Obstacles for young founders (and older ones, too)
Almost everything will pull you in the wrong direction towards distraction and fake work.
A college student asked about the biggest obstacles young founders face. Below is my response. As a reminder, Texts with Founders features tested tactics from my conversations with other founders as I’ve built ODF and invested in hundreds of startups.
Young founders face the exact same “biggest obstacle” as older founders: spending time on anything other than talking to customers or building.
There are dozens of activities that seem productive but are not only unproductive but negatively productive compared to the two good activities.
Your entire list of roadblocks is a distraction - I’ll go through each to tell you why - context is I’ve helped 1,000 companies launch and raise $2B:
1. Mentorship: There is much better information online and in podcasts than you could get from the average mentor. Also, the best people don’t like to formalize mentorship anyways - reach out to them for hyper specific questions in short emails and you’ll get great responses and build relationships over time.
2. Funding: Fundraising is the worst distraction unless you have deep investor relationships from a prior company. Only talk to investors when you’re fundable. You’re only fundable when you have (for the most part) paying customers, growth, and an ability to clearly articulate your business. Most founders believe they’re fundable before they actually are.
3. Balancing Study/Startup: There are limited hours in a day but most people use them ineffectively. The answer is you cannot balance startup and school while building a VC backed company. I can’t imagine a VC backing someone unless they were dropping out. [note: the same thing applies to people who have jobs]
4. Building a network: Networks comes as a result of doing great work and making sure people know about it. So many students (and adults) post slop on social media instead of doing the hard work of doing something great.
Hope this comes off as constructive. Almost everything will pull you in the wrong direction towards distraction and fake work. Good luck!
(I also x-posted this to X)
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- Julian
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