Give Yourself Permission to Be a Founder

There is a persistent myth about entrepreneurship: that founders are a particular kind of person.

They studied the right subject. They started young. They grew up around business. They understand finance. They can code. They know investors. They are naturally confident. Somewhere along the way, somebody effectively handed them permission to call themselves an entrepreneur.

The stories from Founder Friday suggest something very different.

Across conversations with founders from remarkably different backgrounds, one idea keeps appearing: you don't become a founder because somebody decides you are qualified. You become one because you decide to begin.

There is no standard route into entrepreneurship

Consider the backgrounds of some of the founders we've interviewed.

Andy Bird and Steve Baker spent decades in the print industry before building Toggle. Steve left formal education after his GCSEs. Andy describes much of his business education as self-taught. Their founder skills came from years of working, solving problems, surviving difficult markets and learning as they went.

At the opposite end of the educational spectrum is Gianluca Memoli, founder of Metasonixx. A physicist with a PhD and a deep-tech background, Gianluca had even pursued his ambition to become an astronaut and flown on European Space Agency zero-gravity flights.

Yet when he became a founder, he discovered an entirely new vocabulary. He recalls an early investor asking about customer acquisition cost and having no idea what she meant. Academic expertise hadn't magically made him an entrepreneur. He had to learn entrepreneurship by doing it.

Julia Marshall Wessendorf's journey was different again. She trained as a landscape architect and worked on projects including the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fountain. After having children and experiencing significant health problems, her life moved in another direction. Eventually her own attempts to understand the relationships between different aspects of wellbeing led to Wave Six. She says she didn't really know becoming an entrepreneur was "a thing". She simply started.

None of these people followed the same path.

That's precisely the point.

You are probably carrying more founder skills than you realise

One of the most powerful ideas from the interviews comes from Katie Grayson and Zillah Watson of Phase Space.

Before becoming founders, they had substantial careers in television and production. Those careers had taught them to manage complicated projects, persuade people, work with creative and technical teams, build relationships and operate in uncertain environments.

They just hadn't necessarily labelled those things as founder skills.

Katie's advice to people considering entrepreneurship is to take stock of what they already know. When you've spent years inside organisations, it can be easy to underestimate the capabilities you've accumulated.

The same pattern appears throughout these founder stories.

Parenting creates insight and resilience. Scientific research teaches experimentation. Production teaches resourcefulness. Sales teaches listening. Creative work teaches storytelling. Running a traditional business teaches cash discipline. Experiencing a problem personally can create unusually deep customer understanding.

Your previous life isn't something you discard when you become a founder.

It's the raw material you build with.

Confidence doesn't have to come first

Perhaps the biggest barrier, then, isn't capability.

It's permission.

We imagine that one day we'll feel sufficiently knowledgeable, financially secure, experienced or confident to begin.

But the interviews suggest that confidence often arrives after action, not before it.

Sharlene Rudd and Vikki Nolan met while studying counselling and psychotherapy as mature students. Together they began exploring whether tabletop roleplaying techniques could be combined with therapeutic principles.

They researched it. Tested it. Worked with children. Gathered evidence. Entered entrepreneurship programmes. Pitched. Received difficult feedback. Improved. Built a team.

Their founder identities developed through doing.

Vikki's description of fitting entrepreneurship around family life is revealing. Between the two founders they have seven children. Her perspective is that her children aren't the reason she can't find time to build something; they're part of the reason she finds the time. Passion and purpose change the calculation.

You don't need to know everything

Roxanne Taku and Joana Rocha offer another useful lesson.

They don't try to be identical founders.

Roxanne describes herself as stronger commercially, in relationships, sales and strategic vision. Joana brings marketing, operations and execution. Their differences are an advantage.

Underneath those complementary capabilities is something even more important: trust. Their relationship stretches back to university, through living in China together and previous attempts at building businesses.

Being a founder doesn't require becoming brilliant at everything.

It requires understanding what you bring, recognising what you don't, and finding people who can help fill the gaps.

Entrepreneurship is a verb

During my conversation with Gianluca, I described entrepreneurship as a verb rather than a noun.

The more founder stories I hear, the more strongly I believe that.

You don't need someone to confer the title upon you.

You talk to a potential customer.

You investigate a problem.

You make something.

You test an assumption.

You find a collaborator.

You pitch badly, learn something and pitch again.

You take another step.

And somewhere in that process something changes.

You stop wondering whether you're the sort of person who could become a founder.

Because you're already doing what founders do.

So perhaps the question isn't:

"Am I qualified to be a founder?"

A better question might be:

"What could I start doing today if I gave myself permission?"

Because there is no admissions committee for entrepreneurship.

Sometimes the first person who needs to believe you can become a founder is you.

Listen to the Founder Friday podcast & the interviews that inspired this blogpost at https://founderfriday.buzzsprout.com