255. What Most Startup Support Gets Wrong — and How to Fix It

From accelerators to corporate venture capital, most startup support structures fail to deliver. Investor and entrepreneur Andrew Ackerman explains why — and what founders and corporates should do instead.

With over 70 investments and hundreds of founders mentored, Andrew brings rare perspective from both sides of the table. Andrew is a serial entrepreneur who has founded two companies, led an accelerator, and now advises startups, VCs and corporates.

He’s also the author of The Entrepreneur's Odyssey — a novel-style guide to what startup life really feels like.

You will learn:

• Why most accelerators fail: Discover how many support programs offer flashy promises without delivering tangible outcomes like revenue or pilot deals.

• Rethinking venture capital: Understand why fundraising is often pursued for validation rather than strategic fit — and why most startups don’t necessarily need VC money.

• Corporate innovation pitfalls: Learn how misaligned incentives and internal politics transform innovation programs into mere theatre rather than engines of growth.

• The value of tailored support: Find out how startups can benefit from support structures designed as platforms that evolve with their specific stage and needs.

• What to do instead: Get practical insights on structuring your support programs, whether you’re a founder, a corporate team, or an investor.

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Transcript

Sophia Matveeva (00:00.108)
Adam Neumann convinced people that Rework was a tech company.

Andrew Ackerman

And he got more money for his next startup after all the shady crap he did. Okay. I wouldn't try that. I wouldn't trust that man as like a valet at a mid-priced restaurant on the fundraising side. always tell founders that VC money is the least worst alternative for a certain type of startup.

Welcome to the Tech for our Techies podcast. I'm your host, tech entrepreneur, executive coach at Chicago Booth MBA, Sophia Matejka. My aim here is to help you have a great career in the digital age. In a time when even your coffee shop has an app, you simply have to speak tech.

On this podcast, I share core technology concepts, help you relate them to business outcomes, and most importantly, share practical advice on what you can do to become a digital leader today. If you want to a great career in the digital age, this podcast is for you. Hello, smart people. How are you today? Did I tell you that I now have a cat?

It's a raptor kitten and he is the best thing that has ever happened to me. He's sitting next to me right now. Anyway, today in this episode, you're going to learn from Andrew Ackerman. He is a serial entrepreneur based in New York City. He's an early stage investor and he's a startup mentor with over 70 investments and hundreds of founders coached over the past 15 years. He has also founded two companies of his own and he ran an accelerator.

Sophia Matveeva (01:37.346)
He is the author of a book called The Entrepreneur's Odyssey, which is a book written as a novel designed to show what startup life actually feels like. And in this conversation, we are going to get into what actually works and what doesn't in startup support. So whether it's accelerators or venture funding or corporate innovation. So for example, we talked about why most corporate accelerators don't deliver, how corporate venture often fails to produce results and why most startups

don't actually need VC money. So if you are a founder questioning what to do next, like you're thinking about the fundraising path, or you're a corporate innovator trying to figure out how to make your startup programs actually work, this episode is going to be very useful. And if you like what you're learning, then share it with a friend and leave this show a rating and a review. I read all your reviews, I count all the stars, it makes me super happy.

Okay, on that note, let's learn from Andrew.

Sure, I realize a rope you're holding a rope in your hand and you're looking at the individual strands and a couple of them are free, but most of them are okay. You can use that rope. It'll bear the load. Now visualize a chain instead. If any one link is broken, the chain is useless. They can't carry a load. So when I talked to founders about startups, like, our market size is great and this, that, the other, but you know, this one link is broken. Like you don't have a go to market. That's going to work.

or i don't think your problem is really widespread and frequent and painful i don't need to look any further it doesn't matter if the other twelve links for sounded one that is broke.

Speaker 1 (03:18.734)
So when, I realistically having worked on startups, ran startups, you know, it doesn't feel like we ever really have the full chain sorted out, right? Like you sometimes feel like you're holding onto one link and then another link and then the other ones are kind of rusty, blurry, non-existent. Like it's not that neat in mind space.

Sure so let's drag this analogy a little further along the chain needs to support a certain amount of weight the further along your startup is the more weight I as an investor expect that chain to hold so when I was an angel investor running accelerated programs if some of the links looked a little bit weak but I figured I could work with them and they were fixable that was okay it only had to carry a little bit of weight for that one time and the later I get in the program more you know the more I've spent

that to be robust chain capable of carrying the weight that it has. The timer stays serious at any startup, but I want those chains to be pretty damn strong. And like if you're, if you're, know, get the sales economics are weak, but getting better, like, okay, I'm all right with that link, but like the other links have to be rock solid.

