founder's mentality
insights, articles, musings and resources to help founders and builders cultivate a healthy mindset and get unstuck
sari and
founder's mentality
Brave thing I heard in a board meeting this week: “I don’t know if we have a good answer to that, yet.”
Admitting you *don’t know* the answer is hugely productive. We’re trying to find, together, the important things we don’t know the answers to
Striking how rarely it is said
sarah guo // convictiontwitter.comLove motivates people to work through challenges that might otherwise lead them to give up. If those founders had focused on building for a customer they genuinely loved, they would have been more likely to persevere and create something that addressed a deep need. If they were to find a customer they loved serving, I would invest in them again.
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Julian Weisser • Founders and Customers: Love and Service
nice - on the importance of customer obsession and falling in love with a customer, not a product.
Advertising adds value to a product by changing our perception of it. An example I love that is not mentioned in the book: for years, few people bought “death insurance.” Then some genius changed the name to life insurance and grew the industry by many billions of dollars. After all, life insurance sounds so much better than death insurance.
Sari Azout • Check your Pulse #14
Absolutely excellent piece.
Throughout history, new technologies have opened new fields of expression and expanded what's possible. Every time a new technology came in, at least half were left behind loving the old craft or worrying about the future. Those who embrace the discomfort, understand how the tool can be wielded will continue to create novel ideas and change culture, With the printing press, those who mastered textual literacy created profound societal impact. In those early days, this literacy was an essential differentiator.
Just as the printing press democratized knowledge creation, AI is commoditizing access to intelligence and with it redefining technical execution. This is now widely accepted. AI can generate endless ‘perfect’ outputs, and its reasoning capabilities will only expand. Design’s tools will change but design’s essence remains distinctly human: creation guided by feeling & relationships rather than pure logic, and the judgment to know what’s worth creating.
Design literacy—combining curiosity, studied curation, personal conviction, and craft—will become as vital as verbal literacy.
This way of seeing and thinking becomes a new differentiator. It’s a new type of intelligence and design that will separate those who thrive from those who fade into the noise. I see this type of design everywhere in my work with founders, engineers, salespeople, and investors—they are all designers in their own right. It is innate—it just needs to be unlocked.
The best founders already understand this. In a world where anyone can build, they know what to build, who it’s for, and why it must exist.
Building a great product is a bit like marriage: if you commit your life to making it excellent over long periods of time, and earnestly care about understanding the other person (users), you’ll be surprised at what you can build.
David Liebx.comThe good stuff is always lonely in the beginning. Nothing meaningful will get made if its potential makers all wimp out too soon, because they get scared by the sparse crowd, the empty room.