Founder Fundamentals: Building a Strong Product & Culture

Establish a routine for daily customer interaction to gather valuable feedback and insights.

Reflect on your strengths (e.g., engineering, sales) and identify potential biases (e.g., prioritizing product over customer feedback). Use the '5 Whys' technique to dig deep into the root causes.

“If you're an engineer, if you love building great products, you will be naturally biased for spending more time on product.”

Track how you spend your time for a week to identify areas where you can deprioritize distractions. Apply Parkinson's Law: work expands to fill the time available.

“Try to deprioritize everything else. None of that really matters until you find a strong product market fit.”

Visualize yourself working on the startup for the next 10 years and assess your enthusiasm. Imagine your funeral and what people would say about your life's work (Meaning gamification).

“Imagine yourself doing that for the next ten years, which is very, very hard.”

Ensure your startup idea aligns with your personal strengths and passions. Practice the Ikigai framework: what you love, what you are good at, what the world needs, what you can be paid for.

“But a lot of founders pick ideas that are not really aligned to their own strengths.”

Conduct workshops with early employees to define the company's core values. This should include exercises to build consensus and create shared ownership.

“We do workshops, we try to get the early employees and the management, like the founders, to get together, spend maybe a day talking about core values and the culture of the company.”

Regularly assess the current state of the company culture and identify areas for improvement. Conduct anonymous surveys to gather honest feedback.

“And then I start to see a lot of good people leave first and people who are a little bit toxic and were not doing a good job, but they were great at like selling to their senior bosses.”

Seek out people who are one or two stages ahead of you to learn from their experiences. Build a diverse network of mentors with different skillsets and backgrounds.

“So my general advice is continue to seek out companies or people that are maybe one stage or two stage ahead of you.”

Define your end game and work backwards to figure out the steps you need to take to get there. Apply the concept of 'first principles thinking' to deconstruct complex problems.

“Almost like Amazon's or Jeff Bezos mantra of working backwards. Think about what your end game or next stage look like and then figure out your steps to getting there and who do you need to work with upgrading or coaching your existing team or recruiting from somewhere else to really level your leadership?”