At the beginning, what are the links that you basically can't progress without?

Sure, sure, the super basic ones, right? If you don't have a problem that is A, really painful, right? It's not like, oh, I gotta hang now. It's like, boom, my thumb with a hammer, it hurts like hell. It's not painful, if it's not prevalent, meaning lots of people have it, and if it's not frequent, you're gonna run into problems right there on the problem side. You can sometimes get away with two of the three. So the example I give is college admissions.

Speaker 2 (04:57.472)
It's a super painful and stressful time for people. Most people have it, so it's pretty prevalent, but with luck, you only go through it once in your life. But that's hard. Really you want to score strongly on all three and if you don't, I don't need to read the rest of the deck.

So is it the same when we're thinking about corporate innovation as well? it that those, you know, when there is somebody in a corporate who is thinking of, you know, pitching a new line of business to the CFO, is it essentially those three things or is it slightly different when you have corporate money behind

So it's different. It's different when you look at it from the investor side of the fence. So as a startup, you want to create that chain and want everything to be strong. have to work on all those links. As an investor, you're deluged with lots of startups pitching you, ideally with warm intros, not the cold emails. You don't even waste your time with those. So one of the things you need to learn how to do very quickly as an investor of any type is do that quick filter. Okay, I've seen hundreds of startups that target architects. They're cheap and they're not that many of them. I'm going to skip right to the market size.

And it's a market size and the revenue model don't make sense. I don't have to look anywhere else. So you learn to have that fast filter. Now, when you layer on top of it that you're corporate, you got to do a bunch of other things. You have to do all the things that a regular investor has to do. But then you have to sweat things like the strategic fit. have to sweat things like champions within the organization will actually pilot with this. And when you take it up to even higher level and you're setting these things up, you have to think about the processes and the structures that support it. Like it's one thing to say, I'm going to get connections to the line of business, but

But the line of business, this is not anything that they're, you know, they're not bonus, they're not promoted for the number of partners, partnerships they do. So when push comes to shove, like they want to hit their numbers. So if you're really setting all that up, have to think structurally about how do I achieve all my goals as not just a VC fund, but a corporate venture fund. I don't know, I guess it's a chain, but it's a different type of chain.

Speaker 1 (06:48.438)
wonder, do you think that's one of the reasons why corporates find it so hard to innovate is that actually, you can have all of the traditional startup ideas, they can be the problem, they can be the market size, all of that stuff to a sensible investor who is not involved in the corporate politics. That looks great. But you know, if I don't know, sales and finance hate each other, and you need to get finance on board, it's just not going to happen. Do you think that's one of the reasons why?

Yeah, that's one of the big reasons. And let's actually take it up a level, right? When we talk about corporate innovation, we're talking about a toolbox with a lot of tools. On one extreme, you've got just your regular R &D departments. And that's traditional. Most corporations know how to run it, whether they do it well or not is a different story. There's no great novelty to it. People know how that works. Then as you move a little bit more into like the cool startup stuff, they start thinking about Venture Studio, which is kind of new to a lot of corporations.

And it's actually a brutally hard model. It's everything that's hard about VC and accelerators, but harder because it's earlier. And for those of you who are kind of just tuning in to Mentor Studio with some variation up, hey, we have all these interesting ideas. Maybe we can make startups internally about. So they're trying to stand up a team that's kind of in, but not in, trying to replicate the startup experience in one way, shape or form kind of in or on the margins of the company. And we can go lot deeper on that if you want.

But then the next step over is doing accelerator, which is also a very, very heavy lift. And usually the advice is don't do it. doesn't make sense for you. and then you got out in corporate venture. So corporate ventures, what we started talking about before we got all the BC stuff and you're layering on top of the strategic element to it. And most, corporate ventures though, in theory, they're very strong platform and should be advantaged relative to a BC fund. I Sophia, Hey.

You shouldn't take their money, you should take my money, because I can give you money for investment and I can get you revenue with a line of business. Right? That's the friendship. But then they drop the ball on the actual getting pilots and revenue part. So, and there's a lot of root causes for that. So in theory, it's super strong. They practice 95 % of the time. They, they drop the ball on whatever kind of subtle nuances in many cases.

