How breaking invisible family pacts forge unstoppable founders.

Some pacts are never spoken. Nobody sits down to discuss who expects what, which is precisely the point. Break one and you're an ingrate. Honour it and you may never reach your potential. But the people who break it often become the most formidable founders in the startup world, hell-bent on proving their worth on their own terms.

The Anatomy of a Covert Contract#

Psychologist Robert Glover popularised the term covert contract: I let you count on me, expecting you'll one day reciprocate, but I never say so. A pact made covertly can't be broken overtly, at least not without great angst.

Immigrant families are full of them. Your parents' dreams and sacrifices are tied to you, and you're regularly reminded how hard Mum and Dad worked. The unspoken terms:

We sacrificed everything. You owe us prestige.

You're expected to honour your roots and thrive in an unfamiliar world. Turn down law school or a big, fancy job offer for something less "safe", and you risk being seen as an ingrate, even a traitor.

But some founders make breaking the contract work for them. They use family duty as fuel, outdoing the cushy careers they turned down and proving all those tears and sleepless nights were worth it, on their own terms.

That creates extreme urgency. As their parents age, each year demands bigger wins to justify the choice.

Cultural Pressure Cookers#

Cultural expectations, and the covert contracts that come with them, sit on a continuum of intensity. At the intense end are East Asian countries steeped in Confucian filial piety. In Korea, walking away from a steady job shames not just you but your whole family. Japan has "resignation agencies" that employees hire because admitting they want to quit is so shameful. In China, families vie with one another and bask in their children's accomplishments.

The West sits at the milder end, but we too feel obligation to the families, bosses and mentors who invested in us.

When these founders break the pact, failure means more than a dead company. It means failing their families, and every setback feels like a test of loyalty. They feel they don't have much time, so they move fast. Needing to prove they made the right call makes them ferociously ambitious, and ferociously resilient.

That's why VCs love this kind of founder. Their drive often outstrips that of founders from less pressured backgrounds.

A Message to My Parents, and to Those Who Understand#

This essay isn't a showcase of success. It's an attempt to talk about what drives those of us raised under the weight of parental sacrifice.

Growing up in Austria, I watched my parents toil away in their Chinese restaurant. Good grades were my way of repaying them. That sacrifice fuelled my drive to get into a good university in the UK, to land the best internships, to get onto a conventional, secure career path.

For a while I thought that was what repaying them meant: putting on the suit, name-dropping the prestigious company, watching my parents glow with pride. But many of us eventually ask whether this really honours their sacrifice. For me, the answer was no. Leaving that path wasn't a rejection of my parents. It was taking the determination they gave me and applying it my own way.

Each day on that path brings pressure, immense pressure, to show you and ourselves that we haven't made a mistake, that your sacrifice wasn't for nothing, that the opportunities you gave us haven't gone to waste.

To my parents, and to all the other parents who've sacrificed: We haven't forgotten. That drive, that ambition, that work ethic is your gift to us, and we intend to use it to create value in new ways. We may have broken our deal with you, but we're working tirelessly to repay it tenfold. It's our way of making you proud.

This struggle is silent, but widely shared among children of immigrants, of small business owners, of parents who dreamed of better lives for their kids.

We carry your hopes with us, always.

Braindump by Josef Chen