Every Business Needs a Founder
Teams might be what makes the success, but without a founder the story doesn’t start.
The founder is the person who takes the first step, the person who puts their head above the parapet. The one who is willing to say a daft and unlikely idea out loud and see who comes along for the ride.
They’re usually the one who gets paid last, the one who puts in more, and the one who has the most to lose if it doesn’t work out.
They’re not always the person still in charge in a decade, nor are they always the one who can drive it to full success.
The role of the founder is to recognise the opportunity in the moment. To take that opportunity and build the momentum that leads to products and services that customers and partners want.
It isn’t always a single person, it’s best when it isn’t — more to come on that soon — it could be a collective, partnership or lone stepper.
Founders have different motivations to start — but when it is mission-led it can create a compelling and authentic vision that helps others understand why they ought to come along for the ride.
There are layers of authenticity to the founding story that is an important hook to engage people who wish to collaborate or have a feeling of a shared goal. The origin story can be the thing that shows that you deeply understand the cause you’re working on, or the lived experience that led to the “eureka” moment. It can show that you’re not just doing this because it’s lucrative, but that you also believe.
None of this is to say that the founder is the most important person, or that the success comes solely down to the founder. This is about the phase of the founder.
A new company, or project, is like a newborn child. It is a wholly new thing which we will all learn to recognise and eventually take seriously.
The fantastic Sapiens* by Yuval Noah Harari uses the example of Peugeot to explain very well how a company is nothing but an imagined construct. This is a lot of what I was talking about in Ideas, Echoes, Ripples, Truth.
The founder is the only one who has belief at the start, and their biggest goal is to turn others into believers.
It also isn’t necessarily about having a grand vision, but storytelling will play a key role. If you have too grand of a vision you can get hung up on that rather than being agile and adapting to the clues that the world is trying to throw your way.
No Founders
There’s another personal bugbear in this too, and that’s around leadership void.
I find this sometimes^ in the world of co-operatives, it is so hard to move things forward when you need consensus, especially when you are not profiling who is influencing those decisions in an attempt to be inclusive.
To move forward at pace you need to get to consensus fast, and that’s where I think narrow leadership makes a difference.
Of course, you don’t always need to move at pace, but often the sooner you get moving the sooner you’re creating value for your communities and beneficiaries, or learning about what isn’t working to implement changes for the next iteration.
When a project has a mission or objective which benefits many varied stakeholders and is on a slower clock then different approaches to leadership are appropriate.
That isn’t to say that all leadership comes in a single form. Conscious leadership is an important trend which has a lot of material supporting it to help you to learn how to lead in a more open way which again emphasises the point here that the founder is not the most important person to a cause’s long-term success.
This isn’t heropreneur nonsense, this is about understanding how to recognise the broader role founders play.
The founder isn’t a single person, co-founders are even more important — we will talk more about this soon. It isn’t a fixed profile of the extrovert — more often than not — man, who talks about their vision and how wonderful they are.
Founders are like leading singers, they don’t need much help and support to get the attention — they usually already command a lot of it.
But whether you’re a founder now, tomorrow, or a long-time from now, recognise that your role is different and comes with a greater deal of responsibility.
*I’m not exaggerating when I say that reading that book changed my life and drove me to near breakdown, so read it at risk!
^I’m not having a dig at co-ops, I probably shouldn’t need to put a disclaimer but in my experience of social media it is probably sensible. The co-operative model is an excellent tool for certain organisations and causes. It just doesn’t fit with what I’m describing here.
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