EF Founder stories #1
Having worked at Entrepreneur First for almost a year now, I recently reflected on how much our team has grown and how the companies we work with have developed and matured in the space of just one short year.
I am privileged to work with talented founders at the very beginning of their journey — before ideation really begins and before they have co-founders. Whilst there is a tendency to obsess over founder-idea fit; founder-market fit; product-market fit… it is hard to pin down the most important thing: what makes a co-founding pair really work. How do you go about finding someone whose appetite for risk, whose ambitions and whose bar is set as high as yours?
In a series of fortnightly posts, founders from the EF portfolio will talk about starting a company and their founder fit. This week, I spoke to Toby Mather, CEO of Lingumi, who alongside his co-founder Adit, has developed a pre-school English language learning programme to help children as young as two to learn English. Before co-founding Lingumi, he studied Modern Languages at Oxford and worked as an English teacher in Russia.
Toby Mather, Lingumi, EF5
“Adit and I met during interviews for EF, about 9 months before we started. We didn’t stay in touch at that point, but we saw each other again during further application rounds, and eventually started speaking about ideas over Skype a couple of months before EF kicked off.
I didn’t really think I liked Adit the first couple of times we met! He’s a big, loud personality, and I thought he was all talk no action. But, the best way to test a co-founder relationship is to try building something, because that’s where you find out what sort of person they really are.
That’s exactly what we did: we went through a couple of prototypes of the idea that became Lingumi before the EF programme even started. We knew we had to get something out quickly, so we first made a powerpoint that replicated our software, and tested that with the family of a 2 year old. The user experience was far too complex so we iterated and re-built, this time writing some crappy javascript. That worked better, and we saw that our idea could work, so we kept going. We’re one of the teams that stayed together from day 1 — but this isn’t the norm, so don’t be afraid of splitting up quickly, you will find someone else to work with.
Adit turned out to be a great problem solver and really hard working: in two months from January to Demo Day, he released 35 new versions of our beta app. The key thing with a co-founder relationship is understanding your own strengths and weaknesses, and those of your co-founder. If you can find someone with a compatible, but not similar skill-set, that’s a great start. Over the next 6 months you’ll need to develop an idea, kill it if it’s crap, build a prototype, find people to test it, get money out of them (good luck), improve on the prototype, design a technically complex fuller product, build a great UX, start marketing it, sell more of it, speak to your customers, incorporate a business, pay salaries, do accounts, build websites, design logos (*not* now). If you can do all of those things, you’re superwoman.
But you are not superwoman.
You need to find someone who can do as many of those as possible, and, ideally, can do the ones you can’t. Better, find someone who can do some of them, but is totally happy to jump in and learn loads of the others.
Working as closely as you do with your co-founder will cause conflict. That is true of every business or personal relationship. Don’t be afraid of it, and don’t suppress it. The best thing you can do is deal with the conflict soon. If needed, formalise this: do a mini review period each week, where you discuss what you think about how your co-founder works, any issues you have with their style or personality, and ask if there’s anything they’d like to see you do differently. Probably start with this.
People are naturally proud, and it’s easy to forget that people look at things in very different ways, bring different experiences to the table, and may be better or less good at dealing with problems or successes. Drop the pride, and be incredibly transparent (gently) about each other. If you want them to arrive earlier, discuss that. If you want them to stay later, discuss that. My biggest bit of advice would be to set yourself clear, achievable targets (“let’s test a prototype with a real person on Friday morning”) and then reach that goal no matter what. If they let the side down, it may be a sign you shouldn’t be working together.”
Check out Lingumi and what they are doing here and if you are interested in working for an early stage startup with a talented team in a fast paced environment, they’re hiring.
