☕︎ The hardest part of being a startup founder
Seemingly obvious, still killing thousands of startups
The most difficult but critically necessary part of being a startup founder is to combine the roles of a “visionary” (the one who finds an idea, and transforms it into a vision and key narratives) and a “maker” (the one who organizes the work and actually “makes it happen”).
The first without the second is just words and blabbering. Such founders (I call them “sounders”) are able to create a vision and ignite people but they fail to efficiently bring the idea to life. So, over time, without dynamic progress, their team members become frustrated, everything eventually stagnates and dies.
The second without the first is an effective work unclear towards what. Probably, that can work in more or less predictable businesses, even in IT outsourcing and small niche products, but it’s next to impossible to build something truly innovative (what startups should do) without a strong vision and key narratives.
These roles, as you see, require not only different skills but also completely different mindsets. And in the whole world you can hardly find more than a couple of hundred, if not dozens, folks able to combine them.
This is one of the reasons why multi-founder teams are considered to be more resilient. It’s critically important that the founders should be not only like-minded but also skillset- and mindset-complementary. Of course, in real life pure “visionaries” and “makers” are rare, leave it to the books about Jobs and Woz, but in great teams, there’s always a founder more about the vision and narratives, and a founder more about operations, maintaining a team in good shape, and building.
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