After more than two years—and nearly 100 episodes—as the host of TechCrunch’s recently concluded podcast, I’ve learned a lot about how founders approach building their startups.
I’ve heard stories about how founders know when the time is right to expand from their core product, to how startups approach hiring, to what prompted entrepreneurs to take the leap in the first place, and everything in between.
While I’m not a founder myself, some of the insights 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 I heard on the show for founders that are both practical and philosophical.
Founders should lean into what they are not good at
While many of the founders talked about finding co-founders or early hires that helped fill their experience or knowledge gaps, Rippling co-founder and CEO Parker Conrad believes 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 have to find the things that you hate in the company and run to them and embrace them and just really take them and focus on those things, because those are the things that will probably kill you,” Conrad he said. “These are the things you tend to avoid because it’s uncomfortable to focus on. I’ve definitely seen that in myself and the things you really hate, like, that’s where you have to spend all your time.”
VCs are not always right
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 ready-to-eat box company meant to help solve the dessert food problem, pitched in VC, she was told to pivot to a meal kit company, the hot trend of the day. He’s glad he ignored the advice and booted instead.
“Every VC we talked to, any of them who were even remotely nice to us at the time wanted us to be a meal kit,” Tyrner said. “It wasn’t what we were focusing on. We didn’t want to jump on the meal kit. Now looking back, I’m very happy that we never raised capital and we still haven’t raised capital to date. Most of the meal kits are, you know, slowly dying.”
Instead, just a few years later, FarmboxRx was able to connect with insurance companies and start sending boxes of its products as part of patients’ prescriptions, a revenue stream that Tyner said has been really lucrative for the company.
You better not be first
If you read a lot of PR posts, as I do most days, a common thread is that many companies want to advertise that they were the “first” in either a technological innovation or a new market. But is being first always the best thing?
Jordan Nathan, founder and CEO of non-toxic housewares company Caraway, wouldn’t necessarily agree. Nathan told TechCrunch that when he was preparing to launch Caraway’s first set of non-toxic cookware, he wasn’t initially thrilled that it looked like they would be the last to be released in an increasingly crowded category, but he got through it. Nathan said the latest release allowed the company to find gaps in the market left open by what it had already released, and allowed Caraway to serve that audience directly.
“It helped us change our color palette, it helped us change our price point, the pieces we put in the set,” Nathan said. “And while a lot of these other brands were doing a lot of things right, we were able to make our own space in the kitchen [direct-to-consumer] world in which others did not play”.
Companies should strive to get to market immediately, regardless of their long-term goals
While some startups build software that can start getting customers and making money within a week, the same cannot be said for startups looking to enter deep-tech innovators or moonshot companies. But that doesn’t mean these deep-tech companies have to wait years to make money.
Joe Wolfel, the co-founder and CEO of Terradepth, a company that wants to build autonomous drones to map the ocean floor, told Found that Terradepth has been very intentional about creating its revenue streams. While it still has a ways to go before its autonomous drones roam the ocean floor, the company is looking to provide the same services to commercial and government customers in the meantime, both manually and via dashboards, because companies need ocean floor information now.
“One thing you learn very quickly in combat is that you can’t direct something that doesn’t move,” Wolfel said. “There’s no substitute for hands-on learning right? We eat our own dog food every day.”
We heard a different take on the same idea from Paul Hedrick, the founder of Western clothing 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 build a website and wait for the sales to come. Because of this, he started selling his boots out of the back of his car at farmers markets right away so he could get customer feedback and sales from the start.
Don’t forget to build a company around your product
When a startup is just getting started, the founders are focused on building a product and getting that 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 as well.
Gavin Uberti, the co-founder and CEO of chip maker Etched, told Found that an early mishap the company had was that they didn’t think about creating employee benefits until it was too late. Uberti said the company realized it waited too long when one of its employees broke his leg before the company set up health insurance — something that wasn’t a quick process to fix.
Uberti’s story was a good reminder that when founders are trying to move fast and break things, it’s important for them to also take care of all the other elements needed to build a lasting company that takes care of its employees.
