You Can’t Win Alone
I’ve been watching Alone on Netflix. If you haven’t seen it, the premise is deceptively simple: ten people are dropped in a remote wilderness — Northern Canada, deep inside the Arctic Circle — with limited gear and no crew. No camera team, no support staff. They film themselves. The last person to tap out wins half a million dollars.
They have to hunt. Purify water. Build shelter. Manage hypothermia, starvation, and the creeping psychological erosion that comes from weeks in the dark. The conditions are brutal. The skills required are real. And people come onto that show with legitimate expertise — former military, expert foragers, wilderness survival instructors. These aren’t amateurs.
And yet almost all of them quit.
Here’s what strikes me every time I watch it: almost none of them leave because of a physical breakdown. They leave because they can’t hold it together mentally. The self-talk turns against them. The silence becomes unbearable. The cost-benefit calculation they’re running in their head — why am I here, what is this worth, what am I missing — eventually tips the wrong way. And they tap out.
It made me think about building companies. Because what Alone is really showing us isn’t a survival show. It’s a controlled experiment in what happens to a capable person when you strip away community.
The Mental Load of Going It Alone
Watch enough episodes and a pattern emerges. The contestants who last longest aren’t always the most skilled. They’re usually the ones who’ve built the strongest mental architecture around why they’re there. They talk to the camera like it’s a person. They set small, achievable daily goals. They frame hardship as temporary. They find ways to manufacture a sense of connection even in total isolation.
But no matter how good they are at that, the isolation eventually wins. Because humans are not wired to function alone for extended periods. We’re wired for community. And when you remove it, even the most resilient people start to crack.
The interesting thing is that most of the challenges these contestants face — building a fire, catching a fish, staying warm — would be almost trivially easy with two people. Not twice as easy. Exponentially easier. One person gathers wood while another tends the fire. One hunts while another processes yesterday’s catch. The cognitive load gets distributed. The emotional support becomes reciprocal. Morale becomes a shared resource, not a solo maintenance task.
What makes Alone hard isn’t the wilderness. It’s the alone.
Building Is the Same
I think about this a lot as an investor, because the parallel to company building is almost exact.
We see it constantly. A founder with extraordinary skills, a genuine insight, real conviction about a problem — and they’re struggling in ways that seem disproportionate to the actual difficulty of the challenge. The pitch isn’t landing. The first customers aren’t converting. The product roadmap keeps shifting. And when you dig in, the issue often isn’t any one of those things. It’s that they’re carrying all of it alone.
Things that would be straightforward conversations with a co-founder or an empathetic investor become all-night spirals. Decisions that a functioning board would make in an hour take weeks of second-guessing. The self-talk turns negative. The “why am I doing this” calculation starts running on a loop.
The work doesn’t get harder. The founder gets lonelier. And loneliness, as a founder as in the wilderness, is what kills you.
This is why we spend so much time at Lobby building community. Lobby:Consumer, Lobby:Enterprise, Lobby:Elevate, Lobby:Connect, these are all communities that we build, protect and love. When evaluating companies, we look for the same elements of community, team dynamics and alignment. Not just whether the founders are talented — though that matters — but whether they’ve built something that functions like a community with shared values and a shared direction. Do the founders actually trust each other? Do they have complementary strengths, or are they just two people who both want to be CEO? Is there alignment with early employees around why the company exists and what winning looks like?
I’ve written before about why you can’t hire trust — the most durable early teams are built from pre-existing relationships, shared experience, and networks where social capital has already been established. And I’ve argued that humans are a lot harder than tech — that the companies most likely to fail aren’t the ones with inferior technology, but the ones that underestimate how much alignment, trust, and culture actually drive outcomes. Community isn’t a soft nice-to-have. It’s infrastructure for people.
And critically: are the investors aligned too?
The Full Alignment Stack
One of the things Alone gets right, even if unintentionally, is showing how isolation affects every layer of performance. It’s not just that you’re cold and hungry. It’s that you have no one to reality-check your decisions. No one to tell you you’re catastrophizing when you’re catastrophizing, or to push back when you’re considering quitting on a bad day. No external accountability. No shared stakes.
In company building, that alignment stack includes founders, employees, investors, and — if you’re a VC-backed company — the LPs behind those investors. When all of those groups are rowing in the same direction, with shared values and a common definition of success, the work becomes genuinely more tractable. Not easier in some abstract sense, but actually easier — because hard decisions get made faster, morale problems get solved at the source, and the inevitable setbacks don’t spiral into existential crises.
I was at the Equity Summit last week, and what struck me most wasn’t any single panel or conversation — it was the energy of the room itself. Whether you were there as an LP, a GP, or a sponsor, the thing that made it valuable was the same thing that makes any high-functioning team valuable: you weren’t alone. You were part of a community with shared language, shared stakes, and a genuine interest in each other’s outcomes. The event was a reminder that one of the most reliable predictors of someone’s success — in venture, in entrepreneurship, in any high-stakes endeavor — is how effectively they build and sustain community. It’s not a personality trait. It’s a skill. And it compounds.
When alignment breaks down at any level of the stack, the whole thing gets heavier. A founder fighting with their co-founder is spending energy that should go to customers. A portfolio company whose investors are pushing in conflicting directions loses months to politics instead of progress. A team that doesn’t share values around how to treat customers or how to handle adversity fractures when stress arrives — and stress always arrives. The insight isn’t that talent doesn’t matter, it’s that talent without alignment is just expensive noise.
Even the Wisdom of the Crowd Is Community
Here’s an angle that might seem unrelated at first: prediction markets.
I’ve been pretty critical of where prediction markets are headed — I wrote a piece arguing they’re starting to look like digital OxyContin, monetizing a genuine insight in ways that cause real harm. But I want to be fair about what they actually get right. The core mechanism — aggregating dispersed beliefs into a single price signal — works. The wisdom of the crowd, when properly harnessed, produces better forecasts than almost any individual expert.
And when you strip away all the financial engineering, what is the wisdom of the crowd? It’s community. It’s the collective intelligence of people with different information, different priors, and different incentives, combining into something more accurate than any of them could produce alone. Prediction markets have monetized that in what often feels like a perverse way. But the underlying insight holds: you’re more likely to succeed as a community than as an individual.
The same logic applies to startups. Founding teams are smarter than solo founders, not because two people have twice the IQ, but because they have different blind spots. Early employees who feel ownership challenge assumptions that founders can’t see. Investors who are genuinely aligned catch things that founders miss. The whole system works better when more people have real skin in the game and real stakes in the outcome.
Survival, in the wilderness and in building, is a collective intelligence problem. The more minds you have working on it together, the better your odds.
Survival Is a Team Sport
The winner of Alone usually isn’t the person who’s most skilled. They’re the person who has the most compelling reason to stay — and the mental and emotional architecture to sustain that reason through seventy or eighty days of brutal isolation. They’ve built something internal to substitute for the community they don’t have.
It works, sometimes. Enough to win a TV show.
But in the real world, you don’t have to build that substitute. Community is available. Alignment is achievable. Perishable knowledge — the kind of insight that comes from proximity, shared context, and association — doesn’t travel well, and it doesn’t accumulate in isolation. It’s a product of community. Which is yet another reason why the founders, GPs, and LPs who invest in their networks over time tend to outperform the ones who go it alone.
The question is whether you invest in community early — in the co-founder relationship, in the culture, in the investor partnerships — or whether you treat it as a soft nice-to-have and discover too late that it was load-bearing.
In the wilderness, going alone is the premise of the show. In company building, it’s a choice. And in our experience, it’s usually the wrong one.
Your chances of survival go way down when you’re out there alone.
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