Elon Musk was in London this week and I asked him how we can get more exceptional technologists founding companies. His answer:
“If you don’t succeed with your first startup it shouldn’t be a catastrophic career ending thing. It should be that you gave it a good shot and now try again.”
You can watch the here from 27 mins in.
In some ways this is so obvious – so why is the idea of a career as a founder still so alien?
Being a founder is portrayed as the antithesis of a career
In a career you develop and build on your experience over time and there is a legible path to success. For example, if you wanted a career as a surgeon or a lawyer you would learn your craft from day one and then progress up to roles with more responsibility. You’d be expected to build your skills and, importantly, your intuition, over time. High pressure roles require strong intuition so that you can make decisions fast under extreme stress.
Being a founder is portrayed as the antithesis of a career. The typical advice given to a future founder is to “get experience” in a big company. Founding is seen as something you do once and if the time is right and you’re lucky, you might make it big. If you don’t, you revert back to whatever previous life path you were on. There is little acknowledgement that you can found multiple times within your life and that with each attempt you build skills, experience and intuition that will enable you to succeed.
Defining the Founding Career Path
We need to define the Founding Career Path and make it legible for the next generation of founders. We need to clarify what skills and experiences are most likely to help a potential founder succeed, both now and in the future.
I believe the principles behind the Founding Career Path are that:
- The best way to hone your founder intuition and skill is through starting a company,
- To maximise learning you should found now; and
- Your founder ability will compound with each startup attempt and increase your likelihood of building a globally important company
The data shows that the Founding Career Path works
The data supports the efficacy of the Founding Career Path. Ali Tamaseb‘s book Super Founders compares unicorn founders to a control group of founders that raised Series A funding from VCs. He found that the billion dollar founders were far more likely to have already been a founder compared to the control group.
The world’s most notable founders follow this pattern. Patrick and John Collison, the founders of Stripe (and our investors at EF) started their first company at 19 and sold it for $5m – their next company was Stripe. Mark Zuckerberg made dental software before founding Facebook. And Elon Musk founded Zip2 after leaving university, before being part of the founding teams of Paypal, Space X, Tesla and Solar City. Twitter is his first corporate job at the age of 51! These founders didn’t pursue adjacent career paths, they started building.
So what’s next for those who want to pursue the Founding Career Path?
My advice for someone who wants to follow a Founding Career path:
- Get started, right now. Even if you don’t quit your job, start building a product and getting people to use it. You will learn the skills that are particular and peculiar to starting a company. You will begin to build your founder intuition.
- Surround yourself with founders. Don’t surround yourself with people who want to be founders – most of them won’t ever take the leap. University entrepreneurship clubs produce management consultants.
- Don’t tell your your friends and family. It is too easy to slip into validation seeking. If you take an alternative path, it is unlikely they will understand your choice. Parents are more likely to be conservative – they want you to have a great mean outcome, with limited downside risk. Peers will seek to protect their status quo, and your career choice might undermine the confidence they have in their own life path.
Founding may not work out the first time. In fact, it probably won’t. Regardless of the financial outcome, the experience will build your founder intuition and increase the likelihood of success next time round. Your founder mental muscles will have been flexed and will be ready to go. This is the Founding Career path.
If you want to follow the Founding Career path, check out Entrepreneur First. We help exceptional technologists build startups from scratch.