Characteristics of the Best Founders #0046

"The best founders? They're like high school teachers – they've seen everything, they expect the unexpected, and they survive on coffee and determination."

30/01/2024

Characteristics of the Best Founders

Nick Moran, and Nate Pierotti, General Partner and Principal at New Stack Ventures, interviews Gaurav Jain, Co-founder & Managing Partner at Afore Capital in “418. Why Market Size is Irrelevant, Patterns from Working with the Best Founders, & How AI Compares to Past Paradigm Shifts”

• Characteristics Of the Best Founders

  • "If I can use one word, it is learning. [...] it’s their ability to learn quickly, it’s their pace at which they’re willing to get out there, talk to customers, talk to be in the industry, gather feedback, digest that, build product accordingly, and just iterate really, really rapidly."

• How The Best Founders Approach The Market:

  • "I think the best companies either expand markets in ways that even the founders can’t predict or shrink markets. [...] What some founders say, we’re gonna own this manageable market. But to the best founders say, Well, I don’t have to stop there. What can I do that is just adjacent to my market?"

• Understand the Customer Holistically

  • "When it comes to learning, like understanding the customer holistically, not just like what you’re selling, but what motivates your customer, what incentives do they have, and incentives drive behavior, again, just that incredible curiosity, to learn and to be able apply that to your company and product."

• Be Cautious of Raising Too Much Capital Early

  • "[…] you’re adding more risk to the company. Right? I don’t think founders realized that no matter how much money you raise, founders always have 18 months of runway."

• Maintain Discipline and Focus in Early Stages

  • "Constraints are great at this stage, I’m going to run a set of experiments, stay nimble, learn rapidly. And when I feel that I have early sense of product market fit, that’s when I raise more capital, and we accelerate, but I want to give myself the leeway to say, we don’t know what we’re doing yet, right? We’re gonna go figure that out."

How to Make Developers Productive

Andrew Boyagi, Senior Technical Evangelist at Atlassian, emphasizes the importance of developer experience, highlighting how a focus on developer satisfaction and the right work environment can lead to increased productivity in “Developer experience is more important than developer productivity”

• The Problem with Obsessing Over Developer Productivity:

  • "There’s an unhealthy obsession with companies looking for a way to measure developer productivity. The problem is that developer productivity is incredibly difficult to measure, resulting in organizations allocating disproportionate effort and resources while trying to find the magic measure."

• Happy Developers as Productive Developers:

  • "Thousands of academic research papers back the notion that satisfied employees are productive employees — software developers are no exception."

• Inputs to Developer Joy: Experience and Culture:

  • "There are two main inputs to developer joy: developer experience and engineering culture. You can think of developer experience (DX) as how developers feel about the tools and frameworks they use to build software. DX is heavily influenced by the quality of tooling and efficiency of processes used by developers to create software within an organization."

  • “Engineering Culture is how work gets done. A fusion of organizational values, norms, decision making and legendary stories.”

• Misguided Efforts in Measuring Developer Productivity:

  • "A lot of people misquote Peter Drucker’s 'You can’t improve what you don’t measure' when it comes to developer productivity and use this as a justification to measure the wrong things in the wrong ways. Developer experience and engineering culture are the two inputs to developer joy, which results in developer productivity. These two inputs are unique to every organization and can’t be replicated; given their huge impact on developer productivity, what you choose to measure should also be unique to your organization."

How to Sell When They Ask for Features You Don’t Have

Jason M. Lemkin, SaaStr Founder, provides guidance on how to handle sales situations when potential customers request features that are not yet available in the product in “Dear SaaStr: How Do You Sell When They Ask for Critical Features You Don’t Have Yet?”

• Grab Your Paintbrush:

  • “This is indeed the art of enterprise sales”

• Key Strategy: Acknowledging the Gap and Committing to Development:

  • "The key is simply to acknowledge the gap — and if you are willing, commit to building what the customer needs within X months. Enterprise customers are used to this. Sometimes, they will bite and agree. Other times, they’ll need more proof."

• Understanding Customer Expectations and Willingness to Wait:

  • "But it’s worth a shot if (x) you fill 90%+ of their need as is and (y) they also believe you to be the overall vendor of choice. They’ll often wait for one feature gap to be solved. If you really commit."

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