The evolution of a founder: Filling in the gaps

This is cross-posted from the original article published on Forbes.

We often compare founding a company to raising a child. There's pride, a refusal to admit we don’t know everything from the start and a whole lot of growth—not just for the company but for us as founders.

The founder journey is fraught with challenges, primarily because a founder’s role evolves out of necessity as the company matures. From bootstrapping an idea to a successful exit, founders constantly adapt their focus and apply their skills—both technical and emotional—to meet the company’s needs at each phase.

Much like the lifecycle of a company, the evolution of a founder can be broken into key phases, each requiring a different skill set to nurture the company to the next phase.

Over the first five years of our company's life, we went through four phases of our own:

Phase 1: Doing Everything Everywhere All at Once

At the very beginning, you’re in the most intense phase. With limited staff and funding, the margin for error is minuscule.

You’re doing a bit of everything to get the company on its feet: fundraising, managing a tight budget, negotiating contracts and leveraging your value-add skills (for me, it was platform design and product development). If there’s time, you’re also sourcing customer feedback, building your founder network, and courting potential investors. This stage is the genesis of the company, where the foundation is laid, and the small team works tirelessly to launch the product.

Cherish these moments, because this is one of the most exciting phases of your company’s life. Everything is a possibility, and your company must be nimble enough to iterate quickly to find product-market fit.

Imagine your company without any limitations—money, people or time. If you had unlimited resources, what would your product look like? Now, work backward to distill that vision into the most impactful functions to bring it to life. While building out this Day 1 MVP, keep a level head and prioritize ruthlessly as you cross items off your checklist.

It’s crucial not to take things personally. Every “no” from investors or lack of adoption from prospective customers is just more feedback to refine your product-market fit.

Phase 2: Get The Ball Rolling

By now, you’ve hopefully raised your initial round of financing and can expand your full-time team. Think of this phase as your company becoming an adolescent: You need to trust in the culture and team you’ve built and learn to delegate responsibilities. They need you to focus on the bigger picture and prepare them for the next phase.

At this point in our own company’s life, we staffed up on operations to handle customer inquiries and platform intricacies. In exchange, I began laying the groundwork for managing the board after our first funding round.

Your team will still be nowhere near the size needed to handle scale, especially as product-market fit is still being perfected. Consider what your customer wants and what specific pain points you can address that will be exponentially better than current solutions. Be as analytical as possible and don’t get locked into any single feature or solution. Use data-driven decision-making and let your customers guide you toward solutions, even if they challenge your initial assumptions.

Phase 3: Scaling To Something Real

Once you know your product-market fit, your focus as a founder should obsessively shift to scaling. With product-market fit comes enough funding to hire experts to fill identified gaps. It may seem hard to let go of duties you feel personally connected to (like UX design for me), but it’s crucial to trust your team.

With a larger team in place, focus on employee retention and fostering company culture. The first 50 people at a company set the cultural tone for years to come. Hire carefully and slowly, ensuring every new team member is critical to your success at that point in time. The last thing you want to do is over-hire or settle for a candidate out of desperation.

It bears repeating: Trust your team. From experience, I can tell you that your team will step up in ways you never imagined.

Shifting your focus to maturing the company will reveal your deficits. Have you built a data-driven and KPI-oriented culture, or are you flying blind with product development? Do you understand your levers for growth, or are you still trying everything to see what sticks? Do you have a hiring framework to ensure new team members align with your values? These critical gaps need your attention, and you can’t meaningfully address them if you’re holding onto operational responsibilities.

Phase 4: Growing Up

At this point, you’ve turned the initial idea into a tangible product people are willing to pay for. You’ve raised enough to build a team centered on your vision and culture. You’re less worried about running out of cash, but now you need to figure out how to deliver 100x returns at venture scale.

This is your time to shift focus from operational details to strategic vision. The paths to $100,000, $1 million, $10 million and $100 million are equally challenging in different ways. Revenue is like a freight train: The first million dollars is the hard push to get it moving from a standstill, the next $10 million is about keeping the boiler stocked with enough coal to keep accelerating and $100 million is running the train at full steam without it flying off the rails.

Conclusion

By recognizing the stage your company is in, you can take things one step at a time to maintain a clear focus and avoid burnout. Just as you nurture your company at each stage, have the self-awareness to recognize your growth needs. Through this honest and self-reflective lens, you’ll recognize where the gaps are and learn how to fill them. As founders, we are not just building companies; we are building ourselves. It's a journey of continuous learning, adaptation and growth—a journey that ultimately allows us to leave a lasting legacy.