The Traits of Great Founders

I would say the characteristics of a great founder more often than not are that you're an inventor, that you're often thinking about new things, that you're a self starter, that you're passionate, and that you're a problem solver. Those are sort of common across everything. At Forerunner, people always ask us what makes a great founder, and we've consolidated it to three adjectives. Magnetic, disciplined, and visionary. The reason is your job as a founder is to sell all day long. You're selling to your investors, you're selling to your family members who are asking you why you don't have a real job. You're selling to your team who wants to quit because no one's getting paid and they don't know what they're doing. And you're like, no, don't leave. This is going to be a big thing. You're selling to every single person all day long. And so if you are not magnetic and people aren't naturally drawn to you in some way, it is really hard to do this nonstop. So the best founders in our portfolio are ones where people will drop their jobs and join. No salary, no anything, and they just want to be with the founder doing this thing. The discipline side is, I hope, a little bit obvious, but you've got like $5 in your bank account and you have a lot of things you have to accomplish. So are you the type of person that's going to know exactly what needs to be done to move the needle forward? Nothing more, nothing less. You know what it takes minimum viable product to show what you're trying to do. And that is something that we see in our best founders. Visionary is that I am not in the business of funding good companies. I am in the business and I get paid to find extraordinary outlier companies. Venture capital is only successful on outliers. And so if you're not visionary, if you're thinking, I'm going to build this great company and I think that it's going to be $50 million in five years and we're going to make $5 million of cash flow. That's amazing and that's a lot of money in your pocket, but that does not make me successful. That does not make our endowments and our LPs successful who have invested in Forerunner. And so if visionary isn't a word you would use to describe yourself or your future goals, maybe this isn't something that you want to do. The super skill going along with magnetic is that this job is all about hiring. 100% hiring. If you can hire the team to win. You don't need to be the smartest person in the room. You don't need to be the best person. You need to be the people to. You need to be the person to know who to bring onto your team and to get them there and empower them to do their job. If you're good at that, you'll be a successful founder. And the benefit there is 100% ownership. It is yours, it's your baby. And no matter how ugly it is, it's your baby. And it's fun. You know, I do think it's a lot of fun to have that type of ownership. But the key drawbacks, and I would say people don't think about this, is it's incredibly lonely. There's no one else that you can turn to because it's all on you. You have your partners and you can talk to your friends, but ultimately, when you can't make payroll, that's on your shoulders, and that is a heavy burden for anybody. So the loneliness is real. The instability, obviously, it is what it is. And the high beta is, I think, what a lot of people get excited by. It's just this huge, huge outcome potential. But with that is just a huge zero. And I think after that, it's hard to rally. The right timing here, I would say, is when you're ready. I mean, that's kind of stupid, but it's true. You'll know in your heart if you're ready to start this. I knew that I wasn't ready until I was ready. And then when the thing happened with my family, I wasn't ready anymore. And so you have to know where your risk appetite and your financial flexibility meets in the middle and crosses over with that founder bucket. It obviously helps if you have an idea and some experience in the space, but you don't need it. I mean, I think there's a lot of founders that get out there and just want to do something and they're hungry and trying stuff, test and iterate, and so you can still be successful doing that.