The solo founder

Ryan Gilbert
Aug 23, 2017 · 2 min read

Last week I wrote Knowing your bus number and I shared my thoughts on the project management reference to the “number of team members whose loss would place a project in jeopardy”. Thanks for all the feedback.

Many asked how the bus number applies to a solo founder of a start-up. Companies lead by solo founders frequently have low bus numbers, often 1.

Being a founder, even with co-founders, is a high pressure and lonely role.

President Theodore Roosevelt’s Man in the Arena is notable part of a speech titled Citizenship in a Republic that he delivered at the Sorbonne in Paris, France on April 23, 1910. It’s a prescient description of the challenges of a start-up founder. Just imagine what the president would say if he witnessed today’s start-up culture.

It is not the critic who counts;
not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles,
or where the doer of deeds could have done them better.
The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena,
whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood;
who strives valiantly; who errs,
who comes short again and again,
because there is no effort without error and shortcoming;
but who does actually strive to do the deeds;
who knows great enthusiasms,
the great devotions;
who spends himself in a worthy cause;
who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement,
and who at the worst,
if he fails,
at least fails while daring greatly,
so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

Successful solo founders have uncanny situational awareness. This is the very unique strength that Roosevelt described: striving “valiantly”, knowing “great enthusiasms” and “great devotions”, while recognizing the challenges ahead and appreciating what needs to be done to pursue start-up dreams and understanding that failure is as likely as triumph.

Propel Venture Partners backs a number of brave solo founders and will hopefully partner with many more in the future. They’re communicators, mentors, team builders, designers and 10x engineers.

They believe they can do it all (and probably can) but most importantly they demonstrate unique situational awareness, allowing them to focus on increasing their bus numbers and building strong teams around them so that their places will “never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat”.

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Ryan Gilbert

Written by

Venture Capital, FinTech and a few interesting things in between. Partner @PropelVC and Founder/Exec Chair @SmartBizLoans

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