It’s my 45th birthday on 4/3, so I want to look back on my life. I try to live consciously.

I was born in 1972 and grew up in NYC. Starting at age 14, I spent the summers living on a commune in Arizona, Arcosanti, working to build a city of the future. I did construction, carpentry, welding and metal casting. I started to see a better way to live, but a lot of work was still needed.

My goal was to build the city of the future, so I went to architecture school at Carnegie Mellon and became one of the first 4.0 students in freshman year, which eventually lead to being invited to apply for a Rhoades Scholar. The whole experience was disturbing, so I dropped out to ride freight trains. Then, returning from the journey and study abroad in Vienna, I eventually wound up at the University of Pennsylvania.

At Penn in 1992, Elon Musk and I became roommates, starting a nightclub in order for us both to escape the dorms as transfer students. I created my own “Revolution” major, which failed to be supported by the university, and launched the Green Times, an environmental newspaper with a 30,000 circulation. I also lead the environmental group, since was I was concerned about the evolving environmental trends.

Done with school, I launched my first company to publish one of my many books of poetry on Gopher and FTP in 1994. This was a bad idea. So, when HTTP came out, we “pivoted” to release the first commercial website, creating an online newspaper. The company was Total New York, which eventually became AOL Digital Cities. We were covered by all major media outlets, helping start the first internet revolution.

I then launched a services company to take all major media brands online. This company became a key part of a digital media roll up that went public in a reverse merger as Exeed, giving me a range of public company experiences. I did some venture partner work for a fund started by former friends and colleagues at Exeed, allowing me to see Google, eBay and others very early on.

In 2000, I started helping venture capitalists save failing portfolio companies that suffered from the crash. I also flirted with launching an incubator, and briefly joined Idealab as a portfolio CEO. This was my second foray into venture capital and entrepreneurship as a business.

As this was going on, Elon and I started working on a project called Life to Mars. Our goal was to inspire humanity to inhabit Mars. I also joined the board of the X PRIZE foundation, helping to fund the initial private space exploration purse. Once the X PRIZE was won and SpaceX was started, I knew that private space exploration would happen.

Space and games were of interest to me at the time, so I launched a video gaming company, Game Trust, in 2002. I figured AI would first appear in games. We developed many of the modern day gamification concepts, which was a term coined by my friend, Gabe Zichermann. We sold the company after a Board struggle for control.

Some of my Game Trust investors were very bad actors, which lead me to launch TheFunded in 2006 as a weekend project, allowing CEOs to rate VCs. My life changed in many ways at this point, as I became relatively well-known among entrepreneurs. While semi-retired at age 35, I was being regularly villainized by some venture capitalists, and change was needed.

I wanted to improve the world of entrepreneurship and fix the funding landscape, so I launched the Founder Institute in 2009. FI was designed to wake people up and turn them into competent entrepreneurs, and it grew much faster than I had ever imagined. By 2010, we were in a dozen cities around the world. We mandated Founder-friendly investment terms. We started to predict entrepreneurial outcomes through social science. Entrepreneurs started recovering from the long years of abuse after the 2000 crash.

Today, through FI, I have helped to create key legal concepts for startups, such as the SAFE note and the FAST agreement. We are operating programs in 173 cities worldwide. In 2017 alone, we will put 100,000 people through our free events, eventually creating about 1,500 companies. Well over 15,000 jobs have been created by FI Graduates, and well over $15 billion in enterprise value have been generated.

At 45 years old, I feel that I have done some good in the world. I want to see FI become the largest entity in the world of entrepreneurship across every metric. I want to fulfill my childhood dreams for the city of the future. I want to explore ways to wake more people up and help them realize the inherent good in humanity. There is a lot more work to do.

More businesses are being started today than ever before, and while this is great for humanity and the economy as a whole, there is one major drawback for an individual entrepreneur looking to build an impactful company. On an almost daily basis, the bar for standing out and winning is constantly being set higher and higher.

