Here are the five best founder tips I’ve learned as a bunch of Found

After more than two years – and almost 100 episodes – as a bunch of TechCrunch has recently ended. I find podcastsI learned a lot about how founders approach building their startups.

I’ve heard stories about how founders know when the time is right to expand from their core product, to how startups approach hiring, to what led entrepreneurs to take the leap in the first place, and everything in between.

Although I wasn’t a founder myself, some of the learnings and advice I heard on the show stood out more than others. I’ve compiled a short and sweet list of the five best pieces of advice for founders I’ve heard on the show that are both practical and philosophical.

The founders have to lean into what they are not good at

While many of the founders talked about finding co-founders or making early hires that helped fill their experience or knowledge gaps, Rippling’s co-founder and CEO Parker Conrad he thinks the founders should do the opposite.

Conrad called the practice of hiring people to fill roles that a founder isn’t good at, or doesn’t want to do, bullshit.

“You have to find the things you hate in the company, and you have to run to them and embrace them and just really take them and focus on those things, because those are the things that will probably kill you,” Conrad. he said. “These are the things that you probably avoid because it’s not comfortable to focus on them. I’ve definitely seen it in myself, and the things that you really hate, like, that’s where you have to spend all your time.”

VCs are not always right

While the right venture capitalist can provide valuable insight and guidance to a startup, good VCs are hard to find, and even the best VCs don’t always have the best advice for every startup.

When Ashley Tyrner, the founder and CEO of FarmboxRxA direct-to-consumer box company aimed at helping to solve food deserts, pitched VCs, told them to pivot to be a lunch kit company, the hot trend of the time. Glad he ignored the advice and bootstrapped instead.

“Every VC we talked to who was actually even remotely nice to us at the time wanted us to become a meal kit,” Tyrner said. “That’s not what our focus was. We didn’t want to jump on the lunch kit bandwagon. Now looking back, I’m really glad I never raised any capital and we haven’t raised any capital to date. Most meal kits are, you know, I’m slowly dying.”

Instead, just a few years later, FarmboxRx was able to tie up with insurance companies and start sending its product boxes as part of patients’ prescriptions, a revenue stream Tyner said has been really lucrative for the company

It pays not to be the first

If you read a lot of PR pitches, as I do most days, a common thread is that many companies want to claim that they were the “first” for a technological innovation or a new market. But is the first always the best?

Jordan Nathan, the founder and CEO of the non-toxic home company carawayI wouldn’t necessarily agree. Nathan told TechCrunch that when he was preparing to launch Caraway’s first set of non-toxic cookware, he wasn’t initially thrilled that it seemed to be the last to launch in an increasingly crowded category, but it worked out. Nathan said the latest launch allowed the company to find gaps in the market left open by what had already been released, and allowed Caraway to respond to those audiences directly.

“It helped us change our color palette, it helped us change our price point, what pieces we put in the set,” Nathan said. “And while many other brands have done many things well, we have been able to create our own space in the (direct-to-consumer) kitchen world that others have not played.”

Companies should try to get to market right away, regardless of their long-term goals

While some startups build software that can start acquiring customers, and making money, within a week, the same cannot be said for startups trying to introduce deep technology or moonshot innovative companies. But that doesn’t mean these deep tech companies have to wait years to make money.

Joe Wolfel, the co-founder and CEO of Terradeptha company looking to build autonomous drones to map the ocean floor, told Found that Terradepth was very intentional about establishing its revenue streams. While it still has a ways to go before its autonomous drones travel the ocean floor, the company is looking to provide the same services to commercial and government customers in the meantime, either manually or through a dashboard, because companies they need information on the ocean floor now.

“One thing you learn pretty quickly in combat is that you can’t drive something that doesn’t move,” Wolfel said. “There’s no substitute for learning on the ground, right? We eat our own dog food every day.”

We heard a different approach to this same concept from Paul Hedrickthe founder of the western clothing company Tecovas. Hedrick told Found that he knew he wanted Tecovas to be a direct-to-consumer brand, but he didn’t want to just create a website and wait for the sales to roll in. So he started selling his boots out of the back of his car at farmers markets right away so he could get customer feedback and sales from the start.

Don’t forget to build a company around your product

When a startup is just getting off the ground, founders are focused on building a product and getting that product to market—as they probably should be. But the founders have to make sure that they don’t forget to also think about building the actual company around the product.

Gavin Ubertithe co-founder and CEO of chipmaker Etched, told Found that an initial misfortune the company had was that they did not think to create employee benefits until it was too late. Uberti said the company only realized it had waited too long when one of its employees broke his leg before the company set up health insurance — which was not a quick process to remedy.

Uberti’s story was a good reminder that when founders try to move fast and break things, it’s important for them to also take care of all the other elements necessary to build a sustainable company that takes care of its employees.