Speaker 1 (08:45.422)
Yeah, it's an attractive proposition.

Speaker 1 (09:00.248)
Yeah, I remember in my last company, we actually were in the School Grid Accelerator and we joined basically not because we wanted any knowledge from them, because like I didn't think that they would give us anything that useful. But at the end, there was going to be, know, contract with this very large entity and everybody else in the Accelerator was there, you know, we basically just sat through whatever lesson they wanted us to learn, which actually we could have taught much better, but at the end, like just, just give us the money.

I'm gonna finish this.

It's like the song by the booze, right? How do you get your pudding if you don't eat your meat? You're like, I'm just going to sit there, have my broccoli, and then maybe I get dessert. Let me guess, you were absolutely right about not learning anything from the Ming program, but you were wrong about getting the contracts. It's at the end of the day. Exactly. They didn't come through most of the time.

Yeah, they didn't come through, but now I get to talk about it in a podcast. And so you mentioned that accelerators are not a good idea. Is that for the founder or for the corporate? Who are they bird-eyed or for the investor?

Boston all around, but like they're exceptions, right? So it's like, 95 % of the time don't do it. But if you meet certain criteria yet, it's the right tool. It's like a tool chest, right? But sometimes you need a Phillips head screwdriver. Sometimes you need a flathead. Sometimes you need a ratchet. And if you bring the wrong tool to a project, you just gotta make a mess. So let me unpack that a little bit. Let's go from the, let's go from the, the founder side. Okay. At most accelerators,

Speaker 2 (10:34.434)
like everything in life are kind of same same blob of different. Right? You're not going to get that much. Actually, let me roll it back and let's start positively. We've talked about the book I wrote and go into that more detail if you want, but I should write about it in that where the founder in, write it as a novel. So the founder is like going through his life and he's actually in his martial arts studio sparring and he's trying to ponder the idea of should he take an offer to join an accelerator. And it occurs to him that

thinking about accelerator was kind of similar to how we thought about what studio to join. And so first you have to figure out what you want from it. So some people go to an all martial arts class because they want to defend themselves. Others go because they want the fitness. Some people do it for the social. Right, it's the same thing with an accelerator. So if you're a super early stage startup, you just need to know what it takes to run a startup. Like, okay, you need those basic blocking and tackling skills. That's one thing. If you're a little further along and kind of like built the startup, you got that. But

You need to know how you scale sales, right? You've just been doing like founder led sales and now you know, build the sales team. Well, that's something else. You need those introductions. You need that set of knowledge. Or if you're, you you've got maybe the first two, but like, you don't know the first thing about how to raise an institutional route, then you're joining the fundraising, the network, the skill that it comes with finding and land to investors. So once you know what you need, it becomes easier to figure out like, what's the right salary for you? And then the questions that.

the founder and book asked the different about the dojo about how their style works and how they kind of what they consider success. You can think of similar questions that you would ask. Accelerator programs. So if you're a later stage program focused on driving sales, we'll talk to them about it. How many introductions does the average startup get? Right? How many of them actually generate sales? And those may be hard questions for the accelerator answer, but how they answer them will tell you whether or not there's value for your startup.

in that particular accelerator.

Speaker 1 (12:32.022)
Sometimes it does actually work. So I'm an advisor to a company called Riveter and they use AI and visual search to predict consumer trends. they can basically say, you know, this particular shade of blue is going to be really popular in three years. So you went into tech, some Boreal, start preparing for it now. the founder who has been on the show a couple of times, he actually used accelerators to build.

the business without going to invest it. you know, the beginning, just needed some. At the beginning, she went to an accelerator to find a Codifounder. Then the next one, I think basically there was just some money that if they won first place, got some cash. And then another one, it's called, I believe, think it's called Founders Factory. I'm not sure, but anyway, I know it's the Rose Face in London and they use that to get their first big corporate contract. And then that was a contract with L'Oreal and obviously L'Oreal is

huge and very well known and also has very high French standards. And so if you survive, you know, working with L'Oreal, then all the other beauty houses basically take you very seriously. That really helps our business. But that particular accelerator, that's all they do. They basically say, come work with us and we will connect you to our corporate partners. And they're pretty good at it. And so I wonder why is it that...

You know, some accelerators actually do what they promise and I don't.

