As I mentioned in my last post, there is a prevailing negative sentiment around the difficulty of running a startup. If you are a single founder startup (SFS), the conventional wisdom says the cards are stacked so much against you to barely make it worth trying. I’d like to call BS again.
StatSheet is a SFS, but I didn’t suffer from most of the issues that people claim as being problematic for a SFS. First and foremost (and by definition), a SFS doesn’t have co-founders. There is just one person. That’s true, but given the strong group of advisors I’ve established over time, StatSheet has felt like it’s had 3 or 4 founders at any one time.
When I was out raising money, investors commented on how generous I was to my advisors in terms of granting stock options. What they didn’t understand is that I didn’t use advisors in the traditional “low impact”, once a month way many startups do. I leaned on my advisors constantly. One advisor provided connections with investors and entrepreneurs. One gave me a lot of guidance with sales. Another has been a constant source of guidance and mentorship not to mention providing input during business development, strategy and acquisition discussions. I met with some of them on a weekly basis and in some cases more than once a week.
If you have an interesting business, you should be able to find good advisors. In my experience (including for the companies I’ve advised), advisors are willing to spend considerably more time helping their startups than the startups ask of them. And they don’t need 50% or 33% ownership to do it!
When I started StatSheet I didn’t set out with a plan to find a bunch of great advisors and use them as “co-founders”, it just happened over time. That’s one reason why networking is such a critical activity in the early stage of a startup. Bringing on advisors is a very capital efficient way to get access to a wealth of industry experience and talent without having to pay for it! And often times, it is an easy sell to bring someone on as an advisor. Being an advisor to a company is a badge of honor for successful entrepreneurs and business executives.
Don’t be afraid to give your advisors real deliverables. But the catch is that you have to be proactive. I see the advisor/startup relationship as similar to the mentor/mentored relationship. It is up to the startup or person being mentored to be proactive with the relationship. In every case I can think of (which includes me mentoring ~10 people in my career and being an advisor to 7 companies), the person being mentored or the company I was advising wasn’t proactive enough. They didn’t ask enough of me. You have to stay on top of it. Ask for a weekly call or meeting. Get due dates from them for specific deliverables. Follow up.
I’m talking about this in the context of a Single Founder Startup, but of course it applies to startups with any number of founders. Bottom line: MAKE BETTER USE OF ADVISORS. And since “advisor” has a certain “low impact” conotation, maybe we need a term for a more involved advisor. If you bring them on in the beginning, you could refer to them as “Founder Advisor” or “Founding Advisor”.
