When Did Everyone Start Calling Themselves a Founder?

There was a time when the title seemed fairly straightforward. You founded a company. You were a founder. Somewhere along the way, things became less clear.

Now, a LinkedIn search can reveal founders of consultancies, founders of personal brands, founders of communities, founders of agencies that appear to consist of one person and, occasionally, people who seem to have founded a company mainly so they can put “Founder” next to their name.

It is worth asking when that happened. Not because the word founder should be protected by a committee of serious-looking people in suits. Anyone who starts a genuine business has a perfectly reasonable claim to the title. The more interesting question is why so many people now seem to want it.

Part of the answer is obvious. Titles matter.

“Founder” sounds like you are building something. It suggests independence, ambition and risk. It places you somewhere between entrepreneur and chief executive without requiring the inconvenience of actually being either for very long.

Compare it with the alternatives. Self-employed sounds like you have a tax return to complete. Business owner sounds like you run a plumbing company. Director sounds corporate. Managing director sounds like someone who owns several ties. Founder, meanwhile, sounds like you might be about to raise £10m.

The title has become shorthand for ambition.

That is not necessarily a bad thing. Starting something is difficult. Taking responsibility for finding customers, paying bills and making decisions deserves more respect than endlessly talking about entrepreneurship from the sidelines.

But the founder label has also become part of a wider business trend: making ordinary things sound more important than they are.

A one-person consultancy becomes a “boutique advisory firm”. A freelancer becomes a founder. An informal breakfast group becomes a “community platform”. A WhatsApp group acquires a mission statement.

None of this changes what the underlying business actually does. And perhaps that is the problem. We have started paying too much attention to what people call themselves and not enough to what they are building.

A title does not create customers. It does not improve a product. It does not make payroll. And it certainly does not make you a good boss.

Yet modern business has become increasingly interested in identity.

LinkedIn has something to do with this. We are all encouraged to present our professional lives as a coherent story, and “Founder” is an excellent opening chapter. It gives the impression that you are going somewhere, even when the business itself is still working out where.

There is also the influence of startup culture. For years, technology turned founders into celebrities. The people building companies were no longer simply business owners; they were visionaries, disruptors and, if things went particularly well, the subject of podcasts.

The language travelled. You did not need to be building a technology company to borrow some of the mythology.

This has produced a slightly odd situation in which the title can sometimes appear before the business.

Someone launches a company page, creates a logo, announces that they are “excited to share what we’ve been working on” and suddenly becomes Founder and CEO.

Of what, exactly? Well, that is apparently less important.

To be clear, there is nothing wrong with calling yourself a founder if you founded a business. That is not the argument. The problem starts when the title becomes the achievement.

Building a company is not the same as registering one.

A business begins to become interesting when somebody other than the founder decides it has value. A customer pays. An employee joins. A supplier takes you seriously. The company survives long enough for someone to depend on it.

That is when the title starts meaning something beyond the LinkedIn profile.

And perhaps we should be a little more relaxed about the alternatives anyway. There is no shame in being a business owner.

Some of Britain’s best companies were built by people who would never have described themselves as founders. They started shops, manufacturers, agencies and service businesses. They employed people, paid taxes and built organisations that survived for decades.

They did not need Silicon Valley vocabulary to make them legitimate.

Maybe the obsession with “Founder” tells us something about what modern business values. We like the beginning. The announcement. The leap. The photograph of someone standing in front of a laptop, apparently having just changed an industry.

What we find less glamorous is the middle. Five years of difficult customers. Late payments. Hiring mistakes. Boring meetings. Trying to work out why the numbers do not quite add up. Actually running the thing.

But that is where the business is built.

So call yourself a founder if you founded something. Just do not confuse the title with the job.

The easy part is putting it on your profile. The harder part is still there on Monday morning.