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Smart founders are comfortable with perpetual ignorance and combat it with tireless learning. The preceding Twitter-friendly headline would aptly summarize this article, but outside of the snap-judgment of the Twitterverse, a conversation around a Founder’s ignorance is more nuanced, and the truth less defined.
“Product Market Fit” and “Founder Market Fit” are fancy ways to ask if you are building the right product, and more importantly, if you are the right person to build it. A startup is an experiment, and the world with its infinite complexity (and few controls) is your test tube. If ignorance is the lack of knowledge, understanding, or education about a topic, then a startup magnifies that across multiple disciplines. For a Founder with a learner’s patience and a seeker’s humility, ignorance is then a call to action.
The Challenge
Learning to accept the feeling of “not knowing” is a tough pill to swallow. All your adult life, you’re programmed to be the expert. You get your first job, then build your career by showcasing what you know, not what you don’t.
Recognize that most of the failures in the early years are the failures of ignorance. Significant portions of the infamously long days are spent discovering all of the ways that don’t work. It is demanding and can be very demoralizing. What keeps you going is a focus on problem-solving and passion for your product.
The Solution
Be patient with the problem and the process. Conventional logic asks you to state the problem before you solve it. However, more often than not, you have to state the solution (or desired result) and see how close you can get to it. You have to turn the problem on its head and use unconventional approaches to get to the solution. Sometimes those approaches will not be pretty, but as the rodeo credo goes, you have to “f**k the form and grab the horn.” This patience also requires a Founder’s passion and a Founder’s arrogance.
So, to all those starting new ventures, I’d suggest that it’s OK to have a big goal and yet not know how to get there. Just take one step at a time, keep learning, keep trying, and maybe you’ll get close.
Finally
How to be patient, tenacious, humble? The answer has been and will always be through experiential learning. That is not only learning from your experience but from that of others.
I first wrote on this lesson (and the other two, Passion and Arrogance) in 2009. For my CoFounders and me, very little existed as a support system. While there were always success stories, the predominant theme was “this one thing happened” and “the rest was history.” More often than not, we found ourselves like that cartoon trying to jump from one edge of a cliff to the other side of a deep ravine, vigorously kicking in mid-air, hoping to make it to the other side. I wondered if it was indeed supposed to be this hard or if we were the only ones going through the journey this way.
Today I know that the former is accurate, and the latter is not. Many resources exist that don’t require any investment (or dilution) other than time. Here are a few that I wish I had when we started our journey:
- Masters of Scale Podcast: Reid Hoffmann has figured out the perfect way to give back by creating a platform for other founders to give back. Every podcast is a gem. His Youtube lectures on BlitzScaling are also just as good. Diane Greene’s lecture is a personal favorite.
- Shoe Dog by Phil Knight: A non-tech memoir of creating stupendous success when you don’t own any of the conventional levers required to be successful. Phil wasn’t a manufacturing genius nor a design guru when he thought of the idea. He was a runner with an accountant’s penchant for analysis who believed everyone could be Steve Prefontaine.
- How I Built This by Guy Raz: Based on Raz’s popular podcast of the same name, the book profiles the journeys of founders across many industries. I’d make it the first-read-this book for a new founder.
- The Hard Thing about Hard Things by Ben Horowitz: As Founders’ accomplishments go, I am not in the vicinity of the zip code where Horowitz resides. But, I found myself feeling a sense of camaraderie when he described his struggles, even though I disagreed at times with his response.
Quote of the Day
The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.
–Socrates