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Companies have shapes
Your business model dictates the shape of your team. Find the shape before you hire.
If you like tech startups, you might copy their shape without noticing, even though the right structure for you might be ecommerce.
So, ask yourself: what kind of business are you really building? Get very clear about what the ultimate version of a company in your space looks like. Study it. What departments does it have? What is the ratio of employees per department? Then use that playbook. Do not reinvent the wheel.
Who, not how
The question is not how you will solve it. It is who already has.
Makers default to solving every problem with their own hands. It feels responsible and it feels cheap. It is neither. Every hour spent learning a skill you will use once is an hour not spent on the thing only you can do.
For most problems someone exists who has solved it a hundred times and would be glad to do it again. Your job is to find them, brief them well, and get out of the way. The goal is yours. The route does not have to be.
Convexity
Look for bets with a limited downside and an unlimited upside. Then place many of them.
A convex opportunity costs little if it fails and pays enormously if it works. Entrepreneurship is convex, a salary is not. A piece of organic content can go viral, a billboard cannot. A digital product or a media business can grow without you, an agency cannot.
Position yourself where the upside is open ended and the downside is capped at some time and some money. Then keep placing bets, because convexity only pays over many attempts.
Leverage
Outsized returns need leverage. Pick the kind that fits your zone of genius.
Effort alone has a ceiling. To get results far beyond your hours you need something that multiplies them. There are four kinds: capital (money working for you), people (a team executing), content (writing and video that sells while you sleep) and code (software that runs without you).
Each one rewards a different temperament. Some people are natural at raising and allocating money, some at leading, some at making things that spread. Choose one deliberately and go deep, instead of touching all four lightly.
Zone of genius
Your only real job is to find what you are uniquely positioned to do. Your body already knows.
Each of us is unique, but society trains us to conform and copy, which is a reliable strategy for never reaching your potential. Your uniqueness is usually a mix: skills, upbringing, the odd things you cannot stop paying attention to.
You will not find it by thinking. Observe your body instead. It reacts to everything before the mind does. What do you enjoy? What drains you? When do you light up, where, with whom, and why? Keep notes. Patterns appear within weeks.
Hiring
Three questions: are they smart, are they ambitious, do you like them? Then trust your gut.
Hiring gets overcomplicated with scorecards, case studies and rounds of interviews. Most of it exists to make the decision feel safe, not to make it better.
Three things predict nearly everything. Smart people learn the job. Ambitious people push the job further than you asked. People you like are people you will actually work with, argue with and forgive. Everything else is teachable or irrelevant. Three yeses, move fast. If in doubt, there is no doubt.
Be a river
Trust experience, follow the path of least resistance, and when in doubt pick the new thing.
Three rules cover most decisions. First, with more than five years of experience in a domain, follow your gut. It has seen more than your spreadsheet.
Second, the right decision usually presents itself. Be a river. Take the path with less resistance instead of forcing the one you planned.
Third, when two options feel equal, choose the new one. The known option teaches nothing. The new one teaches something even when it fails, and it is usually where the upside hides.
There is no single right answer
Founders make every wrong decision and still win. Do not confuse the textbook with the territory.
By most business standards some founders do everything wrong. They take three months off in the critical year, ignore the obvious market, hire friends, refuse to raise. Then they build a hundred million dollar company.
That does not mean decisions do not matter. It means the range of winning paths is far wider than any framework admits. What matters is that the path fits the founder, and that they keep going. Use advice as a menu, not a map.
A job is a one client business
Entrepreneurship is safer than a job. Not easier. Safer.
A job feels safe because the money arrives on the same day every month. Look at the structure instead. An employee is a company with exactly one client, the boss. Any business with one client is a high risk investment, and nobody would fund it. Lose the client and revenue goes to zero overnight, with little warning and no say.
An entrepreneur with ten clients, several channels and skills earned in the open market is diversified. The income moves more, but it can never be switched off by one person.
Raise kids by raising yourself
Kids copy what you are, not what you tell them. Raise yourself first.
We put enormous effort into how we raise children and almost none into who is raising them. Yet the outcome is predictable. Your kid will end up remarkably similar to you or your partner, with relationships that look like the ones they watched.
So turn the questions around. Would you be happy if your child grew up to be exactly like you? Want a more courageous kid? Are you courageous? More ambitious? Are you? Kinder? Are you? Your growth is their upbringing.
