[mweil]

This is incredibly well written and 100% on-point with my own personal experiences. This paragraph stood out the most to me:

"As a techie individual contributor in a larger company, I could go to work everyday and execute 99% predictably. As a founder, I had to find ways to plead your case over and over — to employees, investors, candidates, advertisers, users — and I got rejected a lot. For an introvert, the amount of pleading and subsequent rejection came as quite a shock."

That's probably one of the most difficult adjustments I've had to make moving from 16 years of plain-old-coding into being a founder.