Modern Founder

In discussing how we at Company Ventures want to serve the hundreds of founders we work with, we’ve been reflecting on what our seven years of operating has taught us about what they really want and need. What’s become clear is that today’s founder is not 2014’s, it’s actually not even 2020’s. In prior years it was often drilled into founders’ heads to maintain a maniacal focus on their business alone, setting aside other interests and causes; to disregard stakeholders like local government if needed; to ignore the “externalities” of their environmental footprint; to tolerate homogenous, hard-charging cultures as long as they were maintaining pace against revenue and growth milestones; to “move fast and break things”; and so on.

The most visionary founders we speak with today have no interest in operating by this playbook. They deliberately seek out support to ensure they avoid this myopic, growth-at-all-costs means of operating, while still building thriving businesses. Borrowing a page from Ryan Dawidjan’s modern friends, we’ve been batting around the term “modern founders” and think it works well in defining the next generation of groundbreakers.

More specifically, and among other things, modern founders are:

• Seeking out coaching and leadership training not only because they want to be the best executives they can, but because they recognize their responsibility to craft a healthy, inclusive work culture and enable thriving careers for their employees.
• Familiarizing themselves with the ethical quandaries embedded in data storage and monetization, algorithmic bias, attention-based monetization strategies, and the like.
• Committing to social and environmental objectives as a business practice, not a marketing opportunity.
• Credentialing themselves through thought leadership on an ever-expanding array of platforms (Twitter, LinkedIn, podcasts, Substack, Clubhouse, etc.)
• Participating in trusted networks where “how to” meets lived experience for rich, valuable perspective.
• Investing laterally into their peers’ businesses. Developments like scout programs, syndicates/SPVs, and rolling funds have made this immensely doable, and optimizes the value of one’s network with reasonably low effort.
• Educating themselves on emerging new paradigms — most notably crypto — either as technologies/strategies their company can adopt, or as investment opportunities they can personally capitalize on.

In short, modern founders seek to maximize their potential across a range of objectives, not just their company’s valuation. And it is our belief that this broadened perspective will in fact enhance their likelihood of success. If coining the term “modern friends” means acknowledging how our comfort with and interest in digital engagement has created a new type of friendship, “modern founder” means acknowledging that founders’ objectives for how they get value for their time and effort in 2021 begs a new approach to supporting them on their journey. For this reason we have developed a “Modern Founder Ethos” that guides how we serve our founders.

This ethos is predicated on delivering on the promise of Time, Upside, and Purpose — the core objectives of the Modern Founder, distilled.

Time

• On the one hand, founders crave ample time and space to operate without pressure, and on the other hand they crave speed to find the answers to burning questions fastest. Company Ventures is deliberately structured to deliver on both;

Upside

• By embedding a diverse array of modern founders (in background and in industry) in a curated community of high achieving peers, and facilitating deep and meaningful connections therein, we provide founders a key mechanism by which they can achieve maximum upside from their career: collective brilliance. The pace of technology innovation surpasses the capacity of any one person to absorb and distill it all. But a community can keep pace.

Purpose

• Founders are more than chief executives of companies. They are humans concerned with the health of the planet; citizens alarmed by the toxicity of political discourse; technologists considering the ethical usage of algorithms; leaders responsible for creating a culture of belonging and accelerated opportunity for talented people; people looking to enjoy and take pride in their work; members of families looking to stabilize and/or improve their financial position via their career but also their personal investments. We’ve created a perspective and programming that services the whole founder.

It should be noted that key, non-founder employees at early stage startups and established companies alike — “operators” — are being just as thoughtful about how they are trying to maximize their potential. There is no shortage of operators who are qualified to become founders, but whose calculus of how best to achieve maximum velocity, upside, and purpose in their careers leads them to conclude that a non-founder role is best. One can be entrepreneurial with their energies without starting a company. Our model at Company Ventures is built to provide value to all of the employees of the company, not just the founder. We find modern founders are grateful to have support in the full development of their employees, too, as it aids their companies’ appeal, retention, and performance.

If this ethos sounds appealing, consider applying for our next Grand Central Tech cohort. We are now accepting applications and we’re eager to meet like-minded Modern Founders to join our community!