ETFs are kings
Take your risks in entrepreneurship. Park the winnings in the only sure thing there is.
Building a company is already the most concentrated bet a person can make. The money it produces should not be exposed to a second one.
Low cost index funds, S&P 500 and similar, are the closest thing to a sure thing in investing. They own everything, cost almost nothing, and need no skill, no timing and no attention. That is exactly the point. Your attention belongs to the business. Buy, hold, keep buying, ignore the news. Let the boring side of the portfolio fund the exciting side of your life.
Elegant is the way
When something gets too complex, it is wrong. Simplify until it is obvious.
Complexity is rarely a sign of depth. Most of the time it is a sign that the thinking is not finished. An email that takes two reads is wrong. A website you cannot understand in five seconds is wrong. A product that needs a manual, an offer that needs a diagram, a strategy that needs a deck. All wrong, or at least not done yet.
Elegance is not decoration. It is proof that you understood the problem well enough to remove everything that is not the problem. Keep cutting until what is left explains itself.
Positioning is king
If you cannot say how you are different in one sentence, you are not different enough yet.
Positioning is the sentence that tells a specific person why your thing, and not the alternatives, is for them. Everything downstream depends on it: the website, the pricing, the ads, the sales call, the hiring. If that sentence does not exist, no amount of execution will fix it, because every channel will be shouting something vague.
Do not work on anything else until you have it. Write it, say it to strangers, watch their faces. When they repeat it back correctly, unprompted, you are done.
The best investment is you
Every tendency you have becomes a property of your company. Work on the tendencies.
You do not build a company. You build a copy of yourself at scale, including the parts you cannot see. A founder who needs financial safety keeps healthy cash in the bank, which is good. The same need quietly shows up in hiring, choosing people who will not challenge them, because control feels safer than talent. That limits who joins, and so what gets built.
Every blind spot compounds across a team. So the highest return investment available is the one that changes the founder: therapy, coaching, honest feedback, reading, rest.
The wall is you
Your company stops growing at the limit of your current beliefs. Every wall is a mirror.
When a company hits a wall, the instinct is to look outside: the market, the team, the timing. Look inside first and ask a harder question. How am I complicit in this?
If you are happy where you are, nothing needs to change. If you are not, ask which beliefs or values are holding you here. That the money must be safe. That nobody does it as well as you. That asking is weak. Every ceiling in a business has a matching ceiling in its founder, and the business only moves after the founder does.
Take care of the body
Find the movement you can repeat for decades. Guard it hardest when life changes.
Your body is the only piece of equipment you will use for the whole journey. Take care of it so that it can take care of you. The specific workout does not matter. What matters is that you like it enough to do it every week for years. Gym, hiking, cycling, swimming, climbing. Keep trying until one sticks.
Then watch the transitions. Every time your rhythm changes, a move, a child, a new job, the routine is the first thing to fall. Those are exactly the moments to protect it with extra care.
Founder marketing fit
Find the marketing that works for you, or find a cofounder who has. There is no third option.
Distribution matters more than ever. There are very few ideas left where the product alone is enough, so few that it is not worth trying. As a founder you have two options. Find a kind of marketing that works for you, or find a cofounder who is good at it. If you are not good at marketing and have no such cofounder, do not even start.
So explore honestly: is there any kind of marketing that would work for me? Creating organic content? Cold outreach for B2B sales? PR? Something else? Know what it is. Then build businesses that can grow through that kind of distribution channel.
Love the input, not output
Do you love the input of this work, or only the output? That is how you find what you really love doing.
Every piece of work has two sides. The output is the outcome (the company succeeding, the audience growing, etc.). The input is the tasks that go into making it, day after day.
Ask honestly: am I only excited about the outcome, or do I really enjoy the input? What you really love doing is where you enjoy the input.
Hope is a strategy
Keep hope alive and you keep going. Every time you keep going, you get another chance to succeed.
There is a famous business saying: hope is not a strategy. For founders, it is wrong. To become a founder you need to be an optimist. You need to believe when no one else does.
Most people stop because they run out of hope. So nurture it and believe in yourself. That is what keeps you going, and every time you keep going you give yourself another chance to succeed. Your odds rise drastically.