The Founder Who Builds Only When Bored

Reena Mehta has started four companies. Three of them worked. She is forty-one years old, lives in a modest apartment in Brooklyn, and has, by her own estimate, spent close to a third of her working life doing what she calls "nothing in particular."

She means this almost literally. Between companies, she reads. She walks. She talks to old friends. She does not, in any conventional sense, work. She has been told, repeatedly, that this is a strange way to behave for someone in her position. She finds the observation funny.

"Most of the worst decisions I have ever made," she said, "I made because I was bored and didn't want to admit it."

Her thesis is simple and almost impossible to follow. The only good time to start a company, she believes, is when you have an idea you cannot stop thinking about. Everything else is friction. Everything else is the founder trying to look productive in the absence of conviction.

The hard part, she says, is the waiting. Tech culture, as it currently exists, rewards motion. It rewards announcements, raises, hires, decks. It does not reward the founder who reads for eight months and then decides not to build anything.

She has, on three separate occasions, been close to starting a company she did not believe in. She talks about each of these moments the way other people talk about near misses on the highway. Slowly. With visible relief.

The company she is building now is small. It has six people. It is, she will tell you, the best work she has ever done. She is not in a hurry to scale it. She is, in fact, not in a hurry to do almost anything.

She is, however, very clear about the cost of her method. There are years of her life that look, on paper, like nothing happened. There is income foregone, status foregone, optionality foregone. She has, by her own admission, made peace with all of it.

The reward, she said, is that when she does work, she actually works.