Engineer ➝ Founder: Ty Dunn reveals the mindset shift behind one of 2025’s fastest-growing startups

What's the single biggest mindset shift that helped you go from engineer to founder? The biggest mindset shift is you have to like, realize that often as an engineer, in most situations, you kind of are in a situation where things are pretty well defined, where there isn't that much complexity, and often that is something that you collaborate with and you have really smart people around you. And some of those things are even figured out for you as an engineer to being a founder is you have to take ownership of all that. Right? You have to be the person that ultimately figures out what bets to make and how to go about testing those hypotheses you have and running the experiments that matter and letting the things go that don't. Right. I always like to say anything that's important in an early stage startup will come up again. So don't worry about creating a giant task list of all the things you want to do. If it comes up again, it will be important. If it doesn't, it probably wasn't that important. Luckily, I moved from being an engineer to a product manager to a founder, which I think actually helps you kind of with this duck trim, because as a product manager, you have a little bit more ambiguity, a little bit less defined problems, a little bit more confusion that you don't necessarily have as an engineer.