The Animal Spirit

A colleague I respected once told me he cuts every job candidate who mentions wanting to start a business someday. "They have no place here."

He wasn't being cruel. He was being honest. And that honesty taught me more than any performance review.

I swallowed it. Stopped mentioning side projects around him. Went careful with who I told about the ideas that kept me up at night. We still got along. Still talked football. But I'd learned to hide a part of myself at work.

That part — I call it the animal spirit. Not ambition. Not hustle. Something more primal than that. This compulsion to see problems and build solutions. To take ownership. To push for better even when nobody asked.

I tried to channel it inside companies. Intrapreneurship, they call it. Thinking like an owner while collecting a paycheck.

At Sonae, the big corp, I'd bring ideas to my manager. New projects, improvements, things I genuinely believed would move the needle. His reply was always the same: "Thanks, that's great. I'll take it to upper management." Then complete radio silence. The roadmap that came back looked nothing like what we'd discussed.

At Knok, a startup, I finally got real degrees of freedom. Led a squad. Pushed my ideas through. And it worked — best outcomes, happiest team, people from other squads asking to join ours.

So the animal spirit wasn't the problem. The cage was.

I thought startups would be different. They weren't.

Two startups hired me to lead. Both had founders with god complexes who wanted people to nod along, not actually think. I'm fine executing someone else's vision — founders should own the vision. But when the vision isn't working and you refuse to listen to your team, that's not leadership. That's ego on autopilot.

Both pushed their certainties until the money ran out. Then they laid off the people who'd been trying to course-correct.

Those last two hurt the most. Not the job loss. The realization that even in "entrepreneurial" environments, the animal spirit was unwelcome. Corporate or startup — systems want executors, not owners.

That's when it clicked. I don't need to find a place that tolerates this thing inside me. I need to stop looking for permission to use it.

The animal spirit is both. It's primal — something I can't switch off. And it's a conscious choice. I reached a point where I was done suppressing it. Done going cautious. Done nodding along.

Now I build my own thing. The friction didn't disappear. It just became mine. The uncertainty, the fear, the sleepless nights — all still here. But for the first time, the animal spirit isn't fighting against the walls of someone else's cage.

It's running free.

Keep building. -Ochoa