The Importance of Ongoing Education to Grow Your Startup
By Ivonna Dumanyan, CEO & Cofounder, Fathom AI
In 2013, myself and future cofounder Gabrielle Levac found ourselves sidelined by sports-related injuries that could have been prevented. With backgrounds in biomechanics and machine learning, we decided to solve this problem as Fathom AI, a startup that aims to reduce exercise-related injuries through fitness personalization, using bio-data and wearables.
We were about to launch an app for the first time while still pursuing our collegiate degrees. We needed educational support and a community to overcome the hurdles that so many first-time founders face getting started.
From prototyping to fundraising, launching, and scaling, there’s always something to learn. The startup journey is never-ending and it doesn’t get any easier after completing the fundraising process. Though my co-founder and I knew we didn’t have all the skills to successfully operate our startup back then — we were confident in our ability to develop those skills, as long as we sought out the right educational support and network.
If you’re a first-time founder in a similar situation, here are a few tips to seek out the right educational support to grow your startup based on my experience:
Find the Right Partners
To help build Fathom AI, we joined American Underground, a Google for Startups tech hub partner, which gave us exposure to our local, vast entrepreneurial community in Durham. Through this community, we were selected for the Blackbox accelerator, a Google for Startups partner program at the time, where we learned the skills we needed to secure our first round of venture capital.
The number one most valuable network that we’ve been able to build has been through Fathom AI’s investors. From the very beginning, we relied on two fundamental principles when selecting investors to work with:
- Work with people of high integrity and character
- Learn from experts through transferrable frameworks, processes, and models.
By using these principles, we found investors with mission-driven theses, who could add value and contribute knowledge to our team and built healthy, supportive, and synergetic relationships with their founders. Spero Ventures was one such investor that actively invests in training, workshops, and events to improve their founder’s ability to lead. Spero, hosts an annual Product Leader Summit where we’ve met and learned best practices from leaders at Netflix, Hubspot, Intercom, and others that have helped us test product-market fit, lead data-driven engagement optimization processes and focus on problems for our stage (i.e. not get distracted). I can say with certainty that our experience at Spero Venture’s Product Leader Summit has fundamentally changed our ability to lead Fathom.
We now have a Rolodex (yes, those still exist) of nearly 1,000 founders and leaders, with detailed notes of what they can help with — everything from strategic help to niche-focused advice. By expanding the number of highly credible people you associate with, you increase your odds and chances of identifying gaps in your own knowledge. Because let’s face it, it’s hard to think 5 steps ahead when you’re heading down in the day-to-day operations.
Be Transparent and Vulnerable
Creating a company culture that is open and transparent has been an obsession for Gabrielle and myself. No one person has all the skills necessary to start and grow a company on their own. So as founders and leaders, we’re not afraid of communicating and confronting our own strengths and weaknesses in order to build a lean and efficient team with the same mindset. When everyone is looking to contribute their strengths and collaborate to bridge one another’s weakness or blindspots, you amplify the capabilities of each individual.
This was the case for our product development team, for which I delivered business strategy, market insight, and user journey strategy to identify high potential opportunities and frictions to target; Gabrielle leads our PD process and our medical advisory board to make complex, margin enhancing, and hard to copy products feasible; our designer leveraged these inputs to find creative, delightful ways to execute the solution; and our engineering team contributed feedback early and often to converge on lean, value-rich solutions. It hasn’t always been seamless, but we’ve always strived to operate with transparency and complement one another’s weaknesses to improve our performance as a team.
This transparency has also been valuable in our investor relationships. Many founders are unwilling (or afraid) to readily share bad news or challenges with their investors. In some cases, I get it, but in most cases, your investors are there to help you succeed. Your VCs can often be your greatest allies if you’re willing to be vulnerable and ask for help. Remember that a good VC works with a lot of interesting companies and sees a lot of “at-bats” for problems you’re likely facing.
When we learned that our model-market fit assumptions were wrong, we pivoted the company. Luckily we found product-market fit, but were forced to operate in a smaller market with very different economic potential. Like most founders, I had to decide what was right for me, my company, and my mission. Was it raising more capital, growing slowly through profits, or partnering with a larger org through M&A? My first step was to engage one of our investors, Charles Hudson at Precursor Ventures. As an experienced VC, Charles was able to walk me through each option, help me weigh the pros and cons, and spoke from both the investor perspective and the founder-mindset. Ultimately, Charles helped me craft a plan which, because we discussed it early (with plenty of time and runway), prepared me to execute with confidence and clarity.
By being measured and honest with yourself, your team, and your investors, you’ll give yourself the best odds of tackling and overcoming your biggest, scariest challenges. I can say from experience that, in a start-up, neglecting the problems you’re afraid of will only decrease your odds of success.
Seek Out Educational Resources
Your professional development doesn’t end when you become a founder of a company — it should be an ongoing process throughout your career. The technology industry changes at a rapid pace, with new tools and technologies your company can utilize to be more successful.
While which educational courses you choose to future your professional development differ by what your skills are and which you’d like to grow, we’ve had great success in turning to a few, high-quality sources:
- Google For Start-ups is a consistent go-to for best practices including design process and leading teams, while IDEO’s human-centered product design toolkit is a fantastic supplement!
- Skillshare and Medium have a plethora of high-quality classes and thought leadership for creatives.
- I personally think that Brian Balfour’s blog is a must-read for anyone creating a new business or product line (especially his 4-Fit Growth Framework).
- For later-stage start-ups with product leaders that need to go deeper into Growth, Monetization, and Product Strategies, Reforge’s blog and courses would be my recommendation.
This certainly isn’t an exhaustive list but my hope is that it sparks the flame for first-time founders to seek out educational support and be open with the challenges and struggles you are facing. Whether you’re just starting to code your product or about to raise additional funding, there is always something to learn to help your startup grow to be the successful business you envision it to be.
