The Most Important Skill for Startup Founders & Founders Who Refuse It

Einstein: “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”

Building a startup company as a founder or entrepreneur is a journey in which you must constantly complete tasks and solve problems. Some of these tasks and problems will be simple, while others will be challenging. The simple ones are probably the ones where you can do things that are within your, your company's, or your team's capabilities.

Challenging problems, by their very nature, may have a high difficulty level. On the other hand, some problems may be of easy or medium difficulty by their nature, but a person's knowledge, experience, or skill set may not be sufficient to solve them. Or even understand them.

If you studied math as an undergraduate or graduate student, a simple algebra problem may be too easy for you to both understand and solve because algebra was part of your curriculum throughout your math studies.

However, if you studied political science like I did and did not have a deep or broad math education, a simple algebra problem can look and mean the same as a formula that calculates the trajectory of a rocket to the moon because the letters, numbers, and signatures I see only mean a functional unit in a writing system or visually a phoneme, a unit of sound that distinguishes from other words or options and symbols for calculating and counting systems.

Software Engineering/Development is similar. If you don't know how to code a simple Python or HTML code block, the file of a simple function will be meaningless to you and will most likely look similar to the code of a file with more complex functions. With no knowledge of a completely unfamiliar topic or issue, because it is not available in our daily lives and cannot be passed on orally from one person to another in a short period of time through a quick interaction, one will be unable to perceive or have an intuitive idea of what is there and what it means. That is why a junior developer with little programming knowledge can understand what is in the code in 20 seconds, whereas someone with no development knowledge will understand nothing after 20 hours of looking at the code.

What changes here is not the discipline, science, task, or problem, but the person's knowledge, followed by perception, understanding, and abilities derived from that knowledge.

Developing a product with high market fit, acquiring customers at a low cost, fundraising, hiring good and best people, and successfully managing finances are some of the major tasks that any founder must complete in order to build a large company.

Some of these tasks in startups appear to be problems for the founders.

They are the same tasks that all founders and startups must complete in order to be a startup and succeed. And none of them change based on startups or founders.

Despite this, statistics show that some startups succeed while others fail.

It's because the founder fails to complete tasks.

If some founders and their startups are able to complete or solve these tasks but others are not, what could be the cause of this?

For startups, tasks are precise, and as a result, methods of dealing with them (solutions) never change. Find product market fit = build products people love, fundraise=convince people to invest in your company. These tasks and more given above can also be listed as rigid and inflexible principles for building a successful startup.

That leaves us with the founder as the source of the problem.

After working with over 50 startups, I've realised that the difficulty of these tasks or problems for the founder leads to significant negative or positive business outcomes with no additional variables required.

While it is a significant opportunity that most critical principles and topics at startups can be defined as tasks, as described above, instead of completing them, some founders force some of the tasks until they become insoluble problems.

When these tasks are forced to become problems, they create bottlenecks that, if left unsolved, halt the evolution of a startup company.

The founder is the only person who can turn a task into a problem and vice versa while also wielding significant power over the startup company.

Human understanding is a reflection of how a piece of knowledge is perceived and any task(or topic) is evaluated through close collaboration of the founder's knowledge and perception while making choices and decisions. As a result, if the founder, as the business's top executive-or ruler-, fails to understand or misunderstand an important task, the startup can fail without any additional effort or contributing factors.

This is an unavoidable disadvantage for businesses, due to the hierarchical and structural limitations of business enterprises in the twenty-first century.

That's why as a founder, advisor, or investor I never look for companies, but I look for founders. The market and the product are the only other factors that can have such a large impact on startup companies.

While rationality and emotional intelligence play an important role in the founder's awareness to trigger change when the results of some actions are not satisfactory at a startup company, the underlying principle to completing tasks and solving problems is to learn new things.

When a founder is unable to learn new things due to a lack of motivation or ability, or for any other reason, such as emotional wellbeing, the problems become permanent and prevent the company from growing indefinitely.

Knowledge about startups is similar to how knowledge about algebra and software engineering does not come at birth and has not penetrated our culture enough to be learned from anyone we choose.

Tasks and problems arising from any of these topics will always be difficult, as learning about them requires special attention and dedication because they are not easily understood and widely distributed.

A further distinctive feature of them is that they will not get easier on their own.

This leaves the founder's ability to learn knowledge as the only way to understand tasks, problems, and their complexity and simplify them enough for the founder's perception and ability to deal with them by finding convoluted or beautiful solutions to build startups.

If a founder refuses to learn a task and its complexities, it means that: a. the founder is opposed to a precise, rigid, and inflexible task, which is also a principle that must be followed for any startup to succeed; b. the task has now become a problem for the company; and c. the discovery and implementation of a solution to the problem-causing task is being obstructed.

Consider a big, strong rock and someone who desires to break it. But chooses to do nothing while hoping for it to be broken. No matter how long a person chooses to do nothing or how strongly the person desires the rock to be broken, the rock will remain in one piece and will not be broken unless the proper action is taken. While waiting, a person may realise that this isn't working and decide to fight the big, strong rock by throwing plastic balloons at it. The big strong rock will remain unchanged. It may be funny or disturbing to watch because you know that no matter how many balloons are thrown or how long the wrong action or inaction continues, it will never work out, but the person who wishes to break it is blind to this.

A person can discover why these methods are not working by gathering various scientific knowledge (learning) that can provide clear answers about the task and the issue, such as geology or physics. Or go back to basics like cause and effect to figure out why inaction is ineffective. If a person wishes to learn more, he or she may even figure out how to break a big strong rock down with the correct action.

When I notice a situation in which a founder refuses a task and the only way to complete it is through learning, I realise that instead of dealing with it, the founder is attempting to fight the task, without realising that this is not only a fight against the task, but a fight against being a founder, because you can't be a founder or build a startup without completing this task.

At this point, the founder is absolutely unaware that the battle is being waged against oneself.

When founders refuse to accept that there is a definitive way to complete the task and that they can only find out what it is by learning the task and its complexities, they fight the task and/or themselves in various ways with their minds, emotions, talks, actions, or inactions.

They are sometimes aware of the fight, sometimes not, but they choose to fight by failing to choose the correct method of dealing with the task--learning it. The act of choosing may remain hidden from the founder's perception because it occurs automatically when they refuse to learn about the task. Some founders spend their entire startup journey in this state, completely unaware of what they choose to do or not do.

All of this occurs while the task remains stationary and awaits completion with well-defined and fixed characteristics. In the same way that an algebra equation or a big rock would.

Not because it wants or chooses to, but because of its nature and capabilities. A task has no mind or emotions. Because it is also unable to take action, it will never fight back, learn, or change depending on the founder and how the founder acts.

A task simply sits and waits to be understood, completed, or solved.

The founder is the primary problem in 99 percent of startup businesses.

Not the big, strong rock or the balloon.

That's why I look for founders.

If you are a startup founder reading this and things aren't going well at your company, you must understand that the problem is you and your choices.

So how does a founder build a big startup company?

By learning.

So how can a founder fail at building a startup company?

By refusing to learn.

Two facts should never be overlooked: Firstly, both startups and difficult problems in life are inherently counterintuitive. Second, no one can solve a problem without first understanding it.

That is why learning is the most important skill for startup founders. And, most likely, for all humans.