This is what it really takes to be a founder.

I'm Furqan. I'm the founder of Founders Inc. It's a lab here in San Francisco that we built to basically help emerging technology founders get started. I built Founders Inc. as a place because I wish I had this when I was growing up, when I was doing things. I spent maybe the first 10 years of my early career wanting to do stuff and not having people around me, the tribe that I needed to kind of go do stuff. And so I've got a chance to see a lot of different things happen and I wanted to share a little bit of that story. And so like a true founder, I did iterate on my title after I told Umer and the team. So today I really want to talk about what it takes to be a founder and what you need to do to kind of make that happen. And so we'll go a little bit into some stories, some items, some things that hopefully you can use to start your own journey and make things happen. And so, little just personal story and background on myself. I got started in computers very young. So my earliest memories are with my dad and playing with an XT computer pre-internet and messing around with bulletin board services. There's a few older folks here, they might know what that is. But for the younger folks, it was, you had to dial into a computer in your neighborhood just to talk to somebody before the internet. And When I saw the internet, it was kind of like this really mind-blowing moment of like, hey, there's this opportunity, this place. You could just put something on the internet. You could make a page, you could type some words, you could throw it out there, and anyone could do that. That was kind of cool. So me as a kid, as a young preteenager, I could just type something in what was called HTML and press a button, and the whole world could potentially see it. That was awesome. And, you know, like most things, like I had a few different hobbies. I was into cars, I was into computers. And, you know, my goal in life at that point as a high schooler was just do stuff that I enjoyed. And if I could just keep doing that for a little bit longer, that'd be awesome. And growing up in the Bay Area here, what that turned into was, you know, learning a little bit of, you know, programming as a kid, learning a little bit of HTML. it basically meant that there was this industry forming, dot-com. I don't know who remembers dot-com. And what that meant was there was these opportunities. And turned out my dad was working at a startup and they were looking for somebody to build a little interface. If you've ever used like a Wi-Fi router, you have this little Linksys interface and they were building a router for hotels and They needed somebody to make it. But I was like, hey, could you just come show the CEO some of the stuff you've been playing with on the side? And so I went and I showed him this thing and they're like, oh wow, this is cool. Can you make us an interface? Can you do this? And I was like, yeah, yeah, of course. And so got this little internship for the summer. It was a little awkward. I was kind of 15 or 16 and working with a bunch of older folks in a little cubicle and writing this thing and making it happen. But it was a lot of fun. And I actually didn't even think about it as a job. I'm like, I would've did this for free and you're gonna pay me for it? It's incredible. And so that energy is just what I just kept wanting to lean in on. And I was never good at school. My GPA, not very good, didn't finish college and stuff like that. But I just kind of kept doing my passion and wanting to do things. And as a 17-year-old, that turned into an e-commerce company in 2001 where I was buying and selling computer parts. And it was kind of accidental. The goal was to just buy enough stuff so I get my thing for free. I wanted to make a computer case. I wanted it to look cool. Like I said, I was into cars and computers. You know, with cars, people would make them go faster. With computers, you would overclock them, make them go faster. But cars, they would put these lights and put a paint job. And I kept looking at this beige case and I'm like, this is kind of weird. Like, I want to make that look nice. And so we ended up building this company called casemod.com, and it was a way to basically make your computer look cool at a clock it. And, you know, accidentally it turned into something massive. My brother came home from college for spring break and he was like, what's going on here in the living room, in the garage? And yeah, we're shipping these things, we got this e-commerce store. And he joined and we started doing a lot of stuff, and that turned into accidentally into a business that did millions of dollars of revenue in the first few years. It was one of the first lessons that I would take away for folks that are thinking about being founders. Actually, before that, Who here is already a founder in a company? Raise your hand. All right. Who here wants to be a founder? All right. So first lesson, you can just be a founder. You can just do things. You don't need anyone's permission. And a lot of people come up to me and they ask me like, oh, can you write the first check so I could go do that thing? And I'm like, okay, what have you built? He said, no, no, I'm waiting to go become that. I said, well, what are you waiting for? Oh, don't I need an investor? Don't I need like permission? It's like, no, you don't. You can just do things. And if you're not doing things, you got to ask yourself why. And that's the most important thing. Like, being a founder is actually not glamorous. It's the hard path that's likely not going to have success. You're more likely to fail than succeed. It's not the average weekend hike. It's Mount Everest. It's going to be hard. It's going to be chaotic. It's going to be something that isn't very easy. You know, a lot of people talk to me about startups and, you know, whenever we're hiring somebody in one of our companies, I always ask this question, like, why do you want to join this startup? Like, you're purposely choosing to wake up with lava around you. Why are you choosing that? If you can't answer that why, you should not do it. But if you have a desire, a passion, a want to do something on your own, to take your own path, to