Shed Your Old Mindset

Hey y’all — this week I got reminded of something that’s easy for founders to forget:

Nobody starts off as a founder.

That’s significant since the roles we were doing before care about different things than founders do.

And whatever you did before instilled ways of thinking in you that may be holding you back as a founder.

This week I’m diving into how to think through and address this — and make sure you’re thinking like a founder.

Shed Your Old Mindset

What You Do Directs Your Priorities

I started my career as a software engineer.

And I cared about the things engineers cared about.

For example, I cared a lot about writing high-quality, performant code.

In the 10 years or so since then I’ve launched my own businesses and worked on products going through true hyper-scale.

Don’t come after me for this, technical founders, but one thing I realized early on was that founders don’t really care about code quality.

Sure, good founders understand that having spaghetti code will hurt you in the long run, and that letting critical bugs go live on prod will degrade user trust…

But their first priority is making “the long run” possible at all by delivering the actual value that users want.

New founders often underestimate the amount of inconvenience or pain that users (particularly early adopters) will deal with in order to get what they came to your product to get.

Two great examples of this:

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