Avoiding the Suck: How Not to Get Pulled Back Into Ego and Money Obsession as Your Project Grows

There’ll be a moment for you, I promise you, in your alternative entrepreneurial journey when the early rush of idealism meets a new pressure: success.

It's not the success we dreamt about in the beginning - the success of impact, of ethical alignment, of good work done well and fairly - but the kind that looks good on LinkedIn: a growth target met, a revenue goal achieved.

And we think: great!

We forget for a moment all of those values we reflected on, and our wish to be the change we want to see.

And we write the LinkedIn post in the language that LinkedIn understands: look at me. I made it.

It’s a subtle suck.

A gravitational pull back into the very mindset we started our ventures to escape.

This piece is about resisting that pull.

It’s a practical, rigorous blueprint for those of us building what we hoped would be different kinds of businesses, businesses of care, of purpose, of resistance.

It’s for those navigating the sticky middle ground: post-survival, pre-scale, where values can slip, slowly, beneath the surface.

How can we stay honest, stay human, and stay rooted as our alt ent projects grow?

The Nature of “The Suck”: Ego, Scale and the Cultural Default

“The suck” is the default script of entrepreneurial culture: that growth equals success, that money is the clearest signal of value, and that ego — personal brand, visibility, legacy — is worth trading your soul for.

Researchers like Jennifer Hyman (Harvard Business Review, 2020) and Anand Giridharadas (Winners Take All, 2018) have shown how even social enterprises and "ethical" startups can become complicit in reinforcing inequity once scale and visibility take precedence. A 2022 Stanford Social Innovation Review piece found that 61% of nonprofit founders admit they shifted their goals to appease funders after early growth.

Avoiding the suck, then, is something you need a plan for.

We're only human, after all.