So part of it is just some are better at what they do than they are. Right now there's also, it's a similar with VC funds, but especially with accelerators, there's a bit of a virtuous cycle to that. like a network effect almost. So the best startups want to be part of the best accelerator programs are being invested by the best VC fund. And the best investors want to be connected with those accelerators because they find the best startups. So it becomes this virtuous cycle where once you're the best at something,

Speaker 2 (14:30.624)
everyone else to be part of it, and that includes corporate partners. There's certainly an element of scale to it, but it becomes very hard if you're trying to start an accelerator now to compete with the people who've already done it before for a lot of time. And that's kind of the same reason why Craigslist still exists, right? It is a ugly interface. It has been ugly for two decades, but marketplaces are that strong. So if you want to come in as an accelerator, and I'll tell you if you want to come in as a VC, you've to think about what differentiates you.

as your program, you actually have to hold yourself to the same standards you're going to hold your startups to. It's got to be a quantum level better. It's got to be visibly and obviously different than what everyone else is doing. So what you don't want to do is you want to go out there and best startups who have their choice of who they want on their cap table, what accelerators to go to. You don't want them to see you and think, that looks like every other accelerator I've looked at just with a different logo.

So in your view, do these things genuinely add value or is it just handing out cash, which is a commodity problem?

So the answer is yes, yes, but, and no, which is my way of trying to avoid the VC depends. I mean, we talk about the VC soft no, but BC say the word depends more than any other word out there. But the answer is it does depend. So there are some VCs that absolutely deliver value. Actually, I would say many VCs deliver value, but do they deliver fundamentally different or much more value than the other VC that you could have taken money from if you have the choice?

And many cases, the answer to that is no. So what's your typical pitch if you're like the generic VC? It's, hey, we're two or three former founders. We did really well. Now we want to like, you know, take it to the next level. So we did some angel investments and now we're turning them into a fund. And, we can help you with all like the issues you're going to come across as a founder. mean, have a great networks and we'll make introductions to you just like every other VC that that startup has spoken to. So, you know,

Speaker 2 (16:30.126)
They actually haven't held themselves to that standard. Like what can they do different and better? Now the exceptions are some of who really are different and better, the ones that are more established. So they have that virtuous cycle going for them. And then the ones that have actually sweated the details and built platforms around what they do that are meaningfully different. So corporate venture is a platform. If they do it right, it's a good platform. Accelerators are a platform. They're a BC fund with a heavy prologue.

And if you do that right and trench it yourself as an accelerator, that works well. But there are other platforms out there that exist or can be developed that historically look at it be like, I can't move aside, make some room for these guys. We need them on our cap table. And that's the goal you need to shoot for. that's a quantum level more value than your competitors as another VC front.

Do you think that we're now, so actually I'll tell you that I think this and then you can disagree with me if you like. So I think we're now at this time in the market where fundraising is so glamorized that people want to fundraise without necessarily knowing why. And you know, I was just reading a newsletter, know, get start up newsletters from various different national firms, know, because obviously we're working, we're doing a lot of work in the Middle East and.

And so I'm getting this newsletter and I'm just scrolling through it and it's just, okay, this company has raised this much and this company has raised this much. And I'm thinking, this is terrible, you know, good for them. But the signal that it sends is that you only become newsworthy if you convince somebody to give you money or something that might happen later. And I don't know, that just makes me think of, you know, some people are really great storytellers. Like Adam Neumann convinced people that Rework was a tech company.

And he got more money for his next startup after all the shady crap he did. Okay. I wouldn't try that. I wouldn't trust that man as like a valet at a mid-priced restaurant. mean, okay, sorry. No, that's, let's move on. I actually agree with you a hundred percent, right? There is a no fun and fundraise. And the people actually know that the best for VCs, cause we have to go raise money from LPs. And if you as a startup think it's hard to raise money from a VC, oh my God, try to raise money from LPs as a fun. I mean, there, that is brutal.

Speaker 2 (18:49.078)
And in part because we don't listen to what we did, I talked about before, right? We're actually just trying to sell a commodity type approach and the LPs have seen a zillion decks that look like that. Again, just with different logos. But I digress. On the fundraising side, I always tell founders that VC money is the least worst alternative for a certain type of startup. Not all startups are good for VC, right? They might be slower growth, they might be smaller markets, but you can still make a ton of money as a founder.

And if you're going to try to raise VC, again, you're trying to get a hammer on what you need as a screwdriver in different types of funding. you can fund.

very successful businesses that become big businesses without any external investment.

