Founder Mindset

I've built a handful of companies. The ones that actually worked all followed the same shape — and it's close to the opposite of what most founders are told to do. Build the thing. Set a foundation under it. Hand it to someone who can scale it. Then go do it again. For years I thought the handoff was me failing. You start something, pour yourself into it, and then… you leave? It felt like abandonment. Now I think it's the whole point. My job is to make something exist and make it stand on its own — not to be the reason it keeps standing. There's research that reframed this for me. Studying 200+ startups, Noam Wasserman found that founders are most likely to be pushed out right after their biggest wins. Not their failures — their wins. Because hitting the milestone changes the job underneath them. Inventing and scaling reward different instincts, and the thing that made you great at the first often makes you the bottleneck in the second. So I stopped treating my exit as a threat and started treating it as a design requirement. If I build it right, it shouldn't need me. Durability doesn't come from a founder's presence — it comes from the people, process, and structure that outlast any one person. The test I use now is simple: if I stepped away for 90 days, what would quietly break? Wherever the answer is "everything," that's not a vacation problem. It's a design problem. If you stepped away for 90 days — what would quietly break first? …more

My first business got me sent to the principal's office. I was a kid, and my mom taught me a trick that felt like magic: buy a pack of Hubba Bubba at the grocery store for 25 cents, break it into individual pieces, and sell each piece for 25 cents. A quarter's worth of gum became a dollar twenty-five. I ran the whole operation out of my school locker. I had regulars. I had a supply chain. I understood distribution before I'd ever heard the word. Then a teacher noticed a kid moving product out of a locker with a steady line of customers and came to the obvious conclusion: I was dealing drugs. It was Hubba Bubba. I got hauled in to explain myself. Looking back, that little gum hustle taught me the thing I still believe about entrepreneurship: it's not some rarefied skill you learn in a boardroom. It's just noticing where you can add value and bringing something a little closer to the people who want it. That instinct shows up early — usually before you have a word for it. What was your first "business"? Drop it in the comments — I bet it started earlier than you think. 🎙️ From my conversation with Julia Lucidi on the Founder Tactics podcast. Full episode: https://youtu.be/M58Dnn2UAlM …more

I understood distribution before I'd ever heard the word. I was a kid selling gum out of a locker. Entrepreneurship isn't a boardroom skill. It's noticing where you can add value — and most founders were doing it long before they had a name for it. …more

Talent, timing, network — none of it matters if you quit before the moment arrives. Most founders don't quit because they failed. They quit because they haven't succeeded yet — and in a hard moment, those feel identical. They're not. The breakthrough is closer than it feels. …more

"Our marketing isn't working." I've heard that in almost every company I've been part of. It's rarely where the problem actually lives. Years ago I watched a startup tear itself apart over exactly this. Sales blamed marketing for weak leads. Marketing blamed sales for fumbling the ones they sent. Both were sure, both were loud, and both were wrong. The real problem was two doors down, in the product. The UX team had rolled out a new version built on a new mental model. The old product worked like email: you create a message, attach a big file, hit send. Everyone already knew how to do that. The new one worked like a shared, collaborative file system — cleaner on paper, but it asked users to think in a way they didn't yet think. They opened it and didn't get it. That confusion didn't show up with a label that said "mental-model mismatch." It showed up as soft demos, stalled trials, and a sales team and a marketing team pointing at each other. The symptom surfaced at the front of the funnel. The cause was sitting in engineering. Once we accepted that and reshaped the experience to feel like email again — meeting people inside the mental model they already had, instead of the one we wished they had — it unlocked everything. This pattern shows up in the data too. When CB Insights studied hundreds of failed startups, the headline cause was "ran out of money." But they were careful to call that the final event, not the reason. The real reasons lived upstream — the product didn't fit how the market actually thought. The empty bank account was just where it finally became visible. Marketing and sales are usually the windows, not the wound. When they're both struggling, I've learned to stop refereeing the fight at the window and go find the wound. What's the visible problem you keep trying to fix — and what might actually be underneath it? …more

People ask what I actually "do." The honest answer: I build something from nothing, get it standing on its own, hand it to someone who can scale it — then go do it again. That's the whole model. Build, set the foundation, hand off, repeat. For a long time I didn't have language for it, so I just looked like someone who kept leaving things. Four startups. A university incubator. Products and programs that had been stalled for years. I'd get them working and move on. It took me a while to see the pattern wasn't restlessness. It was a role. I'm a 0→1 builder. My job is to take an idea everyone agrees should exist and make it real, durable, and no longer dependent on me. The moment it can run without me is the moment I've done the job — not the moment I've failed at it. But that model only works because of the other half: an operator who takes the foundation and compounds it. I invent and establish. They scale and optimize. Neither of us does the other's job particularly well — and that's the point. If you're an operator who loves scaling something someone else started from scratch, that's the other half of this equation. Curious who relates. …more

Halfway through the year: What's one belief about your business that changed in the last 6 months? Not a tactic. Not a tool. A belief. The answer usually says more about your growth than your revenue does. …more

Most founders I work with avoid customer discovery. Not because they don't understand the theory. Because it surfaces uncomfortable truths. When you sit down with a potential customer and ask the right questions, you're not just testing assumptions. You're inviting reality to challenge the story you've been telling yourself about your product, your positioning, and your market. That's hard. It's easier to keep building. Easier to refine the pitch. Easier to convince yourself that more features, better messaging, or a bigger launch will solve the problem. But avoidance has a cost. You burn months building something nobody wants. You misread demand signals. You position yourself in a crowded space because you never learned what makes you different in the eyes of the people who matter. I've seen this across four startups and dozens of advisory engagements. The founders who get traction fastest are not the ones with the best ideas. They're the ones willing to hear that their assumptions are wrong and adjust accordingly. Customer discovery is not a validation exercise. It's a correction mechanism. The goal is not to hear what you want to hear. The goal is to learn what you need to know before you make expensive decisions. That means asking questions that expose gaps in your thinking. It means listening to what customers are actually trying to solve, not what you hope they need. It means being willing to abandon ideas you were excited about yesterday. The discomfort is the signal. If the conversation doesn't make you rethink something, you're probably asking the wrong questions. After 25 years of building and advising startups, the pattern is clear. The founders who embrace this discomfort early save themselves time, money, and wasted opportunity. The ones who avoid it pay for it later in slower growth, misaligned product decisions, and go-to-market strategies that never gain traction. What assumption did customer discovery force you to abandon? …more