Thirteen years ago today, I quit my day job. I picked the date on purpose: the day before Halloween, so I could throw myself a farewell costume party.

This week, my whole team showed up in costume again. I went as the undead. Accurate for year 13 of a startup.

The odds said I wouldn’t get here. Of the private businesses that opened in March 2013, the year I left my job, just 34.7% were still operating ten years later, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. About one in five didn’t survive the first year.

Back then, almost nobody thought my company would work. Not even my parents. I wanted to sell Americans a bitter green leaf—moringa from Africa—that they had never heard of, through a supply chain built with small farmers. The verdict I heard most: “Cute idea. It’ll never scale.”

Today, Kuli Kuli’s products are in 11,000 stores, and we partner with thousands of small farmers across Africa and India. It’s still hard. Some days, really hard.

To pressure-test what I’ve learned, I surveyed 26 founders and CEOs, 20 of them women, most running food and consumer brands. It’s a small sample from my own network, not a scientific poll. But their answers sharpened every one of the five lessons below.

Who Will Talk You Up If You Don’t?

The hardest lesson of my first 13 years had nothing to do with supply chains or shelf space. It was learning to brag.

Talking myself up felt deeply uncomfortable. But no retailer or investor was going to notice my company while I stayed humble about it. I pitched roughly 400 investors to raise our first $10 million. Every one of those meetings required me to say, out loud and without hedging, why what we were building mattered.

I’m not alone in finding that hard. In a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, economists Christine Exley and Judd Kessler found that women rated their own performance 25% lower than men did. The gap held even when participants knew exactly how well they had scored.

The fundraising market won’t make it easier. Of the 17 founders in my survey who tried to raise money in the past year, nine said it had gotten harder. Only two said easier.

Humility is a virtue. It is not a sales strategy. Practice your pitch until “we’re the best at this” sounds like a fact, not a boast. Nobody else is going to say it for you.

Build The Product You Want To Buy

Before I knew who our customer was, I made the food I wanted to eat: whole plants grown in a field, not a lab, because I believe food is medicine.

Every early investor wanted a customer persona. I had a mirror. Turns out there were a lot more people like me than anyone expected.

This isn’t permission to skip testing. It’s permission to start. Five of the 17 founders who offered advice in my survey told aspiring founders, in one form or another, to begin before it feels ready. Building for yourself is how you do that. You don’t need a focus group to know what you’d buy. You need one to find out how many other people would buy it too.

Start by writing down a problem you have that no product solves well. If you can’t describe it in one sentence, keep looking. If you can, find 20 people who say they have it, and sell to them before you scale.

Be Brutally Honest About What You’re Bad At

Then hire someone great at exactly that.

The second step is the hard one. Hiring for a blind spot means hiring someone whose strengths you can’t fully judge, because they live in the part of the business you understand least. That’s uncomfortable. Do it anyway.

Self-awareness came up in my survey, too. Founders wrote that a visionary always needs an operator, and that culture fit should shape every hire, supplier, and partner, not just the leadership team.

I’d add one filter: make sure it’s someone you actually like. You spend too much of your life at work to spend it with people you don’t.

Try this. List the three parts of your job you most often put off. That list is your next hire. Then check references for how the candidate treats people, not just what they delivered.

Humility is a virtue. It is not a sales strategy.

If It’s Not A Hell Yes, It’s A Hell No

This one has saved me more time than any other. The idea traces back to author Derek Sivers, who made the case in his book “Hell Yeah or No.”

Founders say yes to too much because every opportunity looks like oxygen. A retailer that wants a custom item. A partner who needs a pilot. A panel, a podcast, a pivot. Each one takes a slice of the scarcest thing you have: your team’s attention.

I once turned down a $1 million check after one bad investor relationship taught me what a lukewarm yes really costs. Money from the wrong partner is more expensive than no money at all.

Cost pressure forced this lesson on many of the founders I surveyed. Ten of 26 delayed a launch or expansion this year, and six cut or cancelled products. Done right, that isn’t retreat. It’s focus.

Before your next yes, ask one question: would I be thrilled to start this tomorrow? If the answer takes more than a few seconds, it’s a no.

Can Your Cash Survive Your Growth?

This is the lesson I’d add after 13 years, and the one my survey made impossible to ignore.

Growth didn’t solve the money problem for the founders I heard from. Nineteen of 26 said revenue was up from a year ago. Yet 19 of 26 also absorbed rising costs and accepted lower margins, and 12 delayed hiring or cut staff. When I asked what held them back from giving back more, 15 named cash flow.

Money ran through their advice to new founders, too. Price for margin from day one. Learn the math of every sales channel before you chase it. Don’t hire ahead of your cash. Plan to fund the company for years, not months.

That’s how companies get past the cliff in the BLS data, where only about half of new businesses make it to year five. Revenue gets you noticed. Cash keeps you alive long enough for the noticing to matter.

Know your runway to the month. Model what happens if your biggest customer pays 60 days late. Treat every new channel as a cash decision first and a growth decision second.

Only about a third of companies make it to year ten, and the ones that do rarely get there on a great idea alone. If you’re a founder, pick the lesson on this list that makes you most uncomfortable and start there this week. Thirteen years in, I’ve never once regretted the leap, and I’m already planning my costume for year 14.