The Art of the Founder Memoir
A founder memoir is not a vanity project. Done well, it becomes the definitive account of how an institution was built, and a manual for those who come after.
The founder memoir has a reputation problem. It is too often associated with the kind of self-congratulatory document that exists to confirm what the subject already believes about themselves, a gift-wrapped hagiography, published in limited quantities and distributed to people who already admire the author.
This is a shame, because a founder memoir done properly is one of the most useful documents an institution can possess.
Think about what it actually contains. It is the decision-log of someone who built something from nothing. It is an account of the market as it actually was, not as the official history will remember it. It is a record of the mistakes that were made and survived, the bets that paid off, the relationships that proved decisive. And it is all of this in the voice of the person who lived it, which means it is irreplaceable in a way that no external account can be.
I have written founder memoirs for people who initially described the project as something they were doing 'for the family.' By the time we finished, they understood that they had produced something considerably more valuable: a practical document of how to navigate the kind of decisions they had been making for decades.
The test of a good founder memoir is not whether it is flattering. It is whether it is honest. The sections that endure, the passages that people return to, that get quoted in company meetings twenty years later, are the ones where the founder tells the truth about what it was actually like.
Not the polished version. Not the version that made it into the annual report. The real version, with the uncertainty and the fear and the judgement calls made in the dark.
That is the book worth writing. And it requires someone who knows how to ask the right questions, and how to listen to the answers.