Support the Founder, not the idea

Dall-e created image based on this article. Not sure it makes sense…

I want to INCREASE the failure rate of startups

Successful ecosystems don’t artificially prop up their startups, like we do here. They allow (or encourage!) them to fail, so that the founders can move on to something that is more likely to succeed.

It’s why I think we should move to a model of supporting the founder(s) and not the idea/startup.

The sheer volume of founder time, and public & private money wasted on ideas that will never grow, is insane. And I think it’s worse here in Wales than most places.

I’m constantly staggered by the amount of incredibly poor startups I see in Wales who will go on to receive support & funding for YEARS without any sign of addressing a real customer problem, or gaining any significant traction.

Because they’re not addressing a “real” problem.

I’ve written before about how we over-support startups here in Wales: Twitter thread.

The key thing that is so often missed when we support startups is that a good idea is not the same as a good business.

Successful founders understand the crucial difference between a customer problem and a problem that customers are willing to pay to have fixed.

Support is often measured in part on how many startups are still alive X years later. That’s a dumb metric, & no evidence of economic success. I’ve been part of a zombie startup. And I see them all the time. No traction. Founders paying themselves a pittance for years on end…

It results in incredibly slow innovation and iteration, because there’s no urgency. They’re propped up by the ecoystem.

There’s a well established correlation in startups between iteration speed and future success.

And in Wales, like many other ecosystems, we are SLOW.

And that’s not to say that the founders who move slowly are irredeemably bad.

It’s just that they have fallen foul of cognitive biases (like I have, many times!), and never received sufficient challenge, or been given the skills to be self-critical and iterate quickly.

This is why I believe we should move to a model of supporting the founder(s), and not the idea. As a programme or ecosystem supporting the startup it’s easy to find yourself seeing a failing business as YOUR failure to get them to a point of success.

And that means you are tempted to throw more resources at propping them up. And then the startup founder is encouraged to continue working on something to their own personal and financial detriment.

By the time they realise they don’t have anything tangible, they’re YEARS down the line. They’re exhausted and skint. And they go get a job. All that learning is probably lost to the ecosystem.

Supporting founders instead of a specific idea potentially sets them on the road to building multiple successful businesses over their entrepreneurial careers.

That can’t happen if they get burned out after being propped up for 5yrs on something that was always going to fail.

Even the best programmes are fallible & have potential to keep products alive even when they’re not solving a problem. By focusing on the founder(s), you’re more likely to be product agnostic, and give them permission to kill their startup or pivot when the time is right.

Stopping working on an idea that isn’t working is just one step closer to the idea that WILL work.

Supporting the founder over the idea also engenders (in both the support programme and the founders) what I consider to be pretty much the most important mindset in creating a successful startup:

Falling in love with the problem, not the product.

There is no magic formula to building a successful startup. They’re inherently risky. But finding a real problem to solve is step one.

“Good ideas” aren’t enough.

Realising this will help increase the REAL success rate & not just the “still barely alive after five years” rate.

I’m advocating supporting the founder(s) & increasing the failure rate of those startups that *should* fail. This will allow for everyone’s resources to be better deployed, increasing the number of founders that succeed and have a longterm, positive, social & economic impact.

If you want to join the conversation on this article, comment below, or head over to the discussion on my LinkedIn post…