Yeah, or they would stop for a long time before they raise. Yeah. So you have to ask yourself this, right? What's the VC want and what do you want? Right? So VC is looking for companies that can return 10, 20, 50, 100 X. We need it, especially early on because we know, you know, if a third of our portfolio goes to zero in two years, we're doing pretty well, Right? We need those.

One and 10. You basically need one and 10 to.

Speaker 2 (19:57.358)
You know, I, I like to say that I need at least a third of my portfolio to do reasonably well. Right. So for me, a third, if they go to zero, okay. That's right. And if a middle third, get a two or three X or even a four X return in eight, nine years, that's kind of a loss for me. What do you think about what that translates into as an ROI basis? So I need the rest of my portfolio to be doing 10 X on average, a little bit more, a little bit less depending on the stage and the whole time. And within that third.

It really helps a lot if one of them is 100x.

Founders have to be very focused on exit and so that's either acquisition, know, or IPO, probably most likely acquisition. And that's also been really glamorized, but maybe that's not necessarily what you actually need to do.

I'm going to disagree with you on that one. would say when I see a starter coming in with like an exit opportunity slide in at a seed stage or series a it's kind of a turn off for me. I telegraphed from a weird sort of way that they're coming at this from a mercenary perspective rather than a missionary perspective. Like the ones who come in and say, I started this health tech startup because my mom was getting, you know, radiation for breast cancer. And I saw the way they were doing it. I'm like, Oh my God, I can't believe I'm trusting my mom to this.

Those guys are going to club away at this forever, maybe even longer than they should because it's a mission for them. The ones that are focused on like the exit, going is going to get a little hard. They're going to get like, you know, $300,000 job offer somewhere else. Like I can see I'll do something else. So sometimes the focus on the exit is a negative signal, but instead focus on your total addressable market. If your market is a billion dollar market or more, now we're talking it's potential for hundred X returns.

Speaker 2 (21:42.76)
And if you've to go to market, that's as clever as the startup is itself. And you have a chance of growing, doubling and tripling for those first couple of years, which means you'll get to that point fast enough for it to make sense for a VC. If you don't hit that criteria, don't despair. There are tons of people that made a lot of money with different types of businesses. And even if you do hit that criteria, if you have other alternatives, maybe you those first. Like maybe you can do just traditional bank loans. Maybe you can bootstrap off of revenue.

Maybe in a situation where you could, but then you're like, well, I could grow slower with revenue or I could take money and grow faster. Now that's an awesome place to be in as a founder because you don't need money at that point. You want it. And that makes VCs like that's a catnip for us. I don't need your money, but if I have it, I can grow faster. It makes us like want to shove it at.

So I'm being really happy single basically.

Yeah, and then you get all the dates you want.

So it actually reminds me of this company, it's an e-commerce company and they had been growing, know, sometimes growing slowly, sometimes fast, but for 13 years without any external funding. And then they raised their Series 8 13 years in and by the time they got there and it's called high snobiety. they basically, it's high fashion for men and they got there.

Speaker 1 (23:05.014)
first investment at Series A from Felix Capital. And I remember I saw both the investor and the founder and the relationship between them seemed quite healthy. Like, you know, they, both had professional respect for each other and they both understood that the other one was doing things that the other one couldn't do. And I thought that's a very good, healthy relationship. And it actually looks like a mutually beneficial partnership. Whereas I find that if people are going too early,

The power dynamic is just weird. It's just off. It's like when you see Donald Trump and Kirsten in the same room. You just tell by the body language, okay, who's the one in charge?

Yeah, I'm going to have to take your word on that one. The last time I was there, I couldn't see past the other glitterati to see Trump themselves. So no, you're, right. There's a definite power imbalance. If you think about it, like a BC, even like just your run of the mill BC is seeing hundreds of decks a year. And if they invest in say 10 each year, they're doing multiple transactions a year. They're just going to be better at that kind of thing. Even the ones that are relatively new at it within a year or two.

are going to have an order of magnitude more experience with a bunch of things than the founder does, especially when it comes around fundraising process. What's different in the case you did is you had entrepreneurs that had kind of deep experience in the space. They built something and it was a, they wanted, but didn't need situation. Now I'm sure they had this kind of conversation. We've been doing this for a while, but if we take this extra money, like we can hit this inflection point and you know, God damn it, let's try shooting for the moon. So it's a different dynamic.

in terms of the maturity of the founders and then the need for each other is a little less asymmetric.

