The Founder Is an Apprentice 

Why First-Time Founders Don't Need to Know Everything

One of the most dangerous assumptions a first-time founder can make is that everyone else knows what they're doing.

They don't.

After interviewing founders from radically different backgrounds for Founder Friday, one pattern appears repeatedly:

Entrepreneurship exposes what you don't know.

And that's not a weakness.

It may be the point.

Your startup will reveal your gaps

You can prepare for entrepreneurship.

Read books. Take courses. Attend accelerator programmes. Study finance. Learn marketing.

All of those things can help.

But the moment you start building something, reality begins writing its own curriculum.

Suddenly you need to understand pricing.

Then cash flow.

Then employment contracts.

Then customer acquisition.

Then pitching.

Then some obscure piece of regulation you had never heard of three weeks earlier.

The founder becomes an apprentice to their own company.

Gianluca Memoli's journey from physicist to founder of Metasonixx captures this brilliantly.

His scientific expertise gave him extraordinary depth in one area. Building a company required an entirely different set of capabilities.

So he learned.

Years later, he's still learning. He says one of the things he values about being in a founder community is that every meeting teaches him something — including from younger founders.  

That's founder mentality.

Not:

I know.

But:

I can learn.

Experience matters more than you realise

There is an important counterpoint.

You know less than you think.

But you probably also know more than you think.

Katie Grayson and Zillah Watson founded Phase Space after substantial careers.

Katie's advice to first-time founders is to stop and take stock of everything they already know and can do.  

That's particularly relevant to people starting businesses later in their careers.

Maybe you've never raised investment.

But perhaps you've managed a budget.

Maybe you've never built a startup team.

But you've recruited people.

Maybe you've never pitched an investor.

But you've persuaded a board to back an idea.

Maybe you've never done startup sales.

But you've spent twenty years building relationships.

Entrepreneurship doesn't erase your previous experience.

It recombines it.

Learning requires openness

Andy Bird's advice is to "always remain open-minded".

His experience building Toggle with Steve Baker taught them that the idea you begin with may not be the idea you eventually build.

They sought advice, revisited decisions and changed strategy.

Andy encourages first-time founders to surround themselves with people who possess the expertise they lack.  

That's an important distinction.

A strong founder isn't someone who has all the answers.

A strong founder becomes good at finding answers.

The startup is the classroom

Rob Kramer puts it even more directly.

Start, he argues, and "you will learn everything through the business as you do".  

There is something liberating in that.

You don't need to complete your founder education before starting your company.

You can't.

Some lessons only make sense once the problem becomes real.

Your first customer rejection teaches differently from a sales book.

Running short of cash teaches differently from a finance lecture.

Hiring the wrong person teaches differently from a leadership course.

The challenge is not eliminating mistakes.

It is shortening the distance between:

Doing → discovering → learning → changing.

That's the founder's real learning loop.

So if you're a first-time founder worrying about everything you don't know, perhaps you're asking the wrong question.

Don't ask:

Do I know enough to start?

Ask:

Am I willing to learn what starting will require me to know?

Those are very different standards.

And the second one is achievable.

Learn from founders already doing it

Founder Friday explores these lessons through conversations with founders at different stages, from different industries and with very different routes into entrepreneurship.

Listen to the Founder Friday series

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