10 Nuggets of Advice for Early Stage Founders
Katie Mulligan
Director of Platform at Pillar VC
One of the core shared traits across many founders who have risen to success is curiosity — a relentless desire to learn from others. Building a company can be lonely for many CEOs, but it doesn’t have to be; many of the strongest founders we know spend time learning from people who have traveled the road ahead, an incredibly powerful way to avoid making preventable mistakes.
It’s not easy to make time to seek those people out when you’re a busy founder. We spun up the Founder Playlist to solve this challenge, meeting CEOs where they are with short, simple, concrete audio clips with advice from founders of some of the companies we most admire, CEOs like Brian Halligan (HubSpot), Corey Thomas (Rapid7) and Gail Goodman (Constant Contact).
Here are some of the biggest takeaways.
1.
Set your own definition of success.
3.
Take the time to really listen to your customers.
Commit to the problem you are trying to solve, not your particular solution.
4.
5.
Know your value proposition.
In the early days, make room to meet with people outside of your company.
6.
7.
Keep your eyes open, and never stop learning.
Learn how to scale yourself.
8.
9.
Make time to invest in your mental health and wellness.
Understand that it’s going to be harder than you ever would have imagined, but equally rewarding.
10.
As a founder, you’re going to be bombarded with advice on your journey, so we’ll leave you with one final nugget — listen, process, and follow your conviction about which advices is most relevant for you, feeling confident in how you personally choose to apply it to your journey.