Speaker 1 (24:52.59)
Just your confidence level and the fact that as a founding can just handle unpleasant situations because he'd be running his company for 13 years, growing it. we spoke and you know, sometimes it was going well, other times it was terrible. And I thought the whole thing would fall apart. And if he'd been going through that and actually managed to get it to a point where it's, everybody, by the time he brought investment, his brand in the industry was very well known.

You had great sense. so by that point, you know, if your VC isn't very happy with you, you can kind of handle it. You can handle yourself as a person. And so for the power dynamic to be in the founder's favor, what does the founder need?

So for most cases you just can't do anything about it be honest So you want to really vet your VC as much as possible? So you can go out and find if you have the choice if you have no choice You're just gonna be like I take the money or not, right? But if you're able to run a good process you get multiple turn sheets and I give like an hour talk on that But if you manage to get to that and you really want a diligence here VCs understand how their portfolio companies feel about that and most importantly It's not their successful portfolio companies. It's the ones that are going sideways or that fail

the ones that may not be on the portfolio page anymore. So go back, look through Crunchface, use the Wayback Machine to see what was there two, three, four years ago. Talk to those founders. Because how the VC treats those founders is good indication of how they are when you're not their daughter or their child. I want to go back to one point we talked about before. For many people who are going to be a first-time founder, and most of them are probably in corporate roles right now and they have this idea, it's a pain point they deal with every day.

And they're like, my God, I think I have a better way to do it. One of the things that they don't know, and that's the hardest for them to figure out before they jump ship is what does it actually feel like to be in a startup from a day to day perspective? You don't have anyone bring, you know, filling the coffee maker in the morning for you. If you want to get an office, you got to your own desk, but we assembled our own desk. And I don't mean a Kia sample. We built them from wood. I had like, I had over here, I.

Speaker 2 (27:04.11)
sludgers the better part of the year is we were too much in a rush to actually send it properly. Like that's a huge difference. So, um, you know, that's part of the, the, the beef I have with a lot of business folks out there, other than the fact that they're definitely boring the way that goes for it. It's that you can give you an instruction manual, but it doesn't give you the feel for what it is. You know, and that's T jobs, bell pics make it seem glamorous. It ain't like that. Uh, and that's part of the reason I wrote my book, like a novel, cause I wanted people

to really get a feel for the highs and the lows of being a founder. And if it's not for you, then okay, at least you know it's not for you and you haven't wasted three years of your life and maybe side-reeled your career.

actually try to give people some lessons so they can know when it's not for them because I agree with you that there's so much glamorization. So what are some signs that the startup life is definitely not for you?

Okay, for a large period of time, you're gonna be looking at your monthly bank statements and they're going to be going down. Your personal monthly bank statements. Then your business. When you have your business and when you're in personal, you're gonna be looking at it and I have this much, these many months of oxygen left. If something doesn't pick up, if I can't raise more money or if I can't, you know, boost my revenue, I'm not gonna make payroll. I went almost to, actually a little over a whole year without salary when 9-11 happened and the VC had given us a term sheet.

who was based in the World Trade Center just disappeared overnight, literally disappeared. So we went a year without salary. If the prospect of that makes your diaphragm seize up and you're short of breath, this is not for you. And I don't mean that in a bad way, but climbing Everest is not for me. get it. Like happiness is knowing what you're going to be comfortable with. So don't become a founder because you think it's cool to be a founder. You want to be a founder.

Speaker 2 (29:02.304)
Really try to put yourself in that position in six months or a year and understand like, this the kind of thing that like, I'm going lose my hair over and like need counseling for, or is this the kind of thing where like, I can do that. I'm willing to risk that. And if I lose a year of income, it'll be okay. I've got a spouse or a partner whose healthcare I can be on. I've got my parents, if I'm young enough so I can fall back on. If it doesn't work, I'll have learned a lot.

that's your attitude, then it's a better fit for you.

the theory, don't know if it's correct at all, but I have this theory that people who are really good at driving corporate and really good at lying in the hierarchy, that's a very different balance to the talent of an entrepreneur. And for example, I don't think I have that talent. And where like, do you think I have the talent for entrepreneurship? And so I think that if I were in a corporate, I don't think it would be, I mean, it wouldn't be pleasant for me, but I don't think I would get.

really to the top because I think I would, I would say a lot about what I really think and in corporate you're not allowed to do.

