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“Climate does one half, and temperament the rest.”
Washington Irving
I bought my first plant this week. Since I know I won’t mist leaves or test soil, I picked the one that stores its own water.
For 30 years I went without a houseplant. When I stopped living as a digital nomad, I wanted some green around me. It turned out I could have a plant without the upkeep.
A cactus asks for almost nothing.
The businesses we admire as founders often ask for far more than we have the temperament to give. The venture-backed startup with a board, an office and a 400-person payroll looks like winning. Running one means managing headcount, burning runway and raising the next round before the money runs out.
Wanting a tropical monstera and doing what one needs are two different things.
Each of these plants maps to a kind of business. Match your temperament to one.
The greenhouse plant looks healthiest of all, as long as somebody pays for the heat.
It’s last on the list.
1) Cactus. Stores rain in a ribbed stem, opens its pores at night and turned its leaves into spines.
Pieter Levels runs Nomad List and Remote OK by himself. Zero employees, zero funding.
He crossed $1 million a year running both apps on a single server.
Markus Frind built Plenty of Fish alone. In 2008 he was running it at roughly $10 million a year in profit on about 10 hours a week.
Timo, 24, keeps ChatGPT on WhatsApp running for over 300,000 users on under 10 minutes of work a day.
A business that cheap to run keeps earning through the weeks you give it almost nothing.
Pick a cactus if you want a business that asks for little of your week.
2) Moss. It takes water straight off its surface and goes brown the moment the damp stops.
Patrick McKenzie sold his judgment as a software consultant and took his rate from $100 an hour to $30,000 a week.
April Dunford charges $50,000 for a startup positioning workshop and lists the price on her site.
Their fees stop the week they do.
Choose moss if you’d rather be paid for your judgment than build something that sells without you.
3) Bonsai. A tree that would grow full size in open ground, kept small by root pruning and a shallow pot.
Craigslist could sell banner ads and turns them down. Its CEO Jim Buckmaster has said the company has little interest in maximizing profit.
It still earned about $1 billion in 2018 with around 50 employees.
Shaun Hill’s Hill Farmstead in Vermont topped RateBeer’s ranking of the world’s breweries three years running. Hill caps it around 4,000 barrels a year and pulled back distribution until buyers had to drive to the farm. “I’m not moving to an industrial park,” he said.
Staying this size is a decision that gets made again each time an offer arrives.
Grow a bonsai if you’d turn away paying customers to keep the business the size you like.
4) Understory plant. The rainforest understory gets around 5 to 10% of full sunlight, so the plants down there stopped competing for height and grew wider leaves.
Plausible Analytics sells website analytics that keep visitors anonymous, a promise Google can’t make while its ads run on visitor data.
It reached $3.1 million a year by late 2024 with a team of 10.
Andy Yen and two colleagues at CERN launched Proton Mail in 2014 as email that Proton itself can’t read, while Gmail scanned inboxes for ad targeting. “We’re serving users and not advertisers,” Yen said.
Pick it if you’d rather sell what a giant can’t offer than race it for the same customers.
5) Vine. It skips building a trunk and climbs whatever’s standing, so it reaches light faster than it could on its own.
Thomas Frank sells Notion templates. He built $2.1 million of sales in about two years.
Notion supplies the software and the audience.
LittleThings, a website of stories and videos for women, grew to 50 million monthly readers by publishing into the Facebook feed. Facebook rewrote the feed in 2018, most of that traffic disappeared and the company closed seven weeks later.
Build on someone else’s platform and its owner sets your terms.
Grow a vine if you’d trade control for a faster start.
6) Carnivorous plant. It grows in bogs where the soil holds almost no nitrogen. Rather than fight for better ground, it grew a second way to eat and takes nitrogen from insects.
Dan Ni’s TLDR newsletters go out free to more than 8 million readers. The money comes from advertisers buying up to three slots a day.
Kenneth Lin started Credit Karma in 2007 to give people their credit scores for free. Lenders pay it a referral fee when a member takes their card or loan. It passed $1 billion in revenue in 2019.
Intuit bought it for $7.1 billion a year later.
Go carnivorous if you’re fine giving the product away and answering to whoever pays to reach your users.
7) Bamboo. It spends years building a rhizome network underground before anything dramatic happens above it.
Sam Altman co-founded OpenAI in 2015 as a research lab. It sold its first product, an API for its language models, five years later.
Stéphane Bancel took over Moderna in 2011, when it was a research company with nothing approved to sell.
The COVID vaccine it got authorized in December 2020 was its first.
Bamboo suits you if you can work for years before there’s anything to sell.
8) Oak. Adds a ring each year, for centuries.
Sridhar Vembu co-founded Zoho in 1996 and grew it on profits alone. It passed a million paying organizations in 2026.
Jim Goodnight founded SAS in 1976 and has run it ever since.
Revenue grew to $3.2 billion by 2022 and the company is still private.
An oak suits you if you want to run one company for decades.
9) Perennial. The top growth dies off each winter. The roots wait underground and regrow it each spring.
Spirit Halloween opens stores in empty retail space in early August, hires tens of thousands of seasonal staff and strips them out two or three days after Halloween. Scouting for next year’s locations starts on November 1.
Calendar Club opens about 200 pop-up stores across the UK and Ireland each September and clears them out by mid-January.
A small permanent staff in Exeter stays on while the store operators and Christmas part-timers get hired fresh each season.
Good for you if you’d rather work flat out for a few months and plan through the rest.
10) Farm crop. More harvest takes more land, more seed, more water and more hands.
Chipotle’s filing lays it out:
- 2003: 298 restaurants, $315.5 million
- 2004: 401 restaurants, $470.7 million
Nick Huber and a co-founder started Storage Squad at Cornell in 2011, hauling students’ belongings into storage over the summer. They built it past $2 million in revenue before selling in 2021.
One founder left Apple and Amazon to start a freight company. It grew fast, with drivers hired left and right and trucks added weekly. Before long he was working 60 hours a week to run it.
Plant a farm crop if you’d rather know what next year’s growth costs than hope for a breakout.
11) Greenhouse plant. It looks healthy right until somebody stops paying for the heat.
Casper’s investors valued it at $1.1 billion in 2019. Durational Capital bought it two years later for about a quarter of that.
SoftBank valued WeWork at $47 billion in January 2019. Its IPO filing that August showed it losing more than it brought in.
WeWork filed for Chapter 11 in 2023.
A greenhouse plant works if you’re comfortable raising round after round until the company pays for itself.
Since I won’t mist a leaf, I own a cactus.
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Which business (or plant) suits your temperament?
