Who else can better explain how to be a great founder other than Reid Hoffman who has been helping the founders connect professionally. When it comes to founders there are a few FAQs that has been pondering on everyone’s minds for a long time with no exact answers. Some of these can be put forward as How do you see yourself as a founder? How do you think about what the skill set is? And what are the things you should be thinking about in terms of: Am I ready? How do I get ready? Is it the right thing for me? These sorts of things.
[box type=”shadow” align=”aligncenter” class=”” width=””]
Being An Entrepreneur Is Being Batman – Each Day ![/box]
A founder is typically imagined as the Superman who has each and every skill in his utility belt that is better projected with a superlative adjective when addressing him (not trying to be gender biased). It’s things like, I can do product market fit. I am great at product, I am great at strategy, I am great at management. I can fundraise. I can do all of these skills and the thing you are looking for in a great founder.
“The metaphor I often use for entrepreneurship is jumping off a cliff while assembling an airplane on the way down. And the reason I do is because it’s hard, it has a quasi mortal exit, which are default dead so you start taking every possible chance to actually win.”
Generally speaking you hope to have a couple super powers. Some things that are a unique edge to you, some things that are unique to the problem you are trying to solve, some things that will help you get an edge. And frequently it’s very hard to tell the difference between madness and genius because usually it’s the results that play out.
What is it that actually makes a great founder? Because it’s not actually that you score ten out of ten of these, you become the entrepreneurial olympian. In order to answer the question or at least try to answer the question, we need to eliminate the founder FAQs one by one.
[box type=”shadow” align=”aligncenter” class=”” width=””]
Do You Think You Can Start A Startup – How To Start A Startup ![/box]
Let’s start with team. It is usually best to have two or three people on a team rather than a solo founder, because a good composition of a project and founders are likely to succeed, and the composition is usually two or three of them. If you have two or three founders, you can not only compensate for different skills but also for each others weaknesses.
The next question that needs to be addressed is the location of your company and it is one of the things that comes down to in thinking whether or not you are a great founder. Well the reason is, because of what great founders do is seek the networks that will be essential to their task. In order to be successful, you need to locate where the strongest networks are for the particular kind of thing that you are doing. So great founders will move to where the network is.
[box type=”shadow” align=”aligncenter” class=”” width=””]
The Influence Behind Time 100’s Technopreneurs ![/box]
If your questions were answered until now, then you for sure are not a contrarian. In fact it’s pretty easy to become contrarian but it’s hard to be contrarian and right. While validating a product you need to consider how a smart person is actually going to disagree with your product.
Normally entrepreneur founders are thought about as being the risk takers. Where everyone else cowers in fear at this notion of risk, they boldly go out. Now that’s true, you have to be a risk taker, you have to be thinking about how do I make a really coherent risk because in fact the only really big opportunities, the only contrarian opportunities smart people disagree with you on happen to be ones that have more risks associated with them. On the other hand, part of the skill set, that when you are beginning to apply how you think about risks as an entrepreneur is how do I take intelligent risks? How do I take a focused risk, but if I’m right about that one thing then a bunch of other things break my way. And once I start doing that I try to figure out how to make my own shot possibility as high as possible? How do I minimize other risks? How do I essentially take this risk in an intelligent way that doesn’t just go, oh yeah risk to the wind who cares but lets go. Here are a bunch of other questions too:
- Well should I be doing the work? Or should I be recruiting people and delegating the work?
- Should I be flexible or persistent?
- Am I in fact increasing confidence in my investment thesis? Or decreasing value in my investment thesis?
- Should I have belief or should I have fear?
- Should I focus internally? Or should I focus externally
- Should I build a product, ignore the world, ignore competitors? Or should I be meeting people and gather network intelligence?
Do you have these questions too? Then check out the video !
Wanna know how to Operate? Stay tuned for next week, until then check out How To Start A Startup !
Image Credits: business2community.com