At some point I stopped introducing myself as a founder and nobody said anything. I think because the word had already started to mean something I didn't recognise.
“Founder” now implies a single founding moment, a linear narrative, and a unicorn at the end. That's not how most digital business actually works.
'Founder' now carries a specific set of associations: venture capital, growth at all costs, pitch decks, the dream of a nine-figure exit. It's a word that was shaped by Silicon Valley and its particular mythology, and it doesn't fit most of the people actually building digital businesses today.
I've co-founded a software studio that's been running for fifteen years. I've acquired and relaunched a marketplace. I'm building a platform for buying and selling digital businesses. None of these fit the founder narrative cleanly. There was no single founding moment. There's no VC cap table. The goal was never a unicorn — it was building things worth owning, operating, and eventually selling, repeatedly, over time.
'Digital asset builder' is a more honest description of what I actually do. It treats business-building as a craft and a practice, not a singular identity-forming event. It implies multiplicity — you don't build once, you build repeatedly. It separates the practitioner from the specific asset, which matters when the asset changes. And it centres the economics of the work: what you're making is an asset, something with transferable value, not just a job or a project.
The language you use to describe yourself shapes how you think about the work. If you're a founder, your value is tied to the company you founded. If you're a builder, your value is in the craft. That's a meaningful difference when you're thinking about whether to sell, whether to start something new, or whether a particular business has run its course.
The best operators I know don't think of themselves as permanent fixtures in the businesses they run. They think about what they're building, what it's worth, and when the right time to hand it on is. They build systems that run without them. They document. They treat the business as something to be passed to the next owner in good condition. These are not founder instincts — they're operator instincts, asset-builder instincts.
The best operators don't found once. They build repeatedly, improve with each iteration, and treat each business as one chapter in a longer practice.
My arc has been: studio to acquisitions to platform. Each step informed the next. Machine Republic gave me fifteen years of understanding how client service businesses work. Acquiring and relaunching Indiemaker taught me the acquisition process from the inside. Building Indiemaker as a platform gives me a view across hundreds of transactions. None of this fits inside a single founder story. It's a practitioner's arc. That happens to also be a more accurate description of how digital business actually works.
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