Finding Your Why as a Founder
The Mindset for Something New
As we reach the end of Launch University: Ideation 2020, the last week of the class is a catch-all topic called “Founder 101”. While meant to cover the basic legal, financial, and personal aspects of building a business, the first place to start is always “Why”. I’ve been doing founder-focused education for seven years in Tri-Cities and by far the biggest obstacle is the dreaded “yourself”.
Aside from pitfalls like negative self-talk about the future ahead to bogging down in minutiae like what kind of entity to incorporate — hint: you don’t need one to get started! Not even to make your first sale in most cases. The worst is failing to make a focused, positive mission statement as to why the stress and sacrifice of entrepreneurship should be invited into one’s pacific existence. Fortune and glory will only get you so far.
Are Your Reasons Bigger Than Your Excuses?
We spend much so much of Launch wrapped up in “Customer Obsession”, we need to take a minute to talk about your obsessions. Hopefully, the “Why” for the customer identified in the first step of Customer Validation has a personal connection woven into it, but perhaps linking the economics of your business to the calling of your life is more tenuous.
Do you need a bigger Why? The concept of entrepreneurship is not a lofty aspiration. The word entrepreneur is not a job title. It’s a system of learning-focused habits that drive daily progress. For many people early on, it means a side-hustle where they have to grow a seedling before they can have any shade. Will your Why get you up early or stay up late enough to grow that sprout like a relentless yet patient farmer who may not even have time to make the right tools?
Enough Why to roll back and forth on the ground until it surrenders?
Enough Why to grind up rocks in your teeth until they become soil?
Enough Why to plow using nothing but your fingernails?
Have you written down your Why? It’s got to be something so powerful it will sustain you through the harrowing early days where you get a lot of doubt and not a lot of traction. It has to inspire your co-founders to commit to the same rocky journey. It needs to hold back the fear during the decade — yes, 10 years — it takes for the average business to play out its life-cycle. If it’s not at least committed to paper, you’re probably not committed to being part of your life.
My Why
My Why for Fuse Accelerator is to “Make Tri-Cities, WA a World-Class Place for Startups”. I wrote that down in 2013, upon joining as the first employee for a Danish consulting company opening its first offices in America — right in Richland. At the time, it was somewhat controversial to believe the world becoming “flat” meant you could make an impact from anywhere.
Here we have 7 years later and Fuse is providing a nexus for 21st-century skills servicing global audience and I’ve gone from achieving the uncommon outcome of making technology for all 5,000 employees at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory to having the good fortune to have had 8.5 million users spread across almost every country in the world at LiveTiles.
Why this why? Because my daughters are growing up at a different time than I did in this town, but in 2013 Tri-Cities seemed to have the same sensibilities from when I was coming of age in the 90s. If I want to prevent economics from driving my daughters away from me once they need to start earning for themselves, I need to cultivate a place that imposes no limits on their unlimited potential and connects to the global opportunities that will drive growth for the rest of the century.
Are Your People Ready to Support You?
I like to say that “The World is Made of People”. It’s not dirt, wood, or concrete. It’s people and their relationships. As you move out of your comfort zone to build something new, who is going to stay in your corner? Are they prepared to join you as emotional sherpas as you climb the mountain or are they struggling to gasp thin air, but unable to speak?
The most obvious person to connect with here is your life partner if you have one. From the diversion of time and attention invested in this new adventure, living with a potentially constrained budget once you go full-time, to being the one to catch you in the very real potential of crashing emotionally, this relationship is the foundation for your success and needs to be your life vest, not your anchor.
I must admit that your family may otherwise a mixed bag. If someone doesn’t have a positive previous experience with either personally starting something or knowing someone who started something, they can rapidly become your biggest detractors in an attempt to “protect you” or “encourage you to keep your options open”. Most people have not lived many “all-in-or-fold” moments in their life like the sustained commitment of changing the world, so don’t blame them for not understanding — maybe just don’t tell them if you don’t need to right now.
Your co-founder(s) is the next pillar. Again, the average business commitment is ten years. Are you ready to be married in the eyes of capitalism longer than most people stay actually married in America nowadays? Beyond basic criteria questions like “Would you let them watch your kids?”, consider some of these extraordinary situations I’ve seen or lived: Are they ready to swear an affidavit in a lawsuit to protect them from their own family? Are they going to calmly talk about personal growth moments after losing tens of thousands of dollars? Are they ready to be your ballast if you show up in a bad situation with only your car and your kids in the back?
Finally, it’s important to find a mentor. Early on it can be as simple as a single consistent role-model that constantly gives you something to read, hear, and practice in your life to emulate their strategies, but as you start to launch your idea, you need to find a real human person. Ideally someone with 10+ years of experience in your domain(s) of operation and achievements relevant to your planned course ahead. They don’t need to be consulted about every topic or agree with your every action, but there is no replacement for their outside perspective and grounding experience.
My People
In my life, I have many family and friends who support me — from my in-laws to my community. Most of all my wife, Morgan, who has in many ways put up with more travails around my misadventures than I have. She’s taken me dinner at work, to the airport in the morning, and to the hospital in the middle of the night (more than once) — all while giving me the indulgence of side-hustle weekends and constant positive support.
My partners-in-crime over the years have advanced over the years from strangers on the internet trying to build a video game to seasoned professionals ready to take their careers to the next level. While we didn’t really get far business-wise, the venture where I maybe have learned the most about business and life would be with P. Simon Mahler trying to build software to grow small businesses. It wasn’t just a dramatic chapter in business, it was a traumatic time in life, and he really did make good on not just our contract as founders, but our commitments as partners. He helped me do the right thing and our work together was the demo that clinched my job at the fastest growing tech company in Australia.
As much as I extoll their virtues to others, I must admit I’ve always been inconsistent with my mentors. I do well overall extracting wisdom from leaders at work and one of the best years of my life was while committed to a mastermind group, but even now I’m a free agent on mentoring. Note to self: fix that!
Conclusion
It takes inspiration to find that vision of how the world should be, but it takes grit to make the world change to match it. The constellation of principles within and people without will never feel “ready” when you’re pushing beyond your comfort zone, but equipped with your Why you can start preparing and with some luck, you’ll find success beyond fortune and glory.
Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity — Seneca
Erik Ralston is lucky enough to be an innovator with 18 years of education and experience, having spent the last five years in leadership at the fastest growing tech company in Australia. Erik is also co-founder of Fuse Accelerator in the emerging community of Tri-Cities, WA, where he works on connecting people and sharing knowledge to turn new ideas into growing startups. You can find him on LinkedIn, Twitter, or the next Fuse event.
