The Magic Of The Founder-Problem Fit 🦄
I’m not a founder, and I seriously doubt if I will ever be one….But I seem to gravitate to working for founders…🙂…or should I rather say with.
Here are a few thoughts on the magic of the founder-problem fit…
Give society what it wants but does not yet know how to get. At scale.
~ Naval
Most of us just accept the status quo because that’s the way it has been and always will be. However, a founder recognises what society, technologies or industries need. They reject the status quo and create disruption. A founder has a vision of how things aught to be, and set out to turn that vision into a reality.
The change a founder wants to bring about often stems from personal frustration working in a certain field or technology…or innovation might stem from seeing someone suffer and wanting to alleviate hardship…the list of origins can go on…
From the founder’s frustration grows identification of the problem…which in turn leads to the founding inspiration. Starting a company for the sake of starting a company is not sustainable due to the fact that it lacks deep personal and authentic conviction.
Founders are outliers…because their view on matters take them there. Just as starting a company for the sake of starting a company is not a good idea…trying to be an outlier for the sake of being one will not suffice.
The founder’s conviction needs to stem from a deep and authentic persuasion of what the problem is, this in turn propels a founder to take action.
For most, disruption leads to anxiety, but founders see an opportunity in the disruption.
With time being the ultimate currency and being finite, good founders have the ability to seek out the right people and processes and create technology which are aligned with the change they want to bring to the world.
Roelof Botha relates how Peter Thiel has this immense ability to change his mind. If Peter Thiel feels he made a wrong decision, or circumstances changed…he had no apprehension to adjust.
Hubris is often a reason for founders failing…there needs to be a healthy sense of apprehension; a balanced tension between what if we fail and what if we are successful. A founder should have a sense of what failure might look like, but also what success might look like.
A vision is crafted and honed over time…an initial idea can be in the right general direction. But often over time the idea needs to change to some extent, distilled to its purest form.
And in this founders can commit sins of commission and sins of omission…
I have seen founders who are serial procrastinators in decision making…out of fear of failure. By not acting due to fear, failure is inevitable. These are sins of omission, where an opportunity is missed which should have been seized.
Then there are the sins of commission, founders who make the wrong decision on something, and through escalation of commitment stick to a bad decision.
Finally…there is the part you cannot control…call it what you like…serendipity perhaps?
…these are those moments when opportunities, insights or maybe people are discovered by chance which are hugely beneficial to the startup.
﹡ This article was inspired by an interview with Roelof Botha.
I’m currently the Chief Evangelist @ HumanFirst. I explore and write about all things at the intersection of AI and language; ranging from LLMs, Chatbots, Voicebots, Development Frameworks, Data-Centric latent spaces and more.
