Several months ago we launched a series of Founder Surveys. The goal was to delve into questions and dilemmas we hear from founders and provide a sense of what their peers — other post-fund raising, early stage founders — are facing and how they’re thinking about and addressing those dilemmas. (Feel free to submit an idea for a future survey here).
In this survey of over 80 founders, all post fundraising, we looked at whether and how founders share the heavy load they are carrying and how and from whom they get advice.
Key Insights:
- Get married (ie, co-founder value): In a survey intended to see who founders consider their main support network, co-founders were the big winners. They are THE go to for professional challenges, are key in addressing personal issues, and are the main people to shape a founder’s professional identity.
- Blood is thicker than…: Personal connection and trust trump professional expertise, as most founders are likely to turn to friends and family on professional challenges (after co-founders) before turning to investors and others in their professional network.
- Get a mentor: Most founders don’t have a significant mentor, but for those who do — and CEOs are twice as likely as CTOs to have a mentor — that relationship becomes a key part of their support network. Interestingly, and despite a clear lack of free time, 80% of founders either mentor someone (52%) or wish they had time to (30%).
- Not so lonely at the top: Nearly 90% of founders have someone they feel comfortable sharing everything — both personal and professional — with.
- Another WhatsApp group?!: While 44% of founders find founder-only WhatsApp groups to be valuable, 50% either view them as noise or aren’t members of founder-only WhatsApp groups.
Deeper Dive:
Dealing with Professional Challenges
Co-founders are the go-to when founders are dealing with professional challenges. What is somewhat unintuitive is that founders are more likely to turn to friends and family, rather than others in their professional network (investors, mentors, former colleagues or consultants), to get advice or talk through significant professional challenges. One caveat is that some of a founder’s friends may be from their professional circles, and therefore be classified as a friend despite the fact that they have relevant professional expertise to share.
The Personal Stuff
The vast majority of founders have someone to turn to when things are difficult, either personally or professionally, which is extraordinarily important, as our mental health and well being survey showed.
Founders are most likely to count on family, but co-founders (who often become your work husband/wife) are a close second.
Mentorship
Most founders have not had a significant mentor in their lives, which might explain the reliance on co-founders, family and friends for support, both professional and personal. However, those who do have a mentor are very likely to turn to them for professional advice (60%), making them an important part of a founder’s support network.
When breaking it down by founder role, CEOs are twice as likely to have a mentor compared to CTOs. Interestingly, those CTOs who do have a mentor said the main value is personal growth (vs. professional growth), compared to only 15% of CEOs who said their mentors provided personal growth.
It is interesting, then, that over half of respondents mentor someone, despite the craziness of early startup life, and another 30% would like to. Perhaps this speaks to the value of mentorship that many founders see, despite not having benefited from it themselves.
Another WhatsApp Group?!
Founders are pretty evenly split on the value of founder-only groups.
If you’re a post fund-raising, early stage founder, we hope you find the Founder Surveys interesting or validating or thought provoking. Either way, we’d love to hear from you if there are topics you’d like us to explore in future Founder Surveys.
