Startup Culture / The Patterns of Startup Failure / Hubris
Hubris
The belief that makes a startup possible can become the belief that makes reality optional.
Founders need confidence. An early-stage company asks you to believe that something should exist before the market has given you much reason to think so. That confidence helps you recruit, raise money, and keep moving through rejection.
Hubris is not the presence of that confidence. It is what happens when confidence stops responding to evidence. The founder stops listening, stops testing assumptions, and starts treating the original story as a fact that reality has an obligation to fulfill.
The line is difficult to see because the behavior at first looks like the same conviction everyone praised. Persistence becomes rigidity. Vision becomes immunity to feedback. The myth that helped start the company becomes the thing nobody inside it is allowed to test.
It does not always look like arrogance
The stereotype is a founder pounding the table and insisting they are the smartest person in the room. Sometimes hubris looks like that. Sometimes it is quieter: the belief that your motives are good enough to justify the means, that the rules are for less mission-driven people, or that next quarter will make today’s distortion true.
That quieter version is especially dangerous because it can coexist with warmth, generosity, and genuine belief in the product. You do not have to feel superior to everyone else. You only have to become certain that your story will work out.
I believed Benja was inevitable. I believed old customers would return, nearly signed deals would close, and the numbers would catch up. Each belief let me treat an uncomfortable present as a temporary inconvenience on the way to a guaranteed ending.
Normalization destroys the reference point
Hubris also changes the questions around you. Instead of asking what is right, you start asking what is acceptable. Instead of asking whether a claim is true, you ask whether other startups make similar claims.
“Everybody does this” became one of my most dangerous thoughts. It made the behavior feel normal and made the normal feel harmless. Once that reference point disappears, every further step can be described as a small variation on what everyone already accepts.
This is why overconfidence is not only an individual forecasting problem. It is an organizational risk. A company can build rituals and incentives around the founder’s certainty until nobody has a practical way to introduce disconfirming evidence.
Keep the myth testable
The answer is not to replace conviction with permanent doubt. It is to give conviction a method for being wrong. A premortem is one useful tool: imagine that the company failed, work backward through the reasons, and keep those reasons close enough to revisit.
You also need people willing to spoil the vibe. Not professional contrarians, but people who can ask whether customers are getting value, whether the metrics were chosen because they matter or because they look good, and what evidence would change the founder’s mind.
Write down a few beliefs that would materially change your plan if they were wrong. The customer will renew. The next round will close. The product will catch up to the promise. Then ask what evidence you would accept as an answer. If every possible observation can be reinterpreted as confirmation, you have not created confidence. You have created a closed system.
Startup mythology makes this harder because it preserves only the moments when blind risk paid off. I talked about that on ShowUp’s When Business Gets Messy. The survival story becomes proof that the founder knew all along, while the wreckage from similar bets disappears from the canon. We celebrate the exception and call it a strategy.
A healthier culture would make room for a less cinematic skill: updating. The founder who changes a forecast in response to evidence is not weak. The founder who says the original theory was wrong is not necessarily less visionary. They are demonstrating that reality still has a vote.
This is a practice, not a personality transplant. I still want to believe the bold version. The difference is knowing that wanting it is not evidence for it, and building enough structure around myself that the desire does not get the final word.
Confidence should help you act under uncertainty. It should not help you pretend the uncertainty is gone. The myth can be useful. The myth must be tested.
Further reading
Talks on Hubris
Berkeley Haas: “The Dangers of Over-Confidence”
MBA 205 Leading People · Don A. Moore + Erica Bailey · 2025-2026
Don A. Moore
Oct 2025 + Oct 2026 · 3 sections
Erica Bailey
Oct 2026 · 2 sections
Course
MBA 205 Leading People
Format
Guest lecture and Q&A
Don A. Moore: confidence meets probabilistic thinking
Don Moore’s work on overconfidence gave the discussion an academic reference point for something I experienced as a slow loss of objectivity. I was not simply optimistic about a risky company. I became increasingly detached from probabilistic thinking. The outcome I wanted became the outcome I expected.
Early validation helped. Pitch competitions, investor interest, journalists, and people telling me the app was cool all felt like evidence. I heard what I wanted to hear and discounted the questions that would have complicated the story. Were people actually using the product? Were they getting value? Were our key metrics important, or merely flattering?
The premortem offered a practical counterweight. Imagine the failure before it happens and work backward. That exercise does not guarantee a good decision, but it gives the risks a place in the conversation before optimism turns them into disloyal thoughts. Revisited regularly, it can protect you from the version of yourself that only wants confirming evidence.
The class also made room for the distinction between boldness and normalization. A startup requires boldness. “Everybody does this” is something else. It moves the reference point from what is right to what appears acceptable, and it can make even severe behavior feel like ordinary startup practice.
Erica Bailey: ethical leadership and the interacting patterns
Erica Bailey’s Inclusive & Ethical Leadership session called for a compressed version of the same core talk. The shorter format made the connecting argument more visible: overconfidence does not operate alone.
My identity was tied to the company. I was distracted by things that looked like progress and made us look successful. I was afraid to admit what was not working. I remained confident that I could fix it. And I avoided the people who would tell me otherwise. That is the whole system, not six unrelated personality traits.
For an ethical-leadership discussion, that interaction matters. A leader can create the conditions for self-deception without ever instructing anyone to do something wrong. If good news is the only news that protects your identity, if challenge feels like disloyalty, and if everyone believes the ending is inevitable, the organization learns which facts not to bring you.
The Q&A pushed on accountability, luck, and what happens after the consequences arrive. One line from that discussion belongs with the framework: maybe I was unlucky, but that does not change the fact that I did what I did and put myself in the position to be unlucky. Overconfidence does not remove randomness. It changes how exposed you become when randomness shows up.
The shared lesson
Across both classes, the goal was not to make students less confident. It was to make confidence more accountable to evidence. Believe enough to try. Build the premortem. Invite the difficult question. Keep the people who are willing to test the myth.
The two settings also reinforced each other. The overconfidence discussion supplied a way to examine the forecast. The ethical-leadership discussion supplied a way to examine the environment around it. Founders need both: a method for checking their own certainty and an organization that does not punish other people for checking it too.
That is the difference between a founder who can act without certainty and a founder who has made certainty untouchable.