The Role of a Startup Founder: One Thing They Don’t Teach You in Business School

One thing they don’t teach you at business school: what exactly is a startup founder’s job?

My answer is three-fold. Develop the big vision. Hire the team to execute the vision. Fundraise to finance it all.

Developing the Big Vision

At least, that’s what they should be doing – in general. But unlike corporate CEOs, the founder needs to not only set the vision but also develop it. They don't have boards and headquarters to provide them with a strategy.

They don’t have a financial cushion of six-figure bonuses to fall back onto. And they don’t have anyone else to blame but themselves for their failure to reach yearly targets.

In an ideal world, you develop a high-level performance spec and let your team create solutions.

As the founder, you are the Chief Learning Officer, and with no board yet, you’re in charge of using instinct, knowledge of your industry, and day-to-day interactions with customers, partners, and experts to create and scale your vision.

When founders have highly capable C-level teams, they drive the learning curve of the business.

Before getting to this point, however, you often need to design solutions yourself. You need to be your own team as well as your own boss. You give people a principal design of something you learned in the past or present, and let them build systems and products based on the vision.

However, designing the solutions yourself often prevents you from spending enough time learning about the customer, which is ultimately what you as the founder should be most proficient in. Hence, the company's long-term learning curve suffers.

It worsens only when your team is too inexperienced to understand the modeled design. The founder needs to do a certain amount of micro designing, pulling their sleeves up high and digging in the dirt, instead of merely flying in the clouds, as more inexperienced founders do.

Obviously, no founder will ever be able to micro-design everything. At some point, you have to close down the Excel file and get into the real world. To speak plainly, there comes a point when you have to stop “dreaming” and start “doing.”

But as the founder, you can — and oftentimes have to — create key elements of the business in detail before anyone else. This brings me to the second job of the founder after developing a vision: hiring.

Hiring a Good Team

This is not as easy as it sounds. It’s very hard to hire a good team, engage them, and design an organizational structure that works based on their personalities and the task at hand.

But the instances in which you realize you’re stretching yourself too thin will tell you, as the founder, a lot about your teams' seniority gaps. You will hire as a result of identifying these gaps.

There’s a big danger here, though. There are many founders who don’t think of micro design, they just “move fast and break things” before they run out of money. Tested and true, they almost invariably do.

On the other hand, there are founders who become caught up in the web of micro design and think too much, failing to learn or let others learn, impeding the company's learning curve. The only way out of either path is to bring super-capable people on board.

Hire for attitude and skill, especially when it comes to C-level recruitment. This is where founders should spend a disproportional amount of their time, more than business school would tell you. My decades of experience as a CEO show that it's worth it.

They say a minute spent on planning saves 12 minutes of execution. I'm unsure about that.

But I think one minute spent on recruiting might save 50 or 100 minutes of deep work in the future when you have to do a lot of the work yourself that could have been done by a smart C-level executive.

But when you have that — a vision and a world-class team at your disposal — you finally get the time, attention, and headspace to focus on one thing you can’t delegate as the founder: fundraising.

Fundraising

No matter what they tell you, you can’t delegate fundraising. To me, fundraising always feels like going into sparring: it's necessary for growth, but it's painful. You get hit.

By structure, fundraising involves a lot of Nos. To raise a round, you need to speak to 40–100 VCs and get only two Yeses. The rest will be Nos.

When choosing a partner for the next several years — a company to invest in and support or an executive to hire and empower — you must be super-picky. So, it only works when you’re building a funnel.

But once you’re done with fundraising, you’re back to square one. Suddenly, you’re running a different company with different obligations. You’ll have to reinvent the vision. You’ll have to hire to develop that vision. And yes, you’ll finally have to fundraise again. That’s the founder’s life.

Max Faldin

Founder and CEO of Silverbird

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/faldin/

Website: www.silverbird.com

Also published here