Letting your startup leave the nest

Recently, a friend said, “This startup is their baby.” Nothing new, I’ve heard it.

I’ve always loved analogy. It’s how my brain works—pattern matching, creating mental models, trying to understand things by recognizing that everything is a remix of what came before. But this time the comparison sat badly with me. I realized that the baby analogy is close, but the mapping is off.

It’s reasonable to compare creating a company to a human lifecycle. But thinking of a company as a baby forever is unfair and ultimately a disservice—just like calling an adult child a baby and truly believing it. Sure, a parent might say to their grown child, “You’ll always be my baby,” but that’s affectionate shorthand, not a literal mental model. If they actually treated their adult child as a baby, we’d all recognize that as a problem.

I think about this similar to how Elizabeth Gilbert talks about creative work in Big Magic. At a certain point, you send your creation out into the world, and it is no longer yours. It passes into the hands of other people. For example, you’re not constantly iterating on a book, at least not the first version you publish and release. Once it’s out there, it stops being a baby. It’s not a child. It doesn’t belong to you anymore in the same way, because other people now have a relationship with it.

I think that same framing is more correct and useful for startups. If I extend the metaphor properly, the gestational period is when you have the idea. You haven’t built anything yet. Maybe you’re prototyping. There’s nothing real someone can use. You might be raising money. That feels like pregnancy.

The “baby” is born when you actually start building the thing. Now it’s real. It exists in the world. It needs care. At some point, it grows up. I’m not sure exactly where adulthood begins, but I feel confident saying that your startup is not a baby if it’s making more than a million dollars in revenue. It’s certainly not a baby if you have a dozen or more employees.

The instinct to protect a company the way you protect an infant becomes harmful after a certain level of maturity. The mindset of “only I know what’s right for my startup” starts to resemble saying, “I don’t want my child to go to school. I don’t want them to have friends. I don’t want them around other adults, because those people might corrupt them.” We all know that wouldn’t be healthy.

Startups don’t literally do this, but I think some founders carry a similar belief about their influence over the product long after the early incubation phase. That kind of protection is based on a false mental model, and it ends up hurting both the company and the founders. You want other influences. You want customer opinions. You want other people’s expertise. It really does take a village to raise a startup.

Adulthood isn’t the end of the story anyway. When humans reach adulthood, that’s often just the beginning. We build families, change careers, buy and sell houses, create new things. Companies do the same. They evolve, iterate, expand—all under the umbrella of a single entity. The metaphor still holds if you let it breathe.

What doesn’t help is insisting that your startup is always a baby. Expanding the metaphor can actually help founders understand where influence and control make sense, and where they don’t. When a child is young, you must control their spending. When they’re older, other people can and should have a say. It doesn’t all have to be you.

So that’s the question I’d encourage founders to ask themselves: is calling your company a baby actually serving you? Or would loosening that mental model—expanding it—broaden your worldview and make you a better leader?