This week on Random Access Memories, I'm looking back at my conversation with David Forman, CEO and co-founder of Mastermind.

David was selling gift wrap door to door at eight, selling his GameCube games on eBay at ten, flipping broken laptops at fifteen and building businesses before most people had even finished school.

He's pretty much the definition of a lifelong entrepreneur.

Today he runs Mastermind, a bootstrapped certification body auditing some of the biggest technology companies in the world.

But behind the success is a much less glamorous story. A marriage that fell apart, years spent travelling more than 200 nights annually, the constant uncertainty of payroll and the reality that sometimes building a business means putting everything else at risk.

We discussed why entrepreneurship has become so romanticised, why taking VC money isn't necessarily success, the value of being exceptionally good at one thing and what failure teaches us about the people around us.

Everyone wants to be a founder. Far fewer understand what they're signing up for.

Let's get into it →

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David was selling thousands of dollars of gift wrap before he was a teenager and building businesses throughout school. He's clearly someone who naturally enjoys selling, building and taking risks. But we discussed how social media has turned entrepreneurship into something everyone is apparently supposed to aspire to. Forget learning your craft, developing expertise or working your way through an organisation. Just start a company and become CEO.

We've somehow made having a boss look like failure and having a startup look like success, even when the startup makes absolutely no money.

David bootstrapped Mastermind, partly using money he'd made trading GameStop shares in 2021. He's deliberately avoided venture capital because he doesn't want investors dictating how he runs his company. He wants to pay people well, remain specialised and build something sustainable rather than chase growth at any cost. Meanwhile, cybersecurity founders announce funding rounds like they've just won the Champions League.

Investment isn't revenue. Valuation isn't profit. And giving away ownership of your company isn't automatically something worth celebrating.

Mastermind focuses exclusively on ISO certification audits. No endless expansion into every compliance framework, no trying to make every employee capable of delivering twenty different services. Just getting exceptionally good at one thing. That specialisation has helped Mastermind win work with organisations including Microsoft and Google. Yet we're constantly told that successful businesses need to diversify, expand their addressable market and create more revenue streams.

Sometimes the smartest growth strategy is having the discipline to say no to almost everything.

David described losing a customer that represented more than 20% of Mastermind's annual revenue, almost without warning. Suddenly the conversation wasn't about growth, valuation or exciting new opportunities. It was about whether they could afford salary increases, maintain their hiring plans and protect payroll. That's the side of entrepreneurship LinkedIn rarely celebrates. Employees see their salaries arrive every month. Founders are often the ones worrying about whether there's enough money to make that happen.

It's easy to glorify being your own boss until you realise you're responsible for everybody else's mortgage too.

David spent part of his early career travelling more than 200 nights a year. He loved the professional opportunities, but the impact on his personal life was devastating. His marriage to his high-school sweetheart ended after they'd been together for around a decade. When I asked about it, he admitted he'd thrown himself back into travelling partly to avoid confronting what had happened. He's since remarried, built a family with Tori and welcomed their son Cooper.

We celebrate people who sacrifice everything for their careers, then act surprised when they eventually discover what they've lost.

I think we've completely lost the plot when it comes to entrepreneurship.

Everyone wants to be a founder.

Everyone wants to be a CEO.

Everyone wants to raise $20 million, announce it on LinkedIn and tell the world they're disrupting an industry.

But apparently nobody wants to spend ten years actually becoming good at something first.

We've turned entrepreneurship into a status symbol rather than a way of building a business.

David's story is interesting because he's been doing this since he was a child. Selling gift wrap, flipping laptops, building tutoring companies, trading gift cards. He genuinely enjoys the process of finding something valuable and figuring out how to sell it.

It wasn't about announcing himself as a visionary.

He just liked building things.

Compare that with today's obsession with becoming a founder before you've learnt anything worth founding a company around.

We tell people to quit their jobs, follow their passions, take enormous risks and never settle for working for somebody else.

As though having a stable job, developing expertise and earning a good living is somehow embarrassing.

It's ridiculous.

And then there's the money.

We've created an industry where raising venture capital is treated as a greater achievement than actually generating revenue.

A founder raises $30 million and gets celebrated.

Another builds a profitable $5 million business without external funding and barely gets noticed.

Since when did convincing investors to give you money become more impressive than convincing customers to pay you?

David's approach at Mastermind is almost deliberately unfashionable.

He doesn't want outside investors. He doesn't want to expand into every possible service. He doesn't want to sacrifice employee compensation to maximise margins.

He wants to be exceptionally good at something, pay his people properly and retain control over the business he's building.

That sounds like a pretty sensible definition of success to me.

But the part of our conversation that really challenged the entrepreneurial fantasy was when David described losing a customer representing more than 20% of revenue.

Imagine waking up knowing that one commercial decision could affect your employees' salaries, hiring plans and livelihoods.

No motivational LinkedIn post fixes that.

No founder mindset makes the money magically appear.

And nobody's celebrating your resilience when you're lying awake worrying about payroll.

I'm not suggesting people shouldn't start businesses. Quite the opposite. I love people who build things, take risks and challenge established industries.

But we need to stop pretending entrepreneurship is automatically better than employment.

There's nothing wrong with being an exceptional engineer, consultant, salesperson or security leader who has absolutely no interest in running a company.

And there's certainly nothing wrong with wanting a life outside work.

David has built something impressive, but his story also demonstrates that success comes with costs that rarely make it into the founder announcement.

Maybe we should stop asking founders how much they've raised and start asking what building their business has actually cost them.

One of the things I love about doing this podcast is that occasionally a conversation goes somewhere I really wasn't expecting.

I've known David for years, but I'd never properly understood what he'd been through personally.

He married his high-school sweetheart after they'd spent roughly ten years together, only for the marriage to end while he was still in his early twenties.

At the same time, he was building his career and spending more than 200 nights a year travelling. When things fell apart, his response was to ask his boss to send him away even more. Work became a distraction from everything he didn't want to deal with.

What struck me was how he described meeting Tori, who already knew his story and accepted him without judgement. They're now married with a young son, Cooper.

It made me think about Hayley and the sacrifices that come with my own career.

I spend a lot of time travelling, working and trying to build things. I like to think much of that is for my family, but I'm also conscious that the people supporting those ambitions are making sacrifices of their own.

It's easy to talk about the risks entrepreneurs take. The money, the reputation, the career opportunities. We rarely talk about the risks their partners and families take alongside them, sometimes without ever choosing that career themselves.

Towards the end of our conversation, I asked David what advice he'd give Cooper if he wanted to start a business one day.

His answer was wonderfully simple.

Be really, really good at something.

I think about what I'd want Ollie and Izzy to learn from watching me. I hope they develop ambition, curiosity and the confidence to try difficult things. But I also hope they understand that being successful professionally doesn't automatically make you successful as a person.

I want them to see someone who works hard, but who also makes time for the people who matter. Someone who takes risks without assuming everyone else should have to pay the price.

Because ultimately, the people who love us aren't investing in our valuation, our job title or our next business.

They're investing in us. And we shouldn't make them regret it.