Mark Zuckerberg was a college student when he started Facebook at Harvard.
Brett Hurt was shopping online when he founded Bazaarvoice in Austin.
The Honest Company co-founder Jessica Alba was a new mom.
Airbnb’s co-founders were young Millennials in need of cash.
Why does any of this matter?
It matters because many of the world’s most successful companies were founded by people who actually represented the users or customers they were trying to serve with their businesses. And this is just one of the reasons why prominent venture capitalists like Fred Wilson with Union Square Ventures, Paul Graham with Y Combinator and Ben Horowitz with Andreessen Horowitz routinely champion the role of founders as CEOs for as long as it's prudent for startups to reach their potential.
Founders aren’t just the people with the ideas. Founders are the people with the pain, the empathy and the personal desire to solve a problem that others have encountered, too. Founders are students using a social network. Founders are shoppers buying products online. Founders are parents looking for eco-friendly products for their children. Founders are of a new generation and way of thinking for a $1.3 trillion travel industry.
More than anything, founders are closer to their users than anyone else in the company – and the longer they can stay that way, the more successful the company may ultimately end up being.
There are exceptions to this, no doubt. Jeff Weiner isn’t the founder of LinkedIn, but its founder and initial CEO Reid Hoffman handed over the reins after a few years. Natya Sadella isn’t one of Microsoft’s co-founders, but he’s ushering in a new age for the tech behemoth. Sheryl Sandberg doesn’t hold the CEO title at Facebook and wasn’t a founder at either Facebook or Google before that, but she has played hugely important roles in both companies’ successes as public enterprises.
The ground-level intuition, passion and understanding that founders have for the problem they are trying to solve is unmatched and nearly undefeated in tech. Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Oracle, Salesforce, Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Uber, Airbnb, TripAdvisor, Tesla, Yelp – the list of multi-billion-dollar tech companies still led by original founders (either as CEOs or as board chairs) is just as impressive today as it was in the days of Henry Ford and Sam Walton.
As the founder and CEO of a travel startup that is aimed at helping people experience local in major cities around the country (and, soon, the world), I recently embarked upon an epic 35-city, cross-country road trip during which I got direct, in-person feedback from our existing and prospective users, met with local business owners and was reminded of just how important our mission is. I also took notes on three major factors that every founder, operator and tech employee should rely upon to stay close to their company’s users to find those kernels of insight that lead to success.
1. Email is not empathy.
Yes, you can work from your office and be very productive. Yes, emails and phone calls are pretty effective at staying in touch with partners, users, clients and customers. Yes, travel is costly. But you know what’s more costly than flights and hotels? Not knowing what problems your users and customers are really experiencing. Not knowing what your clients or partners really think about your product or service. So jump on those flights, ditch the conference call and leave the office every month (or at least every quarter) to get closer to your users. It’s the best way to make sure you’re not creating a chasm between your company’s mission and strategy and your userbase’s reality. Empathy is best attained by listening and sitting right next to your user, not on Skype or email.
2. Vision comes from wisdom.
If you’re not actually using your own products and services or putting yourself in a position to experience the pain points that led you to create the company in the first place, you’ll eventually pay the ultimate price: You’ll get beat by a company of people who do. Just look at Facebook vs. MySpace. Facebook’s founder spent the first year or two relating to college students, whereas MySpace’s founders were trying to relate to aspiring musicians, which were not their core users. By staying close to the original problem you are trying to solve, you stay close to the breakthrough, either big or small, that will help you solve it most directly. For me, that means a lot of travel, a lot of discovering of new bars, restaurants and local businesses and a hell of a lot of talking to local business owners and travelers who can benefit from what we’re building.
3. A problem is worth your passion.
In sports, old age is undefeated. Knees and backs give out, arms and legs get less resistant to stress and muscles eventually stop responding the way they did in a player’s younger days.
In startups, burnout is undefeated. Every founder, every executive and every employee has felt it at some point. It’s as common for a founder to ditch an idea or company due to burnout as it is for Taylor Swift to write a song about an ex-boyfriend. You can count on it.
So far – seven years into owning my own business, five years into the tech industry and 3.5 years into leading Localeur – I can say without a doubt that the best defense to burnout isn’t a vacation or reading or dating or meditating. It’s staying close enough to your users and the problem that you’re solving to feel the positive energy, goodwill and enthusiasm that comes from doing just that.
When I was on my road trip, I was visiting a new city basically every day for six weeks. It was exhausting hitting five or six meetings and local businesses all over a city I didn’t know that well, then sleeping in a new bed and waking up early the following morning to make a long drive (Minneapolis to Seattle is no easy stretch of highway). What kept me going on this trip and for the past 3.5 years on this same mission was meeting different people, experiencing different cities and discovering different local businesses that remind me how important this work is – and how valuable the opportunity is to solve this problem.
No matter what problem you’re trying to solve and what company you’ve founded or work for, keep all this in mind in those moments when you’re not feeling connected to your mission or your team or your users and customers. Keep this in mind when burnout comes knocking at