The two types of founders - My personal theory
For my 2nd startup (in air mobility), the CEO met me the day after he quit his job, to learn from my startup experience. We met thrice that week, sketching things out on paper. By the time I agreed to join in, we had a service model. When I first spoke with the COO, a helicopter pilot and a safety officer, he knew exactly how a helicopter charter worked. An industry was built on phone calls and excel files. Both of them thought forms & a database would be enough to disrupt it. -- I have a theory that there are two types of founders. The 1st type is always looking for problems to solve. They are hyper-aware of every friction they face and can judge when a problem is worth pursuing. The 2nd type aren't looking for problems. They find the best way to solve the core problem that will get used, will scale and will cost the least.
In my 10 years in the startup world, 95% of the founding teams I have seen have one or the other. The 1st type had the perfect problem but were hiring agencies to build it for $50k in 8 months. The small number of teams with only the 2nd type had a perfect tech breakthrough but didn't really understand the users. The best 5% had both. -- Back to my 2nd startup. The service model from that first week covered the end-to-end experience. Booking a helicopter ride, having a luxury car pick up & drop, check-in and security briefing, luggage handling (accounting for $10 bribes), and everything along the way. The model held for three years, through multiple crises. Customers kept coming back. The COO knew Charters through and through. But schedules were still on paper. The only way to book was to call someone, get a quote and then make the payment. I turned the COO's understanding into an algorithm - upfront availability and cost, in the app, without speaking to anyone. The first of its kind in the world for helicopter charters.
The two of them knew the problem well. They had even run Nielson surveys to validate it. But the actual direction came from me looking at it from a long-term angle. -- The argument now is that AI tools have changed this. A founder of the 1st type has all the tools to build whatever they need. Practical examples show this isn't yet the case.
20 years ago, I used to say to junior devs, "A computer will do what you tell it to do, but 'exactly' what you tell it to do."
The same applies to AI tools. They don't tell you the task itself is wrong. I'm seeing many reports of the massive technical debt that comes with unsupervised AI tool use. And it won't help you avoid the $40/month AWS Support you signed up to without realizing. -- Most founding teams have the pioneer, the one who has the vision and can sell that vision to both customers and investors. Having someone to turn that vision into long-term strategy is what can make that team great.
Which type are you, and who have you assumed is covering the other side?