A few months ago, I opened up my calendar to have virtual coffees with founders from my LinkedIn network. As a founder myself and a stereotypical extrovert, I was looking for a way to increase my social interactions, meet new people, and get some different perspectives on running a company during a global pandemic. I spoke to 50 founders, and here’s how it breaks down:
I started each conversation asking how the other’s company was born, then we went on to sharing achievements and sharing challenges. The main themes across all 50 founders were challenges in fundraising, hiring, attracting customers, and work-life balance.
Fundraising
About half of the founders I spoke with had not previously raised venture capital. They were first-time founders and a big part of our coffee chats revolved around the fundraising process and its challenges. Like me, they wanted to know how to get access to investors, what the pitching conversations were like, how to set a fundraising strategy, and of course, how to have a successful funding round.
Hiring
On the other hand, the other half of the founders I spoke with had recently raised their seed round, and their biggest challenge has been hiring. All were frustrated by how long the process was and how involved the founders had to be in the process, spending the bulk of their time focused on hiring with little time left for other parts of the business. Many founders expressed their desire to hire a diverse team: a balanced team of men and women, with different backgrounds and different ethnicities, but struggled to find the right candidates, or found that their top candidates would drop out of the process at the very end of the hiring pipeline, leading to a longer hiring process and disappointment.
Attracting customers
Founders of deep-tech companies said their main struggle with attracting customers is balancing the research and development of the technology with early sales. With a long product development roadmap, they are constantly waiting for new data necessary to re-engage their customers and to get closer to prototyping and running trials. For founders in highly competitive fields, such as alternative protein, they have to vie for viable customers quickly while their product is still 12+ months away from launch.
Work-Life Balance
Being overworked has always been an expectation of founders, however during the pandemic, I believe this reached an entirely new level. The assumption of constant availability because you are at home has become overwhelming and many founders have struggled to set boundaries. With the lack of anything else to do, every founder I spoke with told me they were working around the clock, when pre-pandemic, they would stop working, meet friends, go to an event, or just take a break.
What did I learn?
I had no idea what to expect when I started these founder coffees as a way to break up the monotony of only interacting with my Zoom room, and my apartment. Beyond the struggles and challenges shared by my fellow founders, I’m coming away from this project with 3 key learnings:
1. People want to be invited
Don’t expect others to invite you to stuff, sometimes you just have to go out there and invite everyone instead. If you are the one doing the inviting, you will be seen as the leader by Day 1.
2. It doesn’t hurt to be aggressive
You can take advantage of your network by being forward and simply asking them for something. It’s very surprising how many people are open and willing to share their time with you.
3. It’s uncomfortable, but only initially.
Yes, it’s pretty uncomfortable to put yourself out there, but it gets easier the more times you do it.
Thank you to all 50 founders who shared their time with me so far!
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