The Unpopular Opinion, Go Alone.

If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go alone. Collaboration is one of those words that sounds automatically virtuous. Say it in a pitch and people nod like you just proved you are mature, strategic, and “people first.” In practice, most collaboration is a soft cover for dependency, status games, and a lack of output. Frankly, Collaboration is often just Lip Service.

Here is my default question when someone sells me on collaboration.

What have you shipped?

Not what are you working on. Not what are you “building.” Not what you plan to launch. What is a real thing you finished, deployed, delivered, sold, or put in users’ hands.

Doers recognize other doers instantly. They have a scent. They talk in constraints, tradeoffs, test results, and timelines. They can show you artifacts. Screenshots. Links. Demos. Receipts. When two doers meet, collaboration can happen naturally because there is shared respect for reality.

Most people who talk about collaboration are not doers. They are grifters, or at least grifter adjacent. They need you more than you need them, and they will do anything to differentiate themselves on an equal playing field. On a field where output is the scoreboard, they lose. So they change the rules and call it teamwork.

Harsh truth: we are not equal

We are not equal in knowledge, skills, abilities, discipline, and tolerance for discomfort. Some of us drink every day, network, and play it cool. Others are constantly building, learning, and testing. One group is optimizing for perception. The other is optimizing for throughput.

This matters because “collaboration” is most often sold as morality, not as an operating system. It is not “we are all aligned” and it is not “we are all equal.” Real collaboration is a capability. It either produces throughput or it does not.

The grifter gradient

I say this a lot, people would rather look like they do good, than actually do good. This comes down to collaboration-as-jargon vs collaboration-in-practice.

Fake collaboration looks like meetings, vibes, status trading, “partners,” referrals that never happen, "marketing visionaries," and advisory theater.

Real collaboration looks like clear ownership, asymmetric contributions, fast feedback loops, explicit decision rights, and shipped artifacts.

If you want a falsifiable test, use this one: if you say you collaborate, show a shipped artifact with named owners and a date. If you cannot, you are not collaborating. You are networking, hoping to jump on our coat tails.

The “visionary” cope

It makes my skin crawl when non-technical and frankly inexperienced founders say, “You are technical, I am more of a visionary.”

Let me translate that.

You did the hard part. I am going to narrate. The worse part is, they generally cannot even narrate properly. They regurgitate terms they overheard, without understanding what they are saying. And to the real doers, out here doing, it makes our skin crawl.

I did not wake up technical. I worked my ass off to become technical by doing. It was super hard. I have had plenty of heartbreak and disappointment. I got tired of begging technical people to focus. I had the vision, the charisma, the guts to get shit done, but I could not focus and learn how to make it. That meant dependency. It meant I would be dependent on convincing other smart people to jump on my bandwagon. Sometimes I succeeded. Often I did not. Either way, the dependency tax was always there. You pay in delays, misalignment, resentment, and lost time.

And now I do not tolerate the “you do tech, I do business” frame from people who have never shipped anything. Do not tell someone technical that they get the tech and you get the business. Do not tell them they are neurodivergent and you know marketing. Not if you do not spend time learning how to actually ship products.

The technical cofounder failure mode

Often the worst version of this story is the technical cofounder who is also “a leader.” They hold the power because they can build, but they have no experience running a company. They do not test with users. They cannot handle negotiation. They rarely follow the roadmap or the backlog. They just build, circle jerk each other, and then fail. Every single time. The refrain is always the same: “Just two more weeks,” until burnout finishes the job.

I have watched this movie end the same way over and over. The product never ships. The story never meets reality. Everyone learns the wrong lesson. They say the idea did not work. The idea was never tested. The company did not fail. It never existed.

The steelman: collaboration is real, but it is earned

I did my master’s thesis on collaboration. I have always believed in the power of skill sharing, network sharing, and lifting each other up. I still do. I am not anti-collaboration. I am anti collaboration theater.

Real collaboration exists in elite conditions: high trust, high competence, clear ownership, and a shared commitment to reality. It is multiplicative when each person can independently produce value.

That is the part people skip. They want the social credit of collaboration without the prerequisite of competence.

The network myth and “partners” who never bring deals

I track reality.

How many deals have been brought to me from my vast network of “partners”?

Zero.

They follow up all the time to ask if I have any deals they can support. None of them have ever brought me a single deal. Ever. The flow is one direction. That is not collaboration. That is prospecting dressed up as community.

And when you peel back the onion on a lot of influencers and public speakers who claim they are “doing AI delivery,” you find the same pattern: zero sales, nada, zilch. They do not ship anything. They chase their tail. They spread jargon they heard a technical person say. They are predators, and you need to avoid them at all costs.

