It’s often said that venture capital firms invest in founders, they don’t invest in the idea. That is, the ability of the entrepreneur is much more important in scaling an enterprise than the business idea itself. That is a mercurial founder can take the most mundane of ideas and scale it to heights never seen before, while a shoddy entrepreneur could kick an out of this world idea to the ground. It is why we need to really, find out, just what skill does a great founder need to have? What makes some founders become wildly successful in one venture after another, while others remain mired in mediocrity? For instance, why is Elon Musk so much successful running X, space X, and Tesla, all the while remaining a ferocious commentator on the deep issues of the day?
Founders need to have an intense study of the market. Identify the market gap and whether you can fill in that gap. This is both easy and hard. Being number one in the market is a good thing in that you will reap the early profits, but being too much ahead also means the market may not understand your product, it may not even know it has a need for your product. You will thus spend a significant amount of resources to educate the market, only to have the copy cats and imitators come and reap where they did not sow. That’s why for a founder, they need to find a sweet spot between being the early player versus educating the market, so that they don’t just pave the way for later players as they do all the hard work.
The next skill the founder needs to have is to have immense product knowledge. This doesn’t necessarily mean an engineering or technical background, but rather a deep enough knowledge to know what need the product is going to address. Most people confuse having a deep product knowledge to being the technical coding and programming guy especially as relates to the tech space but this is not necessarily so, just have a clear vision of what the product is going to do for the market and how is it you are going to get sales from it. Then, you can get the technical guys to implement the vision. For instance, the vision of Bill Gates was to replace the typewriter in the office, and that didn’t mean that he had to know how to program an operating system. In fact for his first operating system software, he simply bought a ready made one and adapted it to IBM computers. And that’s how he became the youngest billionaire at the time.
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