After more than two years — and nearly 100 episodes — as a host of TechCrunch’s recently ended Found podcast, I have learned a lot about how founders approach building their startups.
I’ve heard stories about how founders know when it is the right time to expand from their core product, to how startups approach hiring, to what got entrepreneurs to take the leap in the first place, and everything in between.
While not a founder myself, some of the learnings and advice I heard on the show stood out more than others. I’ve compiled a short and sweet list of the five best pieces of advice for founders I heard on the show that are both practical and philosophical.
While many of the founders talked about finding co-founders or making early hires who helped fill their experience or knowledge gaps, Rippling co-founder and CEO Parker Conrad thinks founders should do the opposite.
Conrad called the practice of hiring people to fill roles a founder isn’t good at, or doesn’t want to do, bullshit.
“You should find the things that you hate within the company, and you should run towards them and bear hug them and just really take them on and focus on those things, because those are the things that are probably going to kill you,” Conrad said. “Those are the things that you’re probably avoiding because it’s uncomfortable to focus on them. I’ve definitely seen that in myself, and the things that you really hate, like, that’s where you should spend all your time.”
While the right venture capitalist can provide invaluable insight and guidance to a startup, good VCs are hard to find, and even the best VCs don’t always have the best advice for every startup.
When Ashley Tyrner, the founder and CEO of FarmboxRx, a direct-to-consumer produce box company meant to help solve food deserts, pitched VCs, they told her to pivot to being a meal kit company, the hot trend of the time. She’s glad she ignored the advice and bootstrapped instead.
“Every VC we talked to, any of them that were actually even remotely nice to us at the time wanted us to become a meal kit,” Tyrner said. “That’s not what our focus was. We did not want to jump on the meal kit bandwagon. Now looking back, I’m really glad that I never raised any capital and we still haven’t raised any capital to this day. Most of the meal kits are, you know, they’ve slowly died.”
Instead, just a few years later, FarmboxRx was able to link up with insurance companies and start sending its produce boxes as part of patients’ prescriptions, a revenue stream Tyner said has been really lucrative for the company.
If you read a lot of PR pitches, as I do most days, a common thread is that many companies want to tout that they were the “first” to either a technological innovation or a new market. But is being first always the best thing?
Jordan Nathan, the founder and CEO of non-toxic homeware company Caraway, wouldn’t necessarily agree. Nathan told TechCrunch that when he was getting ready to launch Caraway’s first set of non-toxic cookware, he initially wasn’t thrilled that it looked like they would be the last to launch in an increasingly crowded category, but it worked out. Nathan said launching last allowed the company to find the gaps in the market left open from what had already been released, and allowed Caraway to cater to those audiences directly.
“It helped us change our color palette, it helped us change our price point, what pieces that we put in the set,” Nathan said. “And while a lot of those other brands did a lot of things right, we were able to craft our space within the kitchen [direct-to-consumer] world that others weren’t playing in.”
While some startups build software that can start acquiring customers, and making money, within a week, the same can’t be said for startups looking to introduce innovative deep tech or moonshot companies. But that doesn’t mean these deep tech companies have to wait years to make any money.
Joe Wolfel, the co-founder and CEO of Terradepth, a company looking to build autonomous drones to map the ocean floor, told Found that Terradepth was very intentional about setting up its revenue streams. While it still has a ways to go before its autonomous drones will be roaming the ocean floor, the company is looking to provide the same services to commercial and government customers in the meantime, both manually and through a dashboard, because companies need information on the ocean floor now.
“One thing you learn pretty quickly in combat is you can’t steer something that’s not moving,” Wolfel said. “There’s no substitute for on-the-ground learning right? We are eating our own dog food everyday.”
We heard a different approach to this same concept from Paul Hedrick, the founder of Western wear company Tecovas. Hedrick told Found that he knew he wanted Tecovas to be a direct-to-consumer brand but he didn’t want to just set up a website and wait around for sales to come in. Because of this, he started selling his boots out of the back of his car at farmer’s markets right away so he could get customer feedback and sales from the beginning.
When a startup is just getting off the ground, founders are focused on building a product and getting said product to market — as they probably should be. But founders should make sure they don’t forget to think about building the actual company around the product too.
Gavin Uberti, the co-founder and CEO of chipmaker Etched, told Found that one early mishap the company had was that they didn’t think about setting up employee benefits until it was too late. Uberti said the company only realized it had waited too long when one of its employees broke their leg before the company had set up health insurance — which wasn’t a quick process to remedy.
Uberti’s story was a good reminder that when founders are trying to move fast and break things, its important for them to also take care of all the other elements needed to build a lasting company that takes care of its employees.
