallel, against physics, against doubt, against the void itself.
I've written before that Elon is the kind of person you never want across the table from you in business, and the best possible person to have on your side. What strikes me most is the sheer scale of the patience. Not patience as in waiting. Patience as in: I will fail in public, repeatedly, for years, because the thing I'm building is worth more than my comfort. That's rare. That's the whole game.
But I don't only want to thank the giants. The famous names are easy to admire. I want to name the builders who carry their weight without the spotlight, because they shaped me just as much.
Marc Andreessen, who helped give us the web browser and then spent the rest of his life backing other builders. Paul Graham, who wrote essays that quietly rewired how an entire generation of founders thinks, including me. Neil Patel, who made the craft of getting found online feel learnable instead of mystical. Matt Diggity, who treats SEO like the engineering discipline it actually is. Gael Breton and Mark Webster of Authority Hacker, who taught more people to build real online businesses than most universities ever will.
And Tibor Moes, who runs softwarelab.org. You won't find a thousand articles written about him. But I have learned an enormous amount from that man. About doing one thing properly, about trust, about building something solid and useful instead of loud. Some of my best instincts I owe to quietly watching how he works.
Niels Zee belongs on this list too. Another name the internet doesn't say much about, and another person I'm grateful to have crossed paths with. The world runs on people like this far more than it admits. Not every great builder ends up on a magazine cover. Most of them never do.
There's one more I have to name, and this one is personal.
Aidan Bishop. We worked together in Manila, on Big Dish. The business itself didn't end up working out. That happens. That's the deal you sign when you build things. But I want to be honest about what actually mattered. To this day I'm still living off the wisdom that man gave me. And the moments. We laughed so hard, so often, that it felt like time had simply stopped existing. Like the clock had given up trying to keep score.
That's a thing entrepreneurship doesn't put on the balance sheet. The companies fail and fold and get forgotten. The person who made you better, and made you laugh while doing it, that compounds for the rest of your life. Thank you, Aidan.
I'll end with something I've been slowly allowing myself to feel.
I think I'm becoming part of this group. Quietly, on my own scale, in my own way. I don't have the kind of money these people have, not even close, and I'm not sure I ever will. But I've come to measure it differently.
Because I have created real value. For other entrepreneurs. For the world. For people. And, I mean this literally, for animals, for plants, for the insects. I try, in everything I build, to leave the thing a little less broken than I found it, and to take a little suffering out of the system rather than add to it.
Maybe that makes me a different kind of entrepreneur. A holistic one, if I'm allowed the word. On paper I am not a millionaire. But somewhere in my chest, where it actually counts, it feels exactly as though I am. Rich in the only currency that doesn't lose its value: the sense that the work mattered, and that it was good.
So this is my thank-you note. To Jobs and Edison and Tesla. To Gates and Dell, to Ellison and Zuckerberg, to Musk. To Andreessen and Graham, to Patel and Diggity, to Tibor and Niels and Gael and Mark. To Aidan, in Manila, laughing.
You built things. You made the world a little more possible. And without ever meaning to, you taught a Dutch kid that he could build things too.
Thank you. All of you.
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