In this YouTube talk, Peter Sorgenfrei shares four core pieces of advice for first‑time founders. First, he stresses that plans will frequently go off‑track and founders should expect and accept constant setbacks as a normal part of building a company. Second, he recommends making five new people aware of your existence every day through public‑facing activities like LinkedIn posts, outreach, or targeted networking, rather than relying on random meet‑ups. Third, he emphasizes personal health and energy management—adequate sleep, nutrition, exercise, and social life—so founders can operate at peak performance and recognize when to sprint versus conserve energy. Finally, he advises founders to proactively prepare for conflicts with co‑founders, board members, investors, and employees by developing tactical processes, documentation, and mediation strategies. He closes by inviting feedback and topic suggestions.
Chapters
I meet a fair amount of first-time founders and they always ask me, so how do I do it? How did you do it? What are some of the things that I need to look out for as I get started? And it's always hard to give blanket advice for anybody starting out, but I have a couple of things that I typically share with them. First things first is prepare for everything not to go as planned. Right. So I know you understand that what you're planning on doing may not go as you think it will, but I don't think you fully understand what that means. So just remember every single day or when you have setbacks or when things are changing, that this is how it's supposed to be. This is what it actually means to build a company, to have unexpected things happen on a very frequent basis. The second thing I talk about is make sure that 5 new people know that you exist every single day, 7 days a week. I'm not talking about selling in the beginning necessarily. I'm just talking about making sure you take care of your network, making sure you talk to potential customers, make sure you talk to potential hires. It can be by being public about what you're doing. So like I do, write a lot on LinkedIn. That's a way to make sure that five new people know you exist every day. It can be phone calls, it can be emails. I think a lot of first-time founders make the mistake of going to a bunch of like meetups and networking meetings and stuff. And while those are fun, they're also kind of random in a way because you don't really control the conversation or you don't really get your message across and. And they're just, they're really time-consuming. So I always encourage people just to be very public with what they're doing. And thankfully, this build-in-public movement has now been happening for a while. So that goes along with that trend. So that's number 2. Number 3 is to take care of yourself. And these are obviously not in prioritized order because then I would have started with taking care of yourself. But what that means is that you need to get enough sleep. You need to get enough food that is good for you. You need to get enough exercise, and you need to have social interactions and do things that have nothing to do with your company. Even when you feel like you need to hustle and work all the time, you don't. Actually, you will discover as you get later in your career, I tell them that you're more like a gazelle or like a Messi, which is you kind of wait around, and then when the moment is right, then when you That's when you exert all your energy to deliver the results that you need. I see that in my own work. There are many days where I actually don't do much for a long period of time, and then I have these spurts of doing much more than most people in a few hours. And I think that that goes for many of us. It's it's a question of understanding when your energy is at its highest and when your delivery can be at. The best. And then the last point I talked to them about is you will have conflicts with your founder, co-founder. You will have challenges with your board. You will have challenges with your investors. So you better start getting ready to understand how to deal with those on a personal level, but also sort of tactically speaking, how do you actually deal with a challenge or a conflict with your co-founder or with an employee or with an investor or with the board? What happens in that situation? How do you prepare yourself tactically speaking in terms of writing things down that you want to make sure you present in a certain way or having a process for mediation and meetings with them? But the better prepared you are for these potential challenges and conflicts, the better you'll do. So those are the, those are the 4 things that I talk to first-time founders about to set them up for success. And then of course there's a million other things you need to do, but I thought those were relevant to share to those in the audience who are first-time founders who are considering to become a founder of a company. If you found this helpful, I would love it if you would let me know in the comments or in return email or whichever way that, that you're seeing this. And of course, as always, suggest other topics or other things that I can talk about that would be helpful to you and hopefully to many others.
