The most successful companies are the ones that are most effective at learning. Likewise for founders. Strong founders tend to be great learners. The other day a friend told me an inspiring story about watching Mark Zuckerberg grow as a leader while Facebook exploded; he described a man who was constantly learning, constantly refining and iterating on his leadership style and studying the effects of the moves he made at the helm. This is in some ways the essence of company making: a crucible of perpetual, high-paced learning and improvement. For the curious-minded--those humans who thrive off attaining and applying knowledge--entrepreneurship is awesome.
Building a Culture Of Growth
A company is one of the most remarkable institutions for human growth. This is, interestingly, one of the least discussed aspects of companies and capitalism. Working at a company can be--and should be--an incredible growth experience.
In fact, I think one of the most important jobs of the founder is to create a culture in which each of your employees is having a life-enriching, perhaps even life-transforming, experience. This boosts morale, supports creativity, ensures retention, and increases productivity. It's also better for the world.
You'll Never Be Bored
Being a founder is not boring. And most founders hate boredom. There are 100 things happening at once. You are constantly shifting from context to context: from design review to strategy planning to recruitment to fundraising to managing leaders. You need to be skilled at the big and the small, the human and the technical, the sale and the rigor, the drive and the execution. You won’t sleep much. Your to-do list is absolutely insurmountable. If you find this fun, well, then it’s fun.
Friendship
The bonds forged with your team members in the fires of company making are strong and long-lasting. There's a togetherness, a pride, and a no-nonsense mutual understanding that makes founder friendships glow. When things are hard--and the path to success is inevitably hard--mediating challenges with another person can be exponentially more challenging than doing so alone. But if you can communicate well and stay open, if you can be honest and thoughtful, if you can avoid blame--then your relationship will flourish in the founding environment.
A Window
One of my favorite parts of running a company is the view it gives you into what's happening on Earth. I think this is particularly true for Internet company founders right now, since the Internet is among the most impactful human inventions since, I don’t know, math. This knowledge of what's happening is a gift. It's a perspective that carries with it, I believe, a responsibility to stay humble and still figure out how to use your time and resources to genuinely move the lever for humanity.
Overcome Fear
Being a founder is an amazing opportunity to overcome fear--particularly the fear of failure. If you are a founder and are afraid of failing, it will be debilitating. You simply must find a way to overcome this fear. There are many stories that can lie behind the fear of failure: Perhaps you harbor some inner notion that perfection is required to attain worthiness, perhaps familial pressures or concerns about social status drive your fear, perhaps you are attached to material well-being, etc., etc., etc. As a founder, you must come to know what you fear and why. And, ideally, you will come to realize that the fear of failure is both deeply forgivable and always fundamentally delusional. All fear is.
Getting To Know Yourself
Building on my last point, founding a company is an incredible way of getting to know oneself. Meditation is a profound tool for self-investigation. Starting a company is about as good.
Both activities--meditating and company making--provide you with a radical mirror. In both cases you don't have to look at yourself. You can float through. But maintaining ignorance almost takes more work than seeing things clearly. Your strengths, your weaknesses--they are staring you in the face all day, every day when you are creating a company. And, if you are willing to look at yourself honestly--with both self-acceptance and also an indefatigable drive to grow--then this is a true boon.
Creating Value And Knowing It
The purpose of a company is to create value. And in modernity that value is determined very simply by whether other companies or humans will buy what you're making. This simplicity is so honest. The result is that when you are creating something of value you feel that it's deeply real. There are so few places where value and meaning take on such an indisputable air. I like that. I think founders tend to like that. It's the feeling: I made this from nothing and I know that other people think it's worth something.
Founder As Career Path
Some people decide to become engineers. Some teachers. Some founders. And yet, we know much more about what it’s like to be a teacher than we know about what it’s like to be a founder.
On the one hand, being a founder is a very public experience; we know a lot about founders in the same way we know a lot about celebrities. And yet, on the other hand--in a strange dichotomy--we know very little about founders, these private men and women who create and run our most influential institutions. We haven’t yet quite learned to see the founder as a human.
And we haven’t quite started thinking about the role of founder as a job, like other jobs, with its challenges and its boons. We should, though. Doing so would help existing founders and founders-to-be. And this, in turn, will help our companies, which I--along with many other founders--hope will help people everywhere.