In order to keep pace with the market, we’ve adjusted to this bar in the Founder Institute by making our program more challenging each of the last 8 years. We have had to take drastic measures to weed out the growing number of people that are just interested in “playing founder”, and are not ready for the rigors and commitment of building an impactful company.

There is one thing that these people do not understand:

A business is not worth building unless you are willing to go all-in.

I’ve started 9 businesses and have invested all of my time, all of my network, and most of my money into each and every one of them. Most have done well and others have failed, but I wouldn’t advise an entrepreneur trying to build an impactful company to pursue any other strategy.

Here’s why:

1. Building an Impactful Company Requires 100% of Your Time

I am always surprised by how many founders tell me things like “I can’t quit my job to build this business until I get some funding.” This line of thinking of completely backwards, and naive. What investor in their right mind would take the risk of investing in your company if you (the founder) won’t even take on the risk of future earnings to devote your time to it? Realistically, the founders that tell me this are hundreds of steps away from getting investment – but even then, do they really expect talented people to go out on a limb to join their team full-time if they’re not willing to do the same? Unless you have an amazing track record in entrepreneurship, this is non-negotiable.

To be clear, I am not saying that a business can’t begin as a “side-project”. On the contrary, I believe starting a “side-project” before fully committing is the absolute best way to start a company. When it is just a “project” (not a “business”), you aren’t too attached to it, and you can look at things objectively while testing the idea with customers, researching the economics, and getting feedback from experts.

However, once you have put in several months (at least) and have gotten the proper validation, you need to devote 100% of your time to build the business if you want to have any chance of success. Realistically, this means 60+ hours per week for several years.

2. Building an Impactful Company Requires 100% of Your Network

If you are trying to build something of impact, then you need to quickly get comfortable with asking your friends, family, and colleagues for favors. These favors include, but are not limited to, sharing your news, giving you feedback on your product, providing introductions, handing over money (buying your product/ investing in your company), and more.

As awkward as this may seem, there is really no getting around it. As an early-stage entrepreneur you usually have no tangible product to sell, so all you can sell is a vision or idea. This is actually very similar to a politician starting a “movement” – and a “movement” requires an initial audience to get it going.

To force this thinking on early-stage entrepreneurs that are not quite ready to go “all-in”, in the first week of the Founder Institute we mandate that our founders create a mailing list of at least 20 friends, family members, and associates. After sending an initial introductory email where people can silently opt-out, the founders then send this mailing list business updates and requests for feedback on a weekly basis. To push things further, we even require our founders to add people to the list every week, and when they finish our program they have over 125 subscribed contacts that they know personally or met in the program.

Is this overkill? To be honest, when we first implemented this strategy the required subscriber numbers were much lower. However, over time we have moved the requirements higher and higher because it has be so effective. At the end of the day, this simple mailing list has acted as a forcing function that not only gets our founders comfortable with selling to personal acquaintances, but also provides them with a wide net of people from which to get valuable feedback, spread news, and more.

If you are not comfortable asking friends, family and colleagues for favors related to your business, then I suggest you do something similar. Trying to build your company alone is usually a fool’s errand.

3. Building an Impactful Company Might Require All of Your Own Money

It does not always require 100% of your money, like numbers 1 and 2 above… but it might.

This is what startup people call “skin in the game”. Joining, investing in, or partnering with a startup is always a question of risk management, and the most remedial question someone can ask to mitigate risk before working with you is “Are you committed?”.

“There is a difference between interest and commitment. When you’re interested in something, you do it only when it’s convenient. When you’re committed to something, you accept no excuses, only results” – Kenneth H. Blanchard – Author of The One Minute Manager

Most of the successful entrepreneurs you read about today have invested most of their money into their businesses at the early stage, while also taking either a very low or the legal minimum salary for the first several years. I have done the same with all nine of my businesses.