Yeah. So there's more than that too, right? There's, um, in everything in life, there's a trade off between precision and polish versus speed. So in corporate where, you know, there's a lot of finger pointing, the company's not going to move that fast anyway, the best of circumstances, you're prioritizing a little bit more for precision and polish and also building alliances and all that kind of stuff in a startup, like your alliances is your co-founder across the table. So that's, you know, a conversation and.

Speaker 2 (30:40.046)
you're trying things that are so different that it's not efficient to polish it. Just test it. I can go out there talk to 100 customers, put something up there, doesn't work, I take it down. The world didn't notice. L'Oreal, if they put out, we're just going to try it, and we're going to try like, puke green, and like, oh, that was a mistake. Well, that hurts L'Oreal much bigger in the long run. So they have to be more cautious. They have to like, dowel their eyes and cross all their Ts. So there are very different skills. In fact, probably the profession that trains you

the worst to be an entrepreneur's law. Because in law, you have no incentive to get a deal done fast. No lawyer was ever promoted because that deal happened in half the time. But they have been fired if something they missed, which was a totally obscure one in a million chance happened and it hurt their client. So they are drilled from the very beginning to spend as much time as possible, which they can bill for. Right? That's just the opposite for startups. So as much time as possible.

the fake up every single way something can go wrong and if they kill the dealer it takes longer no punishment just because they've saved their their client potential potential worst memory not. That's the counter opposite of what it takes to be a founder.

If somebody is in a corporate and they are thinking, I do have this idea and I've been wanting to work on it for a while, but you know, I'm not sure if it's for me. So obviously one of the dog devices get the book, but what else could they do to figure out, you know, to basically try before you buy.

So let's break it up to two pieces. One is that gut check we talked about before. Talk to as many real founders as possible. People who have done it for a year or two, ask them about their lows, ask them about the stuff they didn't expect before they jumped off the high dive. And you got to listen to that. Does your blonde run cold or are you like, I can handle that. You may still be wrong.

Speaker 1 (32:32.238)
to that, from different levels of income. What I mean is I remember I was speaking to a startup founder who was saying to me, yeah, know, like it's been hard, but we didn't get paid for two years. And he was certainly fine about it. And then I realized he was from, you know, one of the richest families in the country that I was in. I was just like, you know, you seem to get investment really quickly. How did that happen? I was from a family office with his uncles and I wish.

I had known that about him because I still think he's smart and like he's still doing well. But I do remember thinking like, boy, why isn't that happening?

But you guys didn't have the same existential angst that someone with three kids in private school might have over like nine money for a year or two. So yeah, I would say you need to qualify the entrepreneurs you work with for people who are in similar positions as you are. So that'll give you the most accurate, um, read on it. So that's a very good point. So that's the kind of emotional psychological preparation for the actual block and tackling get out there and talk to as many potential customers as possible.

The other kind of newbie mistake a lot of first time founders, and in particular the ones that have been trained at corporate, is things like, well, I can't tell anyone about this, they're going to steal my idea. Right? So the risk of somebody stealing your idea is infinitesimal compared to the probability that you will spend way too much time and build stuff the market doesn't want if you don't get out there and hear from the market. There's a saying in the industry, more companies, more startups die from suicide than homicide.

And I'll give you one other way to think about it, right? Startups are babies. You love your baby, you think your baby is the cutest ever. That other guy who may or may not become your competition, he or she thinks their baby is really cute. They're gonna at your baby and be like, yeah, it's not so cute. I like my baby better. So you're gonna say, did hear your idea. They're already attached to something else. And lastly, if your idea is so easy to steal, it's probably not that defensible. So it may not be maybe a good product to build, but it may not be a great investment.

Speaker 1 (34:38.094)
Our technical founders program that we run when people apply and they say, don't want, know, nerves of people stealing my idea, we just automatically now dismiss them because I just don't have the time to deal with that. Okay, you know, watch some YouTube videos, you need to figure, figure yourself out. Once you've done that, then you can come to.

I got a standard spiel. I'll send it back to them. But they got that one chance like, okay, that makes sense. Okay, we can keep talking. But if they're like, no, can they ask me to sign an NDA? I'm like, yeah, that's cute. Sorry, best of luck.

So on this note, I will let you go to enjoy your day and the link to your book is in the show notes. And well, thank you so much. been a pleasure. We've all learned so much from you.

Thank you for having me.