by Vishwanath Alluri, author of “The enlightened manager: a transformative approach to work and life“
One of the most common — and costly — mistakes I’ve seen in my three decades of building a tech company is for founders to start companies that don’t fundamentally align with who they are. They pursue ideas because those ideas sound exciting, because investors are excited about them, or because someone they admire has succeeded in that area. What they rarely do is ask a more fundamental question: Am I really suited to this kind of work?
There is a framework that I have relied on that eliminates the noise. This is not a personality test or a quadrant on a whiteboard. It comes from a farmer in a village in southern India, a man named Panna whose fields were always lush with grains. Panna would tell you that there are two fundamentally different types of people in business: farmers and traders. And the difference between them determines not only what type of business you should create, but also whether you will find meaning in creating it.
Two temperaments, two worlds
A farmer, committed to his heart, does what he does out of love and care. Farming is not just a job, it is a passion. The farmer cares about the long-term health of crops and animals. They sleep in the shed if that’s what the cattle need. They know the feeling of a good seed when touching it. Their work is inseparable from their way of being.
A trader is something different – not lesser, just different. The marketer is primarily interested in sales and marketing. The trader’s horizon is short term. Advertising and persuading the consumer is the name of the game. The art of persuasive imagery comes into play. A trader succeeds by moving his goods, not by handling them.
None of these qualities is better than the other. Both are necessary. But they are profoundly different in temperament, motivation and time horizon – and the entrepreneur who confuses one with the other sets himself up for years of quiet misery.
The B2B-B2C divide
This distinction fits almost perfectly with a central division in the tech world: the difference between business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C).
The B2B model has many points in common with the way a farmer works. Transactions take time to develop. Relationships are long term. Trust is earned slowly, over years of consistent performance. A successful B2B founder treats their customers the same way a farmer treats the land – with patient, sustained care, knowing that their reputation gradually grows over decades. Companies like Cisco, Oracle and IBM are classic examples. Their success depends less on flash and more on the deep, almost invisible work of infrastructure.
The B2C model operates in the merchant domain. The horizon is measured in click-through rates and customer acquisition costs. Marketing is central. Storytelling, branding and the art of persuasion are what drives it all. A B2C founder who can’t think like a marketer will struggle, no matter how good the product is.
This is why it is essential for a founder to understand their own qualities before choosing a company. An entrepreneur with a farming temperament will likely thrive in B2B, where patience and rigor are rewarded. An entrepreneur with a marketer’s instinct will likely succeed in B2C, where speed, persuasion, and consumer insight are most important. Put either in the wrong field and they’ll feel like a square peg in a round hole – tired, frustrated and wondering why success continues to elude them.
The cost of a mistake
I saw talented technologists, introverts by nature, try to create consumer applications because the consumer market seemed bigger and sexier. They hired marketing teams, invested money in ads and never really understood why it didn’t work. Their instinct led them towards in-depth work aimed at building something that lasts. They were farmers trying to run a market stall.
I’ve also seen the opposite: naturally persuasive people with a gift for communication and a keen sense of what customers want try to start B2B infrastructure companies because they read that business margins are higher. They became frustrated with the slow sales cycles, the technical due diligence, the years of leisurely relationship building before real revenue arrived. They were merchants trying to farm.
In both cases, the problem was not effort, nor intelligence, nor even strategy. It was self-knowledge. They hadn’t taken the time to ask themselves what kind of person they really were before deciding what type of business to start.
Know yourself first
This is why I believe that the starting point of any entrepreneurial journey is not a market analysis or a business plan. It’s a moment of honest introspection. Do I have the farmer’s patience for the long arc of a thing? Can I find meaning in the slow, unglamorous work of tending to something over the years? Or am I energized by the chase – the pitch, the closing, the rapid market feedback loop?
There is no right answer. There are only people who know each other and others who don’t. And those who know themselves make better choices about where to plant their flag.
A farmer who engages in agriculture can build something that will last for generations. A trader who is committed to selling can create real value and wealth in the marketplace. But a farmer who tries to become a trader – or a trader who tries to become a farmer – is going to spend years doing work that doesn’t suit him, in a field that doesn’t reward what he actually has to offer.
Beyond the frame
Of course, no one is purely a farmer or purely a trader. Most of us possess both qualities in varying proportions. And even within the same company, you need both: a farmer-type founder benefits enormously from trader-type colleagues who can communicate his vision, and vice versa. The goal of this framework is not to reduce you to just one type. It’s about helping you see, with some clarity, where your natural gravity lies – so you can build a business and a team that align with it.
It’s a simple idea, but in my experience, simple ideas are the ones that are most often overlooked. Entrepreneurs spend a huge amount of energy on pitch decks, business models, and market size. They spend relatively little to find out if their temperament is suited to the work they are about to undertake.
So, before you raise your next round, hire your next team, or pivot your next product, I would ask you this one question: Which one are you? The answer could change everything.
Vishwanath Alluri founded technology company IMISoft with a vision to create intellectual properties in India by leveraging India’s intellectual resources and bringing them to the global stage. In 1999, he founded the IMImobile communications platform. His engineering company was acquired by Ramboll, a Danish engineering conglomerate in 2008, and IMImobile was acquired by CISCO in 2021. His new book is “The enlightened manager: a transformative approach to work and life» (Harper Business, October 20, 2025). To learn more, see theenlightenedmanager.com.
