Here are five of the best founder tips I’ve learned as a Found host

After more than two years — and nearly 100 episodes — as the host of TechCrunch’s recently ended podcast Found , I’ve learned a lot about how founders approach building startups. I’ve heard stories about how founders know when the time is right to expand their core product, about how startups approach hiring, what makes entrepreneurs take the leap in the first place, and everything in between. Although not a founder myself, some of the learnings and advice I heard at the event stood out more than others. I have put together a short and sweet list of the five best pieces of advice to founders that I heard in the show that are both practical and philosophical. Founders should lead to what they are not good at When many founders talk about finding co-founders or making early hires that help fill experience or knowledge gaps, Rippling co-founder and CEO Parker Conrad thinks founders should do the opposite. Conrad calls the practice of hiring people to fill roles the founders can’t, or don’t want, nonsense. “You have to find the things that you hate in the company, and you have to run to them and embrace them and just take them and focus on those things, because that’s what can kill you,” Conrad said. “These are the things that can be avoided because it is not comfortable to focus. I have always seen it in myself, and the things that you really hate, for example, where you have to spend all your time. VC is not always right When the right venture capitalist can provide valuable insight and guidance to startups, good VCs are hard to find, and even the best VCs don’t always have the best advice for every startup.As Ashley Tyrner, founder and CEO of FarmboxRx, a direct-to-consumer product box company that is meant to help overcome the food desert, he told them to be a kit meal company, which was a trend at the time. He liked that he ignored the advice and even bootstrapped. “Every VC he talked to was really far away from we at that time wanted us to be a meal kit,” said Tyrner. “It was not our focus. We don’t want to jump on the meal kit bandwagon. Looking back now, I am very glad that I never raised any capital and to this day I still haven’t. Most of the meals, you know, slowly die.” But, just a few years later, FarmboxRx was able to connect with insurance companies and start sending boxes of produce as part of patients’ prescriptions, a revenue stream Tyner says was very profitable for the company. It paid off. not being the first If you read a lot of PR pitches, like me most days, the common thread that many companies want to tout that they are “first” for either a technological innovation or a new market. But being the first is always the best? Jordan Nathan, founder and CEO of non-toxic homeware company Caraway, does not necessarily agree. Nathan told TechCrunch that when they are preparing to launch the first set of non-toxic cooking equipment, they are not happy that it looks like they will be the last to start in the increasingly noisy category, but it can come out .Nathan said that the late launch allowed the company to find a gap in the market left by what had been released, and allowed Caraway to cater to the audience directly. “It helps us change the color palette, it helps us change the price point, what pieces we put in the set,” Nathan said. “And while a lot of other brands are doing a lot of things right, we can make space in the kitchen. [direct-to-consumer] a world where no one else is playing.” Companies should try to go to market immediately, regardless of their long-term goals. or innovative. But that doesn’t mean these deep-sea tech companies have to wait years to make money, said Terradepth, co-founder and CEO of Terradepth. very deliberate about setting it up revenue stream. While it still has a ways to go before autonomous drones will roam the ocean, the company wants to provide the same service to commercial and government customers, both manually and through the dashboard, because the company needs information about the ocean floor today “The thing about speed in combat is that you can’t target things that aren’t moving,” Wolfel said. “There’s no substitute for learning in the field, right? We eat our own dog food every day. We heard a different approach to the 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 brand to consumers but he didn’t want to build a website and wait for sales to come in. Because of this, he started selling car boots at the farmer’s market directly so that he could get customer feedback and sales from the beginning. Don’t forget to build the company around the product from the ground, founders focus on building the product and taking said product to market – they probably have to. But the founders have to make sure they don’t forget to think about building the actual company around the product. Gavin Uberti, co-founder and CEO of Etched, told that one The company’s initial mishap was that they did not think about setting employee benefits until it was too late. Uberti said the company only found out it had been waiting a long time when one of its employees broke his leg before the company set up health insurance — which is not a quick process to deal with. Uberti’s story is a good reminder that when founders try to be fast and break things, it is important for them to also take care of all the other elements needed to build a lasting company that takes care of its employees.

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