Founding

What This Skill Does

This is the operating manual for starting and running an early-stage venture. It covers the five things a founder actually does in years zero through three: picking what to build, finding first customers, hiring the first ten people, telling the story (so customers buy, employees join, and investors fund), and the daily operating discipline that decides whether the company is alive in year four.

Founding is not strategy work. It is closing one customer this week, hiring one person this month, and not running out of money. Most founder failures are operational, not strategic — the founder picked a real problem, then got tired, distracted, or honest about how hard the unit economics were.

Pick What to Build

Three filters in order. Apply them strictly — most "startup ideas" survive one and die at the next.

Filter 1: Is the pain real and specific?

• The customer feels it weekly. Not "annually at planning time." Weekly.
• They can name the moment last week it bit them. If they can't, the pain is theoretical.
• They are already paying for a workaround — a person, a spreadsheet, a vendor that almost solves it. The willingness to pay is proven; you only have to redirect it.
• The pain is concentrated in one role at the company, not distributed. "Everyone hates this" usually means no one owns budget for it.

If you cannot find five people in 60 minutes who describe the same pain in the same words, skip this idea. Ideas where you have to explain the problem to the customer are research projects, not businesses.