Startup Basics: Founders First
Startups are scary. You’re pouring all your energy and passion into this one idea with no guarantee of the outcome. No wonder the average young entrepreneur is scared to start! We at ASIF Ventures are focused solely on startups coming from students and recent graduates, and we want to give you the confidence boost you’ve been looking for.
Students, recent graduates and young entrepreneurs are diving off into the deep end by founding a startup. The bigger part of those founders are scared. They’re young and just finished university. Some are combining their startup with their studies and have little working experience in the industry they want to break into. They’re wondering what they need to ever turn their great idea into a profitable company. Contrary to what you’d expect, things like experience or where you went to college are not the core focus of an investor. Josh Kopelman, Partner at First Round Capital, actually said that years of experience may be an impediment to a founder’s capacity to successfully disrupt an industry. Jessica Livingston, Cofounder of Y combinator, actually noted that one of her biggest surprises in working in the field of VC was that it didn’t really matter where a founder went to college. So what do these investors look at? It is you, the founder! As Ashton Kutcher put it: “I’m looking for founders with grit; […] people I’d be willing to work for, […] people who know their company inside out.”
What lies within
The first step starts with you, the founder. What are some of the reasons that you as a founder hold the biggest value of the startup?
Your vision is the source of the startup. It was you, as the founder who had the concept, the ambition and the drive to pursue this idea. Your drive will be the main source of power of the startup and your vision will be the main driver for further creation. Brad Feld of Foundry Group has mentioned drive as the most important character trait when assessing entrepreneurs and their ventures.
You come with your own ecosystem filled with value and feedback. The use of your background, your community, your support system can be invaluable. After all, these are unique to you as a person, no one will have the exact same support system you have. A good sidenote: this can also be a great place to start looking for team members. Ask yourself what makes the people surrounding you valuable, and how you can find these qualities in others.
Last but not least, you as founder will be the one building the culture within your startup. You’ll be the one selecting the team and setting the tone for the future. Molly Graham of Facebook talked about what is to gain by defining company culture early on, and Facebook is the perfect example of this. After all, their “hacker culture” came from their early years and stuck with them, being an integral part of their identity now. This might be the case for you as well, many years from now.
What now?
The reasons above are just some examples of the values that lie within the founder, and not all of them may be applicable to you. But take a closer look at them, which one really resonates with you? All of these reasons are “unfair advantages”. Author Ash Maurya defines these “unfair advantages” in Running Lean: “A real unfair advantage is one that cannot easily be copied or bought.” By taking a closer look at the reason above that resonates the most with you, you can start finding your unfair advantage. You can do some great things with these advantages!
To further define your advantage, ask yourself some of these questions:
How do I make my best decisions?
What sets me apart from the people around me?
Your answers to these questions are the building stones for your unfair advantages, that in the future might just make the difference between your company and a competitor. And not only that, you may just identify a major core component of your (future) startup, the red thread of your team, the first bricks of a potential company culture.
Only the start
So, as it turns out, the most important ingredient for your startup was right there all along! Here you are, with a great idea, a healthy dose of ambition and hopefully some newfound confidence bubbling under the surface. But this is of course only the start. We at ASIF Ventures are constantly looking for the next big idea from the student and recent graduate community and are looking forward to helping you further define your value as founder