Product management is real collaboration

This is where my beliefs converge. I am a real believer in product management.

Not the box checking, meeting-driven project manager cosplay. I hate arbitrary box checkers and I think traditional project management as a substitute for product thinking is a dead art. Real PdM aligns vision and desired outcomes as strategic swimlanes, then forces disciplined tension between three truths:

1. the business goals
2. the user needs
3. the best technical approach

We want dynamic tension. That tension is the engine.

If you bulldoze your tech lead every time they raise a constraint, you are not coachable. If you ignore what users want, you will meet your maker. If you solely focus on the almighty dollar, you are a bad person.

The best founders do not demand agreement. They demand truth. They build a system where the tech lead can disagree, where the user can veto with behavior, where business goals stay explicit, and where decisions get made fast. Not perfectly. Fast.

Advisors: the predator problem and the coachability test

As a consultant, I often rub people the wrong way when I give them the advice they need. Ultimately they are the decider. It is their responsibility to surround themselves with good advisors.

But an advisor who just tells you what you want to hear is a bad advisor. They are predators, and they are rampant.

If you are not coachable, there is no point in having advisors. A founder’s job is to decide. An advisor’s job is to tell the truth. Those goals are naturally in tension. That is why good advisors can feel abrasive. They are willing to risk being disliked to protect outcomes. Bad advisors optimize for being liked, access, and optionality. They will validate your narrative while you quietly bleed time.

Vision counts. Passion does not.

Your ability to inspire others is worth something. Having vision and gusto is worth something. Vision is direction. Vision is taste. Vision is choosing a hill worth dying on.

Passion is fuel. It helps you wake up. It can help you talk. It can help you raise. But passion alone does little for outcomes, and it can even backfire by feeding overconfidence and friction. (Harvard Business Review)

There is also a reason ecosystems get fooled by passion. Persuasive delivery changes funding decisions even when it does not predict performance. In a large-scale study of pitch videos, “pitch positivity” and other delivery features increased the likelihood of receiving funding, but those positive pitch features did not translate into better long-run outcomes and were associated with worse performance conditional on funding. (NBER) Investors also rely on gut feel in extreme uncertainty, and they are demonstrably biased by factors unrelated to fundamentals, including presenter characteristics and attractiveness. (Harvard Business School Library)

So yes, vision can win people. Passion can win rooms. That does not mean it wins markets.

What wins markets is the boring stuff: experimentation, iteration, and shipped artifacts. A serious body of work frames entrepreneurship as experimentation, where outcomes are unknowable until you make the investment and test reality. (Harvard Business School) And track record matters. Serial entrepreneurs who have succeeded before are more likely to succeed again, which is another way of saying outcomes correlate with demonstrated execution skill, not just storytelling. (NBER)

AI changes the floor: excuses die faster now

In the era of AI, doers do not need to convince anyone of anything. You can ship products as a solo founder now. You can prototype, test with users, instrument results, and iterate before you recruit a team. The cost of dependency has dropped, and so has the validity of “I am not technical” as a permanent identity.

You have to stop making excuses. You have to become technical, at least enough to make real decisions, evaluate tradeoffs, and avoid being held hostage.

Unless you already have a shit load of money and power. In which case you can delay reality longer. You can buy attention. You can hire buffers. You can mistake momentum for truth. You will still be doomed in the long run, but you will not see it because short sightedness is expensive like that.

The litmus test, again

My go-to is still this.

What have you shipped? What have you actually finished?

Generally these “visionaries” who are not “technical” have never shipped a thing. They are always “working on” something. They are always “building.” They are always “about to launch.”

Show is always greater than tell. But the best entrepreneurs can do both. They have vision and gusto and they put in the work to understand the technical approach. They take advice. They hear out their tech leads, their users, and their board. They inspire those around them and rally around a common vision.

Vision can succeed.

Passion does not.

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Source notes (for readers who want receipts)

Note: I am aware this may come across blustery, and petulant. I am not trying to be ornery, or cantankerous. I am not a whiner. Someone had to say these things, and you are on my site. Thanks for making it this far. With that said, did I miss something? Do you have data that suggests otherwise? Get at me via email at jesse@alton.tech.

• Persuasion in pitches can increase funding odds without improving, and sometimes worsening, long-run performance conditional on funding: (NBER)
• Passion can backfire and is linked to overconfidence and related downsides: (Harvard Business Review)
• Investors use gut feel under uncertainty: (Harvard Business School Library)
• Investor bias and persuasion effects unrelated to fundamentals, including attractiveness effects: (Harvard Business School Library)
• Entrepreneurship framed as experimentation rather than predictable execution from narratives alone: (Harvard Business School)
• Track record and execution persistence among entrepreneurs: (NBER)