Things I Find Weird About Startup Culture by Perttu Jalovaara
When I first started making League of Legends videos, I never imagined it would lead me to Silicon Valley. Yet here I am, living in San Francisco with a house full of promising entrepreneurs. As an introverted gamer from Finland, I am way out of my comfort zone here—and it’s great. In just four weeks, I’ve probably talked to more people than I usually would in an entire year. But becoming a founder is not about networking, it’s not about impressing potential investors, and it’s definitely not about prioritizing work over sleep. There are a lot of elements of startup culture that I find weird, and in this post, I'd like to present my perspective as a community outsider and a naive, first-time founder.
Let me start with my story. In 2013, my brother introduced me to a game called League of Legends—if you've never heard of it, you’re probably better off. What began as a pastime with friends transformed into an adolescent obsession with improving at the game. I eventually became one of the best LoL players in Europe and started teaching the game to others through YouTube videos. After my YouTube views went from thousands to millions, I started offering one-on-one coaching but found it unscalable; I did not want to continue selling my time. In search of a more scalable way of sharing my game knowledge, I teamed up with two brilliant engineers to build the LoL improvement application I wish I always had. This project led me to SILTA, and now I’m here in San Francisco, writing this blog post.
After a month in San Francisco, I've noticed some odd things about startup culture. Here are three that confused me the most:
1. Ranking by Revenue
"What's your MRR?" seems to be the startup equivalent of "What rank are you?" in competitive video game communities. It's often one of the first questions founders ask each other, as if monthly recurring revenue is the primary measure of success. Don't get me wrong—revenue matters. But it can be manipulated and tells you little about the profitability or viability of the company. I align more with the Company of One philosophy, focusing on reaching minimum viable profit rather than chasing vanity metrics. Scale should come when not scaling hurts, not because it's the expected next step.
2. Focusing on Funding
The startup world has its own lingo, with terms like "pre-seed," "seed," and "Series A/B/C" describing the funding stage of a company. This vocabulary plays into the idea of a predefined startup path, where you proceed from one level to the next. While I now understand there's a reason for these stages, I was initially confused by their ubiquity. Still, I’m surprised by how much energy people use on indirect work—networking, pitch decks, endless emails—instead of actual product building. Not everyone can bootstrap, true. I am very fortunate in this regard: we're building a product for ourselves and have a built-in marketing channel through my YouTube presence. Nevertheless, I wonder how many founders are just following a predefined playbook instead of writing their own.
3. Sacrificing Sleep
"Sleep when you're dead" is the most criminal widespread advice in this community. My take is not novel, it was popularized by Matthew Walker in his 2017 book Why We Sleep. My current goal in life is to maximize my happiness—selfish, yes, but it’s true—and maximizing sleep is necessary to reach this goal. Whether your objective is to advance technology, minimize global suffering, or enrich the lives of those around you, prioritizing sleep is a dominant strategy in most cases. In my experience, we're not bottlenecked by time but by energy and decision quality. As someone whose success depends on making good choices rather than logging hours—which is the case for most founders—sleep is essential.
This post is not meant as a critique towards the startup community (except point 3, the sleep deprivation culture needs to be stopped). Rather, I’m trying to encourage different thinking from new founders or people interested in startups. My writing also stems from a point of immense privilege—education, freedom, financial security—none of which I take for granted. My San Francisco experience has been overwhelmingly positive, mostly due to my wonderful SILTA batchmates.
If you’re on the fence about starting something of your own, consider this your sign to do it.
Peace, Perttu