Struggle can make you stronger. Here is the evidence.

The capabilities that hardship can build are real, and well studied. Our claim is narrower: venture under-values them, celebrating the clean wins and forgetting the struggle behind them. Here is the evidence, limits and all.

The capacities adversity builds are the same ones that keep a company alive.

Why should an investor care? Because the earliest stage of building is, structurally, an exercise in meeting adversity and continuing anyway — and the capacities that get a person through hardship are the same ones that keep a company alive when the money is short and the path is unclear. Venture loves to celebrate the clean win and forget the struggle behind it. We would rather pay attention to the struggle — without pretending, for a moment, that we have had it harder than anyone.

Resilience is common, and it is a process

Resilience is often imagined as rare and heroic. The evidence suggests the opposite: in Bonanno's work, a stable trajectory of healthy functioning is the most common response to serious adversity, and there is no single resilient “type.” Psychology defines it as a process of adapting well through mental, emotional and behavioural flexibility — something developed, not merely possessed.

Bonanno, 2004 · APA

Adversity quotient

Stoltz proposed measuring how a person responds to adversity across four dimensions — control, ownership, reach, and endurance (CORE): how much influence they feel they have, whether they take ownership of the response, how far they let a setback spread, and how long they expect it to last. Empirical studies have linked higher adversity quotient to entrepreneurial self-efficacy and persistence.

Stoltz, 1997 · AQ research

Post-traumatic growth

Tedeschi and Calhoun documented growth that can follow a struggle with serious difficulty across five domains: personal strength, new possibilities, closer relationships, a changed appreciation of life, and shifts in priorities. Two cautions are essential, and we hold them: growth comes through the struggle, not from the event — and it coexists with distress rather than replacing it.

Tedeschi & Calhoun · APA

The dose-response curve

The most careful finding is a curve, not a slope. In a multi-year national study, Seery, Holman and Silver found a U-shaped relationship: people with a history of some lifetime adversity reported better mental health and life satisfaction over time than those with a high history — but also better than those with none at all. In moderation, difficulty can strengthen; in excess, it harms.

Seery, Holman & Silver, 2010 · JPSP

Creativity under constraint

Baker and Nelson's study of resource-constrained firms named a behaviour they called bricolage — “making do by applying combinations of the resources at hand.” Founders with little often recombine time, networks and existing assets in ways abundance never demands. The same authors note it can be harmful in excess, and useful when applied with judgement.

Baker & Nelson, 2005 · ASQ

From person to firm

At the firm level, entrepreneurial resilience is positively associated with perceived success, and owners’ resilience was linked to small firms surviving the COVID shock — amplified by stakeholder engagement. The mechanisms most often cited are self-efficacy, an internal locus of control, social capital, and adaptive learning.

J. Business Research, 2020

Examples of the impact

Look at the people who have actually had to build under pressure, and the pattern is hard to miss. They are over-represented, again and again, among those who go on to build something that lasts.

59%

of America's billion-dollar startups were built by immigrants — people who arrived and started over.

NFAP, 2026

66%

of US unicorns had an immigrant founder, or the child of one.

NFAP, 2026

1.6M+

US businesses are owned by military veterans, who learned to lead under real pressure.

SBA, 2025

3.2M

people are employed by those veteran-owned firms.

SBA, 2025

What follows, if this is right

A thesis worth holding should be capable of being wrong in public, so here is ours in a form that can be checked. If adversity capital is real and mispriced, then over a decade a portfolio selected partly on it should show a lower rate of founder-driven failure — quitting, co-founder collapse, giving up a round early — than a portfolio selected on credentials and network alone. Not higher returns necessarily; fewer companies that die of the founder rather than the market.

That is the claim we are actually making. If it turns out that the founders we back fold at the same rate as everyone else when things get hard, the idea is wrong and we should say so.

How we hold it

A capability — never a celebration of suffering

We want to be clear about what we are not saying. Hardship is not good, and the evidence does not pretend otherwise: past a point, it only harms. We do not romanticise what anyone has been through, and we would never ask someone to suffer for an edge.

What we value is the capability that can be left behind once the hardest part has passed — the judgement, the resourcefulness, the refusal to quit. We back that, in the present tense, and we try to help founders use it well rather than burn through it.

Sources

Resilience — American Psychological Association · Bonanno, G. A. (2004). Loss, Trauma, and Human Resilience. American Psychologist. · Stoltz, P. G. (1997). Adversity Quotient — concept & AQ research · Adversity Quotient & entrepreneurial self-efficacy (empirical) · Post-traumatic growth — Tedeschi & Calhoun (APA) · Seery, Holman & Silver (2010). Whatever Does Not Kill Us. JPSP 99(6). · Baker & Nelson (2005). Creating Something from Nothing. ASQ 50(3). · Inverted-U: childhood adversity, resilience & careers (MIDUS) · Resilience & firm survival; stakeholder engagement (J. Bus. Research) · Immigrants & billion-dollar companies (NFAP, 2026) · Veteran business ownership (SBA, 2025) · Elite athletes, resilience & entrepreneurial intention (Springer)

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