Modern Founders Are Like the Great Explorers
We like to pretend that startups are a modern invention.
Pitch decks, venture capital, accelerators, growth hacks — all very 21st century.
They’re not.
Strip away the jargon and you’ll see that building a startup looks suspiciously similar to something humans have been doing for centuries: setting out into the unknown, risking everything, and hoping the world looks different on the other side.
Modern founders are not that different from the great explorers.
And venture capital hasn’t changed much either.
Let me explain.
Christopher Columbus: The First Pitch Deck
Christopher Columbus didn’t have a product.
He didn’t have revenue.
He didn’t even have particularly good data.
What he had was:
- a bold thesis (“the Earth is round”),
- extreme confidence,
- and a promise of an upside so large it justified absurd risk.
When Columbus went to Queen Isabella of Castile, he didn’t sell her a safe plan. He sold her asymmetric upside: a new trade route worth thousands of times more than the cost of one expedition.
The risk was obvious.
So was the reward.
Queen Isabella didn’t expect every expedition to succeed.
She knew most would fail.
But she also knew that one success could pay for all the failures.
That was the first pre-seed round of funding in history.
Columbus was the first founder.
And Isabella was the first ever VC.
That’s still how venture capital works today.
Legendary Silicon Valley investor Ron Conway once invested in 30 startups from one of his early funds.
The first 29 failed.
The last one was Google.
VCs don’t fund things that should work.
They fund things that probably won’t — but might change everything if they do.
Hernán Cortés: Burn the Ships
When Hernán Cortés arrived in Mexico with a few hundred men, he made a decision that looked suicidal.
He burned his ships.
No retreat.
No plan B.
No “let’s see how it goes.”
Cortés understood something most founders struggle with:
optional retreat destroys commitment.
Burning the ships wasn’t madness.
It was strategy.
Founders who keep:
- a full-time job,
- consulting gigs,
- five side hustles,
- and a comforting “I can always go back”
are not Cortés.
They’re tourists.
And investors can sense that immediately.
The founders VCs trust are the ones who remove the psychological escape hatch.
Not because it guarantees success — but because it guarantees focus.
The modern equivalent of burning the ships?
Elon Musk betting almost his entire PayPal fortune on SpaceX and Tesla, both one failure away from bankruptcy.
No plan B.
Only outcome.
VCs don’t say “let’s try.”
They say: either we win, or we die trying.
Marco Polo: Vision Without a Market
Two hundred years before Columbus, Marco Polo traveled to China and came back with stories that sounded insane.
Paper money.
Cities larger than Rome.
Advanced technologies.
A completely different civilization.
Europe’s reaction?
“Cool story. But… why do we need this?”
Marco Polo wasn’t wrong.
He was early.
Very early.
His vision didn’t fail because it lacked brilliance.
It failed because the market wasn’t ready.
This mistake kills startups to this day.
Founders build extraordinary products.
They solve problems nobody feels yet.
They optimize for elegance instead of urgency.
They don’t talk to customers.
They talk to themselves.
And then they’re shocked when:
- no one wants to pay,
- no one wants to invest,
- and the money runs out.
The world doesn’t reward visionaries.
It rewards visionaries with timing.
It’s not enough to discover something new.
The market has to want it now.
Vasco da Gama: Persistence Beats Talent
Vasco da Gama didn’t discover that India existed.
Everyone already knew that.
The problem was simple:
no one could get there.
Da Gama set sail and faced:
- disease,
- starvation,
- mutiny,
- months with no progress.
At every point, turning back would have been rational.
He didn’t.
And that was his entire competitive advantage.
Not genius.
Not better tools.
Not a better plan.
Just psychological endurance.
Most startups don’t die because the idea is bad.
They die because founders get tired.
A perfect example from the modern world is Booksy.
Online appointment booking wasn’t new.
The market was crowded.
The product wasn’t sexy.
For years, nothing looked impressive.
But Stefan Batory didn’t turn back.
Country by country.
Iteration by iteration.
No hype.
Today, Booksy operates globally and serves millions of users — not because it had the best idea, but because it survived the years when nothing seemed to work.
VCs don’t fund the smartest founders.
They fund founders who outlast the silence.
Ferdinand Magellan: The Greatest Pivot
Ferdinand Magellan had a plan.
Maps.
A route.
A strategy.
That plan failed almost immediately.
Ships were lost.
Crew members died.
Magellan himself didn’t survive the journey.
And yet, the expedition accomplished something no one had ever done before: it circumnavigated the globe.
The greatest discovery in history was an unintended side effect of a failed plan.
That’s what a pivot really is.
Not panic.
Not weakness.
Adaptation.
Instagram didn’t start as Instagram.
It started as Burbn — a bloated check-in app with too many features.
The founders could have insisted on their original plan.
Instead, they killed almost everything and kept one thing: photos.
The goal stayed the same.
The plan changed.
Founders who cling to plans drown with them.
The best ones adjust without shrinking ambition.
VCs don’t expect plans to survive reality.
They expect founders to survive reality.
Even if only part of the crew makes it to the other side.
Why This Still Matters
The oceans are digital now.
The ships are startups.
The monsters are markets.
But the psychology hasn’t changed.
Founders who succeed today share the same traits as the great explorers:
- obsession,
- commitment without retreat,
- timing,
- endurance,
- and the ability to change course without losing the destination.
Technology evolves.
Human nature doesn’t.
And that’s why modern founders are still, at heart, explorers.
Just without the maps.
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Are you a modern explorer? Ideally from Central & Eastern Europe? Building a global startup? Let’s talk! With a strong presence in both the US and CEE, and a track record of quick decisions, we’re the partner to kickstart your journey. Email me your deck at borys@smok.vc.
