Precursor Ventures on what investors owe young founders: honesty about failure and the grind, without killing their fearlessness. The real trap isn't working hard enough. It's knowing when to pivot versus when to push, and having the clarity to pause and reassess instead of grinding toward a dead idea.
Ashley also argues that investors have this responsibility to be honest with young founders earlier sometimes than might feel comfortable about the failure rates and what the hard parts of being a founder actually look like. I'm curious, how do you be honest about that without getting in the way of that fearlessness that can make young founders so special?
I think one of the challenges for a lot of young first-time founders is like knowing when the answer is to change ideas versus to stick with it. And I think, um, as you mentioned, Alina, a lot of the young founders I meet have what feels like boundless energy. And so like the capacity to work isn't the issue, but not every problem is an effort problem. Some problems are, hey, you're just pointed in the wrong direction. What you really need to do is actually take a step back and like look at whether the thing that you're building makes sense, whether it's still a good idea, whether it's still worthy of your time. And I think this sort of unbridled, unbounded amount of time that young founders have sometimes means they just keep going when maybe the answer is to actually press pause.
