What are a Founders’ Arms?

I was on the South Bank recently when I came across the Founder’s Arms pub.

As a very recent founder, it inspired the thought: “What are a founder’s arms? What are the things that a founder needs to succeed?”

You can google thousands of articles on this topic but here are my twopenn'orth to add to the debate:

1) A supportive spouse

This one rarely makes the lists but it strikes me as the most critical. Founding a startup requires vast amounts of work; much of it out of hours and at unexpected times. It is stressful and exhausting. If - like me - you found a startup after a corporate job, you have just given up corporate perks and benefits in order to work harder with no guarantee of any kind of successful outcome.

I simply cannot see it working if you and your partner don’t see it as a joint project. It requires too much sacrifice on their part otherwise; and if they don’t let you make the necessary sacrifices then you’re dooming your venture from day one.

2) A great team

The stereotypical startup founder is a lone nerd locked away in their garage.

This couldn’t be more wrong. In reality, building and leading a team is the key skill any startup founder requires.

You need people good enough to convince investors that their cash is in safe hands and you need to persuade those people to join you in building your vision. Unlike when recruiting in corporate world, you don’t have perks or benefits. Indeed, often - at the start - you can’t even pay…

I’ve been leading teams since I was in my mid-twenties but leading a startup really made me think deeply about what a good team looks like and what I need to do to try to create one.

3) Doing everything yet delegating

This is one of many contradictory skills a founder needs. In the earliest days of the startup, it will be just a handful of people. As founder, you’ll have a bunch of different roles. You may need to take on marketing, commercial and finance, for example.

But - here’s the critical bit - you also need to be able to identify when the right moment is to give these things up.

For example, I spent too long as Snap’s de-facto finance director. As someone who can deal with spreadsheets, I failed to recognise that we’d got to the point where we needed expertise and skills I simply didn’t have.

One of our investors and advisors argued that we needed a COO. He was right but I made the appointment later than we should have done, and only after we’d been through some significant issues that the appointment might have helped prevent.

Equally, though, you don’t want to hire unnecessary people and burn too much cash. It’s judgement and it’s tough.

4) Total certainty and constant humility

Another of the contradictory sets of skills.

As founder, you will spend a lot of time pitching your vision. You’ll do it to investors, potential recruits, potential suppliers and potential customers. In each case, you need to project total certainty. No-one is going to invest in a company that the founder doesn’t even believe in.

But - somehow - you need to try to maintain humility both at a strategic level and at a detailed level. Even as you’re pitching with certainty, you somehow need to be listening to the feedback with a spirit of humility. Is the whole idea actually flawed? Can your plan be improved? Are there elements of the product that you’ve created in your mind that customers simply don’t want in reality?

The answer to the last two questions is definitely ‘yes’ and the answer to the first question might be ‘yes’ too. One of the hardest things to try to achieve is to maintain absolute confidence in the way you present your vision while at the same time remaining open to the need for constant experimentation and improvement. A strong product manager really helps!

5) Luck

Was it Napolean Bonaparte who first said “I'd rather have lucky generals than good ones”? Or was it Dwight Eisenhower? No-one seems quite sure.

Either way, luck is absolutely critical and outside your control. At Snap we had some great good fortune. We raised our initial funding just as the Uber bubble was reaching its peak. We succeeded in raising funds from Kindred Capital, one of London’s most prestigious early-stage venture capitalists. We gained access to some superb angel investors. But we also had some really bad luck. One of our funding rounds was delayed by six months when the entire team at the VC with whom we were closing a deal suddenly left the company without warning. Two of our VCs had internal corporate crises that caused them to be hugely financially constrained, which became a major issue when Covid happened as they weren’t in a place to bail out their portfolio companies. And, of course, we had Covid.

You may be lucky and you may be unlucky and you can’t possibly know at the start which it will be. When you tell people you’re founding a startup, they’ll say “Good luck'“. You’ll need it!