Founder mentality

A year of Clay

This marks my official 1 year anniversary at Clay. Hard to believe it's already been that long. Everyone older than me always said that time passes faster as you age, but experiencing it firsthand is another thing entirely.

I suppose it's logical. Every second that passes represents an ever diminishing fraction of your life thus far. When you're born, the first second is 100% of your time on earth. When you turn 30, every second isn't even a billionth.

Or as a great poet once said: "the years start coming, and they don't stop coming."

Learning from founders

Over my career, and especially at Clay, I've had the privilege of meeting many startup founders and I've come to greatly admire anyone who has the courage to found their own company. While each founder's journey is quite different, I've observed some commonalities in the successful ones that I'll attempt to imperfectly articulate here.

To be clear, I've never founded a company myself. So why should you listen to me in the first place?

• For the last 4 years of my career, I've built technical partnerships with over a dozen (and counting) founders and their respective companies
• Clay has a lot of them: former founders seeking stability, agency owners who built their businesses on top of Clay, and future founders- the number one reason engineers have left Clay since I joined is to found their own companies. Pretty cool!
• I'm married to a founder. She's pretty cool as well.

But, you be the judge :) I don't claim to have a particularly novel perspective, this is just my spin on things.

A founder's mindset

Conviction

You need a lot of belief to build your own business. Belief in your idea. Belief in your investors. Belief in your founding team.

Above all, as cliché as it sounds, you need to believe in yourself. Your ideas, investors and entire team will likely all change throughout the journey, but the only reliable constant is that you and your abilities will still be there plugging away.

That conviction is what keeps you going even after 6 years of wandering in the wilderness (like Clay) with little to no revenue. Because sometimes it takes a borderline foolhardy level of self-belief to succeed.

Resilience

A new company is default dead. So many things have to go right for you to even get started, and so many problems you encounter are existential:

• Make a wrong hire? There goes months of runway as you struggle to manage them out, and find their replacement.

• Customers unhappy? It's on you to fix it. ASAP. Before your competitors swoop in to fix it for them.

• Need funding? Well, you better find it soon or get ready to painfully cut costs.

A founder takes ultimate responsibility for their business' outcomes, making imperfect decisions every day and suffering their consequences. Some of which will unknowingly sow the seeds of your own destruction. You need a lot of mental fortitude to do that day-in-day-out for years on end.

Frankly I don't know how so many stay sane. I know quite a few do yoga?

Hustle

Success at the start follows a simple formula:

success = luck x talent x effort

Notice how you only control one of those factors. Not only does that mean working more (996 isn't too far off), it means you're always "working" even when you're not working.

Always be selling: your product to potential customers, your abilities to other founders, your vision to potential employees (because you certainly won't get the best talent on money alone).

And the source of your hustle has to be intrinsic, because you won't get much external validation until you've already put in a ton of work to begin with.

I am not a founder

I am not a founder. I've seen what it takes and I don't have it in me.

And that's ok! I can mimic the traits I admire without the absolute, existential dread that comes with actually starting a company.

Nike, eat your heart out

Founder or not, if I were to summarize the biggest I've learned at Clay so far, it's this: even if you don't know what you're doing, you should just do it. You'll figure it out as you go, just like everyone else.

Turns out Nike had it right all along :swoosh: