2026 has been a bumper year for crises and volatility. From new wars threatening an energy crisis to AI giants eating away into a greater share of the tech market, we’re witnessing a time with little precedent for small businesses and startups.
And while resilience is often framed in operational or financial terms, there is a deeper philosophical toolkit that founders can draw from. When supply chains are fragmenting and capital can be more selective, it’s worth turning to the philosophers and how they can help us cope. Which is why Stoicism and the wisdom of Stoic philosophers are one candidate for an enduring mindset that can guide us through these turbulent times.
But what exactly can Stoicism teach startups about how to stay resilient and navigate volatility?
1. The limits of control
An essential pillar of Stoicism is the ability to distinguish between what’s within our control and what lies beyond it. Though easily said, this is a lot harder than it seems, particularly for startup founders. For founders, market cycles, geopolitical shocks and investor sentiment seem so large that it feels as if they are completely at their mercy.
But the Stoics had Fortune as having “main character energy”, but it was never determinant of our Fate. Founders may often expend emotional and cognitive energy reacting to external forces as an excuse but recognizing the small strategic steps that may help a business course through difficult times could save it.
Stoicism is about focusing relentlessly on what you can control and detaching from the rest. The Roman philosopher Seneca the Younger captured this mindset succinctly in his essay On the Tranquility of the Mind: “We must also make ourselves flexible, to avoid becoming too devoted to the plans we have formed and we should make the transition to the state that chance has brought us to without dreading a change either in our purpose or our condition.” In startup terms, this is a call to pivot without ego. Founders are often told to be visionary and unwavering but, in volatile conditions, rigidity can be fatal.
A Stoic technique of premeditatio malorum can sometimes be of aid here. Literally translated to the “premeditation of evils”, the technique asks founders to visualize where things could go wrong for their startup and propose a strategy to move beyond it if it were to happen. For startups, this translates to stress-testing assumptions and asking the crucial questions before they’re made real. What happens if funding dries up? Or if a key supplier fails? What if I’m price gouged on a key requirement of our product?
By forming and confronting these scenarios in advance, founders can reduce its impact on a startup when disruptions occur and can respond with clarity rather than panic.
This mindset is especially relevant in geopolitically sensitive environments. Early-stage investor Bilal Baloch of Shorooq recently reflected on startup resilience amid conflict in the Middle East:
“Never let a serious crisis go to waste,” Bilal said, adding that founders must adopt a broader role. “What separates your typical founder in the Middle East from your typical founder anywhere else is they have a heavy responsibility to act like a statesman… [this includes ] making sure your team is safe and secure, your communication is explicit and regular, not just building and shipping products.” This is what Stoicism looks like in practice. Maintaining composure, prioritizing safety, and responding thoughtfully under pressure.
2. Alleviating Volatility and Getting out of your Bubble
The classic analogy in startup lore is “building an aeroplane as you’re falling from the sky”. It’s a cliche but for many founders it does capture the realities of building a business as everything seems to implode around them.
Stoicism offers tools for managing the day-to-day volatility of startup life. Zeno, considered one of the ancient Greek founders of Stoicism, wrote that “the goal of life is living in agreement with Nature.” For founders, this can be understood as aligning expectations with reality and perhaps even reacting to their ecosystem as it fluctuates. One example might be the pivot towards climate tech as more evidence came to bear that we were on our way to a climate crisis. Accepting Nature, in the words of Zeno, reduces friction and allows teams to operate with greater psychological stability.
Modern research into startup resilience echoes these insights. A recent study identified three key mechanisms: cognitive grounding, affective anchoring, and emotional regulation. Cognitive grounding— or staying oriented in the present moment—helps founders cut through noise and focus on immediate priorities. Meanwhile affective anchoring and emotional regulation enable teams to remain steady even as conditions fluctuate.
Some startups are already building systems that reflect these principles. Recital Finance in Nigeria, for example, positions itself as a control center for finance, operations, and engineering teams, helping companies navigate financial turbulence with greater clarity. By centralizing information and reducing overload, such tools help alleviate the very volatility that founders struggle to manage.
3. A Volatile World Demands Resilient Startups
In his Meditations, Marcus Aurelius observed that “we all love ourselves more than other people, but care more about their opinion than our own.” For founders, this can manifest as overvaluing hype or external validation at the expense of internal conviction over the soundness of their product. In an era of rapid trend cycles, it is easy to get pulled into bubbles that don’t align with a startup’s core mission.
Chloe Samaha’s journey illustrates this balance between conviction and adaptability. Samaha initially built a team-bonding tool inspired by remote work culture that was formed in response to the COVID crisis, but pivoted with the rise of AI to build an AI Chief of Staff. “The biggest problem companies are dealing with today is the fact that information is just fragmented across a bunch of tools, and there’s an overload of information,” Samaha explains of the tool at Bond. “That problem just gets worse and worse… and the way that they currently solve for it is by hopping on a bunch of calls.”
Her decision reflects a Stoic mindset: accept change, but act deliberately. At the same time, she underscored the importance of conviction, particularly at a time when the next app just might be cannibalized by Claude or Open AI a week later. “You really need to have conviction in what you’re doing to really be able to push through a lot of the different obstacles,” she says, while also noting the difficulty of receiving candid feedback early on.
Samaha’s broader philosophy is equally grounded: “Entrepreneurship had nothing to do with ideas. It had 100% to do with understanding the problem and then understanding who you’re selling to and building a very strong skill set in something.” Her focus on product value, brand strength, and team cohesion—and her distributed team across Belgium and the US—reflects a pragmatic, reality-aligned approach.
Ultimately, Stoicism doesn’t offer a shortcut to success. But through its ancient techniques it does offer something more durable. A way of thinking that not only helps founders remain steady and focused but also adaptable in a world defined by uncertainty.
This article is a part of our series on the confluence of startups and ethics. If you have a take on a particularly spicy moral conundrum in the world of startups, drop us a line at [email protected].