Founder Talk
What makes a “good” founder? Is it the ability to see the future? Or perhaps coding skills that rival the most prolific darknet hacker? The start-up world is full of illustrative examples, both good and bad. From blockbuster movies to Twitter threads, we’ve all seen origin stories of college dropouts that set out to fundamentally change the way we live our lives. Many do, although some not in the way they intended (CC: Theranos, Ozy Media).
Over the course of my career, I’ve been fortunate enough to help hundreds of founders in their journey to secure venture funding and take their business from a concept in a slide deck to successful exit. Today, I’m sharing my perspective on the consistent themes across founders and entrepreneurs that tend to find success. Expanding on this, I would break down the key differentiators as follows:
1. Execution vs. visionary: Recognizing the importance of both execution and vision, and how the two interact.
2. Team: Finding exceptional people to surround yourself with and complement your skillset.
3. Intangibles: Understanding when and how to push the boundaries.
Let’s start with execution vs: visionary. We can easily picture the stereotypical Silicon Valley visionary founder building a disruptive technology that if successful will revolutionize a marketplace, but these dreams will remain unrealized without an unwavering focus on execution. On the other side of the coin, we may have an execution-focused founder who is exceptional at aligning high-level strategy with daily operations, but lacks the capacity to see the bigger picture. Realizing why both are important in a leadership team is instrumental to building a high-growth company. Equally important is recognizing how the styles are fundamentally different and that productive conflict between the two can drive innovation and strategic decision-making. Often a founder will need to look outwards to find that balance, which leads us to the next theme.
The importance of building a great team is not a novel concept for a start-up, but how is it actually done? I think of a great founder akin to a successful head coach or general manager in sports. Their primary job is to find the best and brightest people to surround them and help drive success. Nick Saban is one of the best head coaches in football history, and one of the core reasons is because he consistently has the best assistant coaches in the country. Evidence of this is the fact that many former head coaches willingly join Saban’s staff as an assistant knowing the likelihood of success is high. This creates a self-fulfilling prophecy of talent acquisition. If you can attract a diversely experienced team consisting of the best and brightest, the likelihood of enterprise success dramatically increases. Going back to the first theme, a visionary founder with the “head coach” mentality will realize they need a more execution-focused partner to balance them out and will empower them to freely exercise their strengths. A big part of this is being OK with not being the smartest person in the room and understanding how to create an environment where autonomy is not just a buzzword.
Finally, some leadership intangibles that are hard to replace — what I like to think of as the “it” factor. Social media makes it easy to fall into the mindset that being successful requires you to wake up at 3:47am, be hard-charging, and always moving at 300 miles per hour. While it is certainly true that early stage, high-growth companies require a scrappy attitude, knowing when to throw your weight around and expend that human capital is a much more sustainable long-term success strategy. Constantly extending the company and pushing everyone to the brink is taxing on all constituencies: management, employees, investors and advisors. Negotiations in the lead-up to closing unicorn venture financing are more reasonable times for a founder to impress urgency upon a situation, as compared to a slide deck for a weekly internal meeting. The severe cases like Elizabeth Holmes and Carlos Watson are examples of what it can look like when hard-charging founders relentlessly pursue success at any cost and forget where the line is (or never knew where it was in the first place). Similarly, founders that cultivate a culture of open communication will be better equipped to have a true understanding of how the company is doing. Two of the most successful leaders that many may have never heard of — Bill Knudsen and Henry Kaiser (plug to read “Freedom’s Forge”) — had wildly different styles, yet both understood a culture that refuses to confront failure will not end well. If employees are too afraid to tell their superiors when things are awry, how can you fix it?