choose your own destiny, That's the thing that you want to do. The success is not what you're looking for. The success is you get a chance to do this for the rest of your life. And I think as a young kid, I didn't know a lot. And I would say I would accidentally keep failing forward. But one thing I knew was if I could just push away adulthood, like I don't want to go do this college thing, I don't want a regular job. If I could just keep pushing that out as long as possible, that was my goal. Turned out luckily I picked computers and not cars because it was a better industry to kind of be in. And turned out over a course of 10, 15 years, I finally found a set of folks that I could just dig into and work with. And one of them's here today, this guy over, Hassan. You know, you guys should find him. He joined me in a lot of the early ventures. He also was a kind of technology nerd like me. We used to talk about Linux and computer stuff and just kind of like stuff that we were excited about, passionate about. And one thing that was cool is we had a lot of fun just doing these things. And it turned out that some of these things are valuable. Other people will pay you to do these things. And that's the beauty of being a founder is that can you get paid for your passion? And can you just get paid enough to keep doing it? That's success criteria one, and that's what I'd be thinking about. And so the why is the most important thing in everything we do. And if you want to be a founder, get that why right. Figure out why you want to do it. If it's to make money, this might not be the best way to make money. Like, you know, I don't know if you guys ever heard of FIRE or Fat FIRE. These guys that, you know, on Reddit, they're saving up, they optimize everything, they have the maximum credit card points. That's probably the best way to make money. If you just want money, you want to retire early, go do that. It's a predictable system that you can go do that. Now, if you want this particular path, you enjoy the challenge, you enjoy the unknown. So for some reason, the chaos wakes you up. You know, you don't need coffee. You just got to get woken up by a pager duty alarm. when our servers are down. That's what it takes to kind of be a founder and the want and the why. And you gotta enjoy that. You gotta be excited by it. Some of the latest nights we've had building startups with the different folks were some of the most memorable. They were the most fun. And they were fun because not that the thing was hard, but it was fun and exciting because that's what we really wanted to do. These are the things that woke us up. These are the things that we're built for. And I would just ask yourself that and make sure that's what you want. Now, if that's what you want and you truly, truly want that, let's go on the hard path. And there's a lot of things you need to do to kind of make that happen. And we'll kind of dive into some of that. And so I just wanted to first talk about that why, because I think it's exceptionally important for us to do anything. You need this inner drive, right? Second thing you need to do is you need to find people around you. that just look like yourself and want to understand the same things. And this is actually why I built Founders Inc. I just wanted to build a box where I could put all these founders into. And, you know, for many years I was angel investing, I was running a company, Bebo. We sold that to Amazon, and I was thinking about what am I going to do next. I had, you know, been one of the early folks at AppLovin, and that was doing well. I had got into Bitcoin and Ethereum early, and you started examining like, what do you want to do now when you can do everything? And I was like, oh, I want to become an investor. I want to be an angel investor. Sounds cool. Turned out angel investing was really boring. It was cool to meet a bunch of awesome entrepreneurs and talk to them and get excited by them and then write them a check. And then I was a monthly update away. I get this email every month of the things I'm doing, but like, there was no fulfillment in that. It wasn't exciting. It wasn't something that brought me joy and energy. And so I was like, okay, well, there's something different here. And so So I started just talking to some of the founders and I'm like, hey, hey, I'm gonna write you a check, or I wanna know what you're doing. Meet me at this coffee shop. Or I was kind of doing my earnout at Twitch as a part of the Amazon acquisition. And at a company like Twitch, they don't let you work as hard as you want. I'm like, I wanna do more. They're like, no, no, no, slow down, take your time. And I'm like, well, this is not gonna work. So let me go use my lunch and my hours to go do something else. And so I met this guy Farzad. I don't know if anyone's here, sort of BuildSpace, but he built this awesome community of You know, Entrepreneurs at Google. Yeah, shout out Parzha. And I met him at Philz Coffee here in San Francisco, and I was like, hey, you're at this gaming company. What do you want to do? He's like, I really want to get into education. I want to go and change homeschool. I know, yeah, that's random, but why do I do that? And he's like, I never liked high school. I wanted to craft my own path. I wanted to do these other things. And so I was like, okay, well, what's stopping you? Same thing. He wanted permission. And I was like, okay, well, what do you need? He's like, well, I have this job. I got to pay some rent. And I was like, okay, well, how much is that? How much is 6 months of money? And he did some math and he's like, oh, I need like $8,000. You're living in San Francisco. That's not going to be enough. So let's do some real math. And I was like, okay, well, what if I gave you $25,000 right now? What would you do? He's like, first, don't do that. No, no, no. Let's say, let's play this out. If I give you 25 grand today, Like, what's the plan? He's like, I don't know. I'm like, all right, well, here's the plan. I'm gonna give you $25 grand, but every Thursday we're gonna spend 2 hours together, and I'm just gonna help you think about your idea and just work on it over and over and over and over again. And we did that. I probably spent 2 hours a week with