I've started noticing something at founder dinners, demo days, and startup events. It's hyper-specific and now I can't unsee it.
The best builders — the ones pouring all of their energy into making their companies epic — the ones I love to back — all seem to wear the same dirty white sneakers.
Not designer sneakers. Not triple-stitch suede shoes. Not high tech running shoes. Just plain, white, lace-up tennis shoes. Cheap Nikes, New Balance or anonymous-looking Adidas. And they are filthy.
Scuffed toes. Gray creases where the canvas folds. A smudge on the heel from getting kicked under a desk for six months straight. The kind of dirty that would bother you if you had five spare minutes a week to think about it. But great founders don't think about it. They don't even notice.
If you're actually locked in running a startup — you have no spare cycles for things that aren't the company. The question "what shoes should I wear today?" is not a question you ask. You grab the same pair of tennis shoes you grabbed yesterday. And the day before that.
You wear them to the office. You wear them on the plane to meet your biggest customer. You wear them to board meetings. You wear them on a weekend when an employee is trying to quit and you drive to their apartment at 11pm to talk them off the ledge.
The inverse is also true.
There's a type of founder who has their aesthetic fully dialed in. Perfect sneakers. Perfect cardigan. Perfect Substack. They've thought hard about what a founder should look like, and they look like that. They tweet about how many tokens they're consuming.
Some of these people are probably great. But what bothers me is that they spent their limited energy on signaling that they're a great founder rather than spending every ounce of their energy becoming one.
Dirty white sneakers are a symptom, not a cause. You cannot buy a pair of gross Allbirds on Thursday and become a better CEO by Friday.
So please, don't change your footwear on account of a blog post. In fact, wear whatever shoes bring you joy.
Dirty white sneakers or not, when you meet someone really locked in, you can tell — real builders just look the part.
