First Round Capital reposted this
A founder's personality shapes their startup more than you think. "Building a company exaggerates all of your traits. You're influencing how things get done — for better or for worse. So you need to be able to clearly see what is going on in the organization and how your personality is being amplified through this process. You might be someone who pays a lot of attention to detail — which is great. You're being super careful, you're producing excellent work. But you're also slowing down the team and the decision-making, and you might not be aware that it's happening." Kareem Amin is one of the most thoughtful founders we’ve had a chance to work with here First Round Capital. His article today on The Review shares a very practical example of this principle in action. When building Clay, he and his co-founder were struggling to make the move from building a broad horizontal product to targeting a more specific vertical of outbound sales. “When you narrow the scope, it feels claustrophobic. Why are we doing something that’s smaller when we could be doing something bigger? Eventually, we realized that by narrowing down our scope, we were actually increasing our value,” he says. "There was something in my own psychology that made me feel like, 'Oh, we could do anything.' That was the lure of the horizontal product. And that wasn't an obvious thing until I really dug in. That’s when I realized, 'Oh, I feel constrained.’ And that now we can't do these other things because we're doing this. I had to teach myself that just because we're closing other avenues for now doesn't mean that we won't get back to them later. It was also helpful to give myself the reward of recognizing that people were loving the product and using it — even if it was more narrowly. That was worth more than the constraint.” Such good food for thought for builders that I know I would have benefited from back in my founder days — link to his article is in the comments if you want to read more about Kareem & Clay’s intertwined journeys.
This reminds me of the excellent article by none other than Caterina Fake https://www.wired.com/2011/10/caterina-fake-killing-abraham/
Thanks for sharing this.
THIS is so real.
100%
Great stuff, Hayley and Kareem! This could be a book :)
Congrats darling
Partner at First Round Capital
3whttps://review.firstround.com/clays-path-to-product-market-fit/