Shaping the Foundation: Company Building and the Fundamentals of Early Stage Startups (Chas Pulido, Liquid 2 Ventures and Y Combinator)
I spoke with Chas Pulido, a serial healthcare entrepreneur, a Y Combinator founder, entrepreneur in residence at Liquid 2 Ventures (founded by NFL Hall of Fame quarterback, Joe Montana), and adviser to top startups across the healthcare industry, including Sympto Health and Getlabs. Chas has been a founder/operator, advisor, and investor, seeing the full gamut of the entrepreneurship and venture landscapes.
Chas and I discussed team building, sales, networks, and more.
Build fast. Ultimately, no ideation or thought experiments can beat data. The sunk cost bias is difficult to overcome, but doing so is a must in finding the proper product market fit and building something your users and the ecosystem truly need and want. So experiment quickly in an evidence driven and intentional manner.
In the first 10 hires, culture is number one. Frequently, founders are too fixated on pedigree and industry experience, but especially in the early stages of hiring, culture fit is priority. The primary questions to ask yourself in addition to the person’s knowledge of the space and raw ability, are whether you would be able to establish a synergistic partnership for the next 5, 10, or more years.
The first 10 hires lay the foundation of the team. These initial hires intentionally and even unintentionally define the values, mission, tone, and chemistry on which you build your future team, which in turn will be the source of your company’s value creation. As such, it is incredibly crucial to ensure mission alignment: these hires should be evangelists of the work you share and the platform you are building together. People work best and happiest when they are bought into a unified vision. To get there, the founders must first sell others on this vision.
The first sales are the hardest. Fundamentally, startups are building something that meets unmet, under-serviced, or even unrealized needs. While there are competitors and analogous products, startups are carving out their own niches of varying sizes in the consumer market. It is relatively easy to sell a well accepted product with existing widespread brand recognition, but it is much harder to have sold this same product in its earliest stages. In startup sales, going from 0 to 1 is much different and much harder than going from 1 to 100. Consequently, it is especially crucial to get the first several steps right as they matter exponentially more than the next hundred.
Not all founders are the best sales people, and it is a skill acquired over time and trial and error. But founders are the jack of all trades and fill all roles until they find someone better. And in order to find the top talent for sales roles or any others, founders must sell their vision and their company to prospective team members.
The best relationships are never transactional. Always approach each interaction, each connection in a genuine manner. The most valuable relationships are also the least transactional both in their inception and their progression. Get to know people for who they are: their goals, their dreams, their unique stories, rather than their posited value add. Add value to people where you can even before you feel they have done so for you. Founder communities of founders helping founders are incredible — you learn the most from the war stories of other founders that have experienced similar challenges in the rewarding yet lonely entrepreneurial journey.