him for 2 and a half years. And when we stopped doing that, he would text me and say, hey, it's weird that we're not meeting every Thursday. But it was really exciting for me, and it was fun, and it was a way for me to not only invest my money but my time. into something. It's not like there's some exceptional advice I can give. It's just the fact that you got somebody that understands what you're saying, these founders. When we were running Peebo, me and this guy Sean Khoury, every time we were part of this idea lab and we'd come up with new ideas, go into new industries, and every time we went into a new idea, we would do this thing. And this is something that Sean was fantastic at is, hey, we don't know anyone in this industry, who might not know the technology, who might not know anything, how do we go do that? And so we'd create these masterminds. And it's not like the Alex Hormozi Mastermind or these other things. It was like, you know what? Everyone needs to eat dinner. So how about this? We just make dinner happen. We get 5 or 7 interesting founders and put them in a room and we all sit around and just talk about the things you're going through, like the founder problems. And what are founder problems? They might be your investors, they might be your co-founder, they might be your employees. you can't go to those people to solve those problems. So who do you go to? You go to other people that kind of speak the same language. And so this was like the find your tribe moment for us, and the light bulb went off. Like, wait a minute, these other folks understand my pain. And they didn't give us any particular advice. They actually asked pretty stupid basic questions, but you would just tell them what's going on and they're like, well, Like, so then what did you do? Or, you know, like, how about this? Or, okay, when I was doing that thing, we had something similar come up and I made that happen. And it was just the fact that you could find somebody that could speak the same language. And so you gotta find your tribe. That's literally why we built Founders Inc. was I wanted founders to have a box where they could just look around and have these people next to them. And it started as a Discord server. I talked to about 100 founders And I wanted to ask them like, hey, what should I do? And I thought I was gonna go from an angel investor to a venture capitalist, go raise a giant fund and deploy more money. And they all described something like this, like, hey, I don't have somebody that understands my problems. And so you wanna be a founder, you can already do it. You don't need permission. What you now need to do is find other people like you that understand what you're going through, that can be a part of that journey. Don't look for mentors, don't look for advice. Nobody can tell you how to do it. Likely you're doing something that nobody else has ever done before. Even if it's a similar business, it's a new era. Every 5 or 10 years, the world significantly changes. And I started in dot-com era and I got a chance to see social, mobile, big data, ML, computer vision. I've been a part of all these industries and now I am. Things are significantly different. It used to be go raise a lot of money, go build a big company, go hire hundreds and thousands of people. That's not how companies are going to look like anymore. Content creation is so powerful, the distribution mechanism. Every single company is a content creator now. It wasn't like that 10 years ago. It was SEO and programmatic advertising. So things are different. What you're charting right now hasn't been done anymore. Hasn't been done, so you can't ask for advice. You want people that understand your language and what you're going to go through, and can just ask you very basic, simple things, and just be a part of that journey. And if you don't find that tribe, it's really hard. And if you guys ever meet Farzad, ask him. He was a solo founder. He used to call me the "Hey, you're like the hidden founder in the back. People don't know you were the co-founder." It's like he needed somebody to talk to. And that's why it was effective and it was useful for him. And the last thing I'll kind of leave you with, kind of one of the last points is it is a long game. And people say that, oh, it's a marathon, not a sprint. It's a road trip. We're going to go to this end destination. It's the journey. And all of these things are true. That's why people say that. Even though they're cliché, sometimes cringe, but they say that because it's true. And after going through so many companies, Them reaching the peak, them reaching some of the success, some of the failures. The funny thing is the end moment doesn't feel like it. I remember when Apple Oven was first like, oh, it's going to be bought and it's going public. And Shawn was asking me, how does it feel? I'm like, it feels exactly the same as it felt yesterday. Like nothing actually feels different because the thing that we enjoy as founders, as builders, as people that are going our own course, it's actually the day-to-day that we get excited about. And it is occurring, and you got to prepare yourself for it. You can't get too high on your highs, you can't get too low on your lows, you know. And so I would think about what does it take to go the long distance, to do this for a long time. The best success to me is I get a chance to do this for the rest of my life. For me, the worst thing would have been go sit at Meta or some large company and just be on a team and do a random thing and get approval from somebody else. That felt really boring. It's like, you want to be a founder? Think about the why. If that's your why, like that's boring to you and you'd be excited about doing something else, that's the reason you should do it. Figure out the why, find your tribe, and get yourself ready for the long term. And if you're interested in Founders Inc., if you're interested in building something in emerging tech, hit me up. I'm on Twitter. I'm around. We have a lab here in San Francisco, and so let me know. And so I got a bunch of signs going up, tying stuff up, and so I got to get off stage. Thank you. Appreciate your time, and, you know, shout out to Uber and the team here. This is awesome. Woo!