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
Parenting is the best part of my life. What I have re-learned from it is that real joy is in the small moments. The first time she said “mama” was a spectacular moment, but it is in delighting in her coy smile as I change her diaper that I find beauty. You have to love the process of your labor, not the outcome of it. That has been true in making... See more
12 Months a Father, 6 Months a Founder
relatable from Evan Armstrong. “Companies are not sterle laboratories of capitalist science”
the teams best positioned to endure a bold journey are those in which the benefits from the sensation of progress outweigh the costs of working amidst uncertainty, anonymity, and anxiety.
if progress is a sufficient reward, you can be losing for a long time and still win.
scott belskytwitter.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.
Ano... See more
Ano... See more
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.
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.
The most transformative companies rarely emerge from someone else's problem statement. They come from founders who see opportunities that others miss, often in areas that lack established categories.
Facebook didn't fulfill a request for "improved college social networking." It emerged from Mark Zuckerberg's specific intuition about how Harvard... See more
Facebook didn't fulfill a request for "improved college social networking." It emerged from Mark Zuckerberg's specific intuition about how Harvard... See more
Tina He • The Art of Understanding What's Going On
Ev Williams (founder of Twitter, Blogger, and Medium) when asked who inspires him:
“When I think about a commonality of companies and leaders I admire, it is those who—whether they have a bunch of resources or not—come from a position of confidence and an abundance mindset.”
When he got to Google, the thing that most struck him was how big they
... See moreInstead of waiting for something to go wrong and then conducting a post-mortem, conduct a “pre-mortem” by imagining it went wrong then using the power of hindsight to deduce the likeliest reason it went wrong.
