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After more than two years — and nearly 100 episodes — as host of the recently ended TechCrunch Podcast foundI 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, how startups approach hiring, what drives entrepreneurs to take the leap in the first place, and everything in between.
While I’m not a founder myself, some of the learnings and tips I heard on the show stood out more than others. I’ve compiled a short and sweet list of the top five pieces of advice for founders that I’ve heard on the show, both practical and philosophical.
While many founders talk about early hiring to help find co-founders or fill experience or knowledge gaps, Rippling co-founder and CEO Parker Conrad he thinks the founders should do the opposite.
Conrad called the practice of hiring people to fill roles that the founder is not good at or unwilling to do foolish.
“You have to find the things in the company that you hate and run to them and embrace them and just accept them and focus on those things because those are the things that will kill you,” Conrad said. “These are the things you probably avoid because it’s uncomfortable to focus on. I’ve definitely seen it in myself, and the things you really hate, like, that’s where you have to spend all your time.”
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, founder and CEO FarmboxRxa direct-to-consumer produce box company that aims to help solve food deserts landed VCs who told it to go for the hottest trend of the day, a meal kit company. He’s glad he ignored the advice and got booted instead.
“Every VC we talked to, anybody who looked at us very well at the time, wanted us to be a meal kit,” Tyrner said. “That was not our focus. We didn’t want to jump into a meal kit. Looking back now, I’m glad I never raised capital, and we still haven’t raised any capital to date. Most of the dinnerware sets have, you know, slowly died.
Instead, just a few years later, FarmboxRx was able to connect with insurance companies and begin shipping boxes of produce as part of patients’ prescriptions, a revenue stream that Tyner says has become truly lucrative for the company.
If you read a lot of PR pitches, as I often do, one common theme is that many companies want to declare that they are “first” for either a technological innovation or a new market. But is being first always the best thing?
Jordan Nathan, founder and CEO of Non-Toxic Home Furnishings Cuminwill definitely not agree. Nathan told TechCrunch that when he was preparing to launch Caraway’s first non-toxic cookware set, he wasn’t excited at first because it seemed like the last to launch in an increasingly crowded category, but it paid off. Nathan said that the launch of the latter allowed the company to find gaps in the already released market, allowing Caraway to directly serve this audience.
“It helped us change the color palette, it helped us change our price point, what pieces we put in the set,” Nathan said. “And while a lot of these other brands are doing a lot of things right, we’ve been able to create our space in the (direct-to-consumer) kitchen where no one else is playing.”
While some startups create software that can start getting customers and making money within a week, the same cannot be said for startups looking to introduce innovative deep technology or moonlighting companies. But that doesn’t mean these deep tech companies will have to wait years to make money.
Joe Wolfel, co-founder and CEO Terradapa company that wants to build autonomous drones to map the ocean floor, said Terradepth is very intentional about building its revenue streams. While autonomous drones still have a ways to go before they roam the ocean floor, the company is currently working to provide the same services to commercial and government customers, both manually and via a control panel, as companies request information. now the ocean floor.
“One thing you learn pretty quickly in combat is that you can’t control something that doesn’t move,” Wolfel said. “There’s no substitute for learning on the ground, right? We eat our own dog food every day.”
We heard a different approach to the same concept Paul HedrickFounder 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. That’s why he started selling his boots. drives the back of his car immediately to farmers markets so he can get customer feedback and sales from the start.
When a startup is just getting started, founders focus on creating a product and bringing said product to market—as they probably should. But founders need to make sure they don’t forget to think about building the actual company around the product, too.
Gavin UbertiThe co-founder and CEO of chipmaker Etched told Found that the company’s first failure was that they didn’t think about employee rewards until it was too late. Uberti said they realized they waited too long when one of their employees broke their leg before the company set up health insurance — it wasn’t a quick process to overcome.
Uberti’s story was a good reminder that while founders are trying to move fast and break things, it’s important that they focus on all the other elements needed to build a sustainable company that cares about its employees.