11d • General discussion
Founders Trap
95% of your problems are old problems wearing new clothes... please understand this framework 👇🏾
That supplier who's ghosting you? Caesar had the same issue with grain merchants 100s of years ago.
That investor who keeps moving the goalposts? The Medici banks dealt with that in 1400s Florence.
Your co-founder drama? Jobs and Wozniak. Gates and Allen. Every founding story ever...
Do not convince yourself your situation is special.
Or that your market is different.
Or that your generation is unique.
Stop trying to solve everything from first principles, you're not the first human to run a business...
Someone probably solved the problem that is keeping you up at night in 1987. And 1993. And 2004. And last Tuesday.
I've been in business for about 15 years and it's taken me 12 of them to realise that the first question to ask yourself when you're facing a challenge is...
"Has anyone solved this before?"
When Netflix started streaming - genuinely new. Nobody had done it at scale.
When I started hiring people - ancient problem. Millions had done it before.
When Uber fought city regulations - uncharted territory. The playbook didn't exist.
When I tried to motivate my first team - timeless challenge. Ask any Roman general.
In the last couple of years, I became wildly more productive when I started asking one question: "Who's already solved this?"
If someone has, I find them. Pay them. Hire them. Ask to meet them.
Whatever it takes to not spend three years learning what they can tell me in three minutes.
If nobody has - if it's genuinely unprecedented - then I experiment like hell. No advisors. No books. No "best practices". Fail as fast as I can.
👴🏻 OLD PROBLEMS = FIND EXPERTISE
👶🏼 NEW PROBLEMS = FAST EXPERIMENTATION
The tragedy I see all the time is founders wasting their prime years solving solved problems...
They're brainstorming HR policies that P&G nailed in the 80s.
Their revolutionary approach to email marketing? Someone A/B tested that in 2015.
That radical pricing strategy? It's chapter 4 in a book from 1992.
The smartest founders I know are intellectual thieves - they steal everything that's been solved and pour all their creativity into the 5% that's genuinely unprecedented...
For many founders ego makes us think we're too special for other people's solutions.
Inexperience convinces them their situation is unique.
Insecurity makes them think they look weak for asking for help.
So we sit alone, solving solved problems, while our competitors are already three problems ahead.
You do not need to reinvent the wheel... you just need to find someone who'll explain how the thing works! 🛞
- from Steven Bartlett
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Founders Trap
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