Every Entrepreneur Needs a Drug
Mine is music.
I don't mean that literally, but sometimes it feels pretty close.
Music is one of the most powerful tools we have for changing our internal state. It can influence how you think, act, and feel within minutes. Some music makes you nostalgic, some makes you calm, and some makes you angry for no obvious reason. But then there is music that makes you want to move—music that makes you feel like you can take on the world.
I've become increasingly interested in that last category.
I've noticed a pattern
There are a surprising number of successful entrepreneurs who are deeply into music, specifically high-energy electronic music. A few examples:
- Harley Finkelstein — Shopify | Occasional Techno / House DJ
- David Solomon — Goldman Sachs | Occasional EDM DJ
- Elon Musk — Tesla / SpaceX | Openly loves EDM and Techno, hence the nickname "Techno King"
- And many others
I think there is something interesting happening here.
Entrepreneurship is a battle over your state of mind
People talk about entrepreneurship as if it's primarily an intellectual game: build the right product, find product-market fit, raise capital, hire great people, and make good decisions. All of that matters. But there is another variable that gets dramatically less attention: the entrepreneur's spirit.
You can have the best strategy in the world and still lose if you don't have the energy to execute it. Building a company is an unusually volatile experience. You can wake up convinced you're going to change the world, only to have someone reject you two hours later—a customer leaves, a feature breaks, an employee quits, an investor passes, or your numbers aren't where you thought they'd be. You discover that something you spent three months building isn't actually what people want, and yet you still have another meeting, and another, and another.
You don't get to go home just because you're having a bad day. The company doesn't care, the problems don't care, and tomorrow morning, you're expected to show up with the same conviction you had yesterday.
That is the real psychological challenge of entrepreneurship. You have to repeatedly manufacture the energy to continue.
This is where music comes in
I've noticed this personally. Almost a year ago, I stopped listening to hip-hop, and the difference was astonishing. It wasn't that I suddenly started hating hip-hop; I just noticed that the music I was consuming was affecting my state more than I had realized.
So I started listening to different things: more electronic music, techno, house, and music with a fast tempo and a sense of forward motion. I began to notice something remarkable. I'd put on a particular track while working and, suddenly, the same problem that felt enormous ten minutes earlier felt manageable. Nothing about the problem had changed.
I had changed.
That's what makes music so interesting: it doesn't necessarily change your circumstances, it changes the person experiencing them.
You need something that brings you back
I think every entrepreneur eventually hits some version of rock bottom—not necessarily one giant catastrophic event, but dozens of tiny versions of it. You lose a deal, get bad news, make a mistake, or get ignored. You spend weeks working on something that doesn't work, and you start questioning yourself.
Then something good happens: you get a great call, a customer loves the product, someone believes in what you're building, or you close a deal you've been chasing for months, and suddenly you're back.
That's the emotional roller coaster of building a company. The problem is that you can't depend entirely on external events to bring you back up. If your motivation only comes from winning, you're going to have a difficult time surviving the periods when you aren't winning.
You need ways to change your own state. For me, music is one of them.
Music gives you momentum before you have evidence
This might be the most important part. Entrepreneurs are constantly required to believe in something before there is enough evidence to justify believing in it. That's basically the job.
You have to believe the product will work before it works, believe customers will come before they come, believe the company can become enormous before anyone else thinks it can, and believe you're capable of doing something you've never done before. That's an unusual psychological requirement.
And sometimes you don't need another piece of information. You don't need another spreadsheet, podcast, or another person telling you what you should do. You need to feel something. You need energy. You need momentum. You need to remember why you started.
Music can do that incredibly quickly. You can be sitting at your desk questioning everything, then a song comes on, and for three minutes, you feel invincible.
The company didn't change. The market didn't change. Your bank account didn't change.
Your spirit changed. And sometimes that's enough to get back on the horse.
Maybe that's why entrepreneurs love high-energy music
So when I look at entrepreneurs like Harley Finkelstein, David Solomon, Elon Musk, and others who are drawn toward DJing, electronic music, techno, house, and other high-energy genres, I don't think the interesting part is simply their music taste. I think it's the relationship between energy and execution.
Entrepreneurship requires an extraordinary amount of emotional stamina. You have to get excited about the future while dealing with problems in the present. You have to absorb rejection without letting it become your identity. You have to experience setbacks without allowing them to permanently lower your ambition. And you have to do it over and over again.
Maybe that's why music becomes more than entertainment. It becomes a tool—a reset button, a source of energy, and a way to manufacture momentum when the world isn't giving you any.
Every entrepreneur needs a drug
I'm not saying every entrepreneur should listen to techno, or even that music is the answer for everyone. Maybe it's running, reading, spending time with friends, going for a drive, or something completely different.
The point is that you need something—something that can pull you out of your own head, change your state when you're stuck in a bad one, and remind you that the setback you're experiencing right now is not the entirety of your story.
Because building a company means hitting the floor. Again. And again. And again. The advantage isn't never falling—it's being able to get back up quickly.
For me, the fastest way back is simple:
Music.