Obviously not everyone has the luxury to do this, but at the very least, they should expect to front the initial costs of the business (incorporation, legal, basic technology/materials, and the like), while also offering much higher salaries to their first key hires than their own. After all – what signifies more commitment from the founder than cold hard cash?

Okay, so let’s say you have read my three points above but are still wavering and not quite ready to go “all-in” with your time, network, or money.  What should you do?

At the very least, I recommend that you take a step back and ask yourself two key questions:

Am I fully committed this idea?

If you are ready to go all-in but do not believe you have validated your idea, you can usually find the answer by (1) isolating your area of concern, (2) getting feedback on it through a well-constructed “MVP Test” with a few hundred more potential customers, and (3) reviewing the results with someone that successfully built a business targeting the same customer. If you are not sold after that, then it’s time to significantly alter (“pivot”) your idea, or start over altogether. Keep in mind that this is not a bad thing – it is better you learn this sooner rather than later.

Am I ready for the rigors of starting a business?

If you believe you have validated your idea but are still not ready to go all-in, then work backwards and create a plan that will get you to that point. Maybe you have a child on the way, or other family obligations on the horizon? Maybe you need to save up money and start another “side-hustle” in the interim? Or, maybe you need to take time creating relationships that will be crucial for your business to succeed? Whatever the situation, just create an actionable plan to get you there as quickly as possible. I promise you that the longer you wait, the more your chances of getting started and succeeding diminish.

(This article originally appeared on Forbes.)

The Lean Startup movement has changed the global startup landscape over the last few years, providing a simple methodology for resource-constrained companies to quickly learn from their customers, iterate their product development, and ultimately create products that people want. As a result, Lean Startup principles are a key component of the Founder Institute curriculum.

However, in practice, many startup founders misinterpret one of the key principles of the lean startup: “the pivot”.

“A pivot is a change in strategy, not vision” – Eric Ries

This definition sounds simple enough, but most people screw it up in practice because they don’t know (or care) about what “vision” truly is. What’s more, if you were to do a Google GOOGL +0.04% search on “company vision”, all you will find is a litany of convoluted HR and corporate communication-focused definitions. In other words, definitions that have nothing to do with a small startup.

However, forming a clear vision for your startup is perhaps the most important early thing an entrepreneur can do.  Here is the simplest definition I can give you for “startup vision”:

A startup’s vision is their interpretation of what the world will look like in the future, and how their venture will be part of this future.

As Eric Ries and all Lean Startup practitioners will tell you, your strategy to carry out your vision (your “mission”) should change  – whether due to customer feedback, learning from experiments, market forces, etc. That is the definition of “the pivot”, and it is one of the key reasons why startups can outmaneuver and beat the large and slow moving corporates.

However, your startup’s vision CANNOT change. If it does, that’s not a “pivot” – that’s a new company.

Let me explain.

When you create a company, you basically have nothing – “vaporware”, as I like to call it. All you have is your vision: it is why you start the company, and why you spend countless nights working on it when you could’ve been [insert fun activity with family/friends here].

This vision is also what you used to “sell” early team members and co-founders to devote their time and lives to the company, investors to devote their money to the company, journalists to write about the company, and maybe even your reluctant spouse to allow you to start it?

My point is, once you have established your company’s vision, that vision becomes greater than you. It is now your enterprise’s “North Star”, and it should guide each and every decision your company makes. Your vision is the embodiment of your brand, and the reason your company exists.

With the vision in place, your company has your target, and your sole job as a founder now becomes articulating that vision, rallying people around it, and figuring out the right strategy to achieve it (your “mission”). If you keep changing the target, it becomes near impossible to hit.

“Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision, and relentlessly drive it to completion.” – Jack Welch 

Is it hard to create a clear vision, and then stick to it?  You bet. In fact, it is much easier to abandon your vision than it is to grind it out and achieve it – that is precisely why so many companies fail.

The companies that succeed and endure are almost always the ones that created a clear vision, and then stuck to it.

Or, you can change your vision and start a new company. It’s your call.