I talk to 500+ software founders and CEOs a year all over the world. I’m amazed that every entrepreneur’s story is different.
- Different founder personalities and backgrounds
- Different times and tech cycles
- Different markets and verticals
- Different cities and countries
- Different technologies
- Different business models
- Different funding and end games
- Different cofounder chemistries
Yet there are common threads that are always there.
- A misfit founder who wasn’t doing “normal” things like everyone else.
- Going deep into a market to find and create an opportunity before it’s obvious.
- Way more hard work and sacrifice than founders let on.
- Way more experimentation and zigzagging than you can see from the outside. We never see the tries that didn’t work.
- A continuous barrage of seriously hard challenges that would make most people quit, which creates some humility.
- Dedicated and magical teams that don’t give up when it’s tough.
- Lots of help and advice from experienced outsiders who have done it before or are doing it now.
- Starting wide in either their product or market, then scaling fast by focusing in when they find leverage (aka product-market fit)
- Some luck that took years to create and courage to act on.
- Continuous learning about the version of the software startup game they are playing.
That’s just what I see. These are a few observations, not rules.
Maybe these are necessary but not sufficient. Or just what I notice.
What do you see in every serious software founder who is making progress?
#practicalfounders
