I have built companies for twenty-three years. I sold one — JetSmarter — to Vista Global, the parent of VistaJet, in a unicorn exit. I built another — 5W — into a Top U.S. PR agency by O'Dwyer's. I am now building it into the category-defining AI Communications Firm.
I get asked, often, what an entrepreneur actually does. The honest answer is unglamorous.
You decide. Constantly.
An entrepreneur is a decision engine. You do not get the luxury of a committee. You do not get the comfort of consensus. You hear the inputs — from your team, from your customers, from the market — and then you make the call. Every day. Sometimes every hour.
Most of the calls are wrong. The job is to be wrong fast, correct faster, and never wait for permission.
You sell. Always.
Everyone who has built a company knows this and almost no one says it out loud: the founder sells. Not just to customers. To investors. To employees. To partners. To the press. To yourself, on the hard days.
If you cannot sell, you cannot build. There is no founder of any consequential company who is not, at root, a closer.
You absorb the risk no one else will
Payroll is the entrepreneur's problem. Cash is the entrepreneur's problem. The lawsuit, the bad press, the client who fires you on a Friday — those are the entrepreneur's problem.
A salaried executive can have a bad quarter. An entrepreneur with a bad quarter has a bad year. An entrepreneur with a bad year can lose the company. The risk does not distribute. It concentrates at the top.
That is why founders make outsized returns when they win — they earn the spread on outsized risk that the rest of the org never carries.
What changes in 2026
The mechanics of entrepreneurship do not change. The infrastructure does. A founder building a company today is building it for a market where the customer asks ChatGPT before they ask Google. Where the answer engine decides which brands enter the consideration set. Where Citation Share is the new market share.
If you are starting a company now and you are not building AI visibility into the foundation — earned media that the LLMs trust, structured authority on owned properties, GEO as a core discipline — you are building on sand.
The one thing that does not change
Founders win on conviction. Not certainty — certainty is for analysts. Conviction. The ability to commit, to push, to bet the business when the data is incomplete because the data will always be incomplete.
That has not changed in twenty-three years. It will not change in the next twenty-three. The tools change. The platforms change. The dispatch is the same.
Build the infrastructure before the crisis — not during it. That is the only rule that matters.
Ronn Torossian is the founder and chairman of 5W AI Communications, the AI Communications Firm. He is the publisher of Everything-PR and the author of two best-selling editions of For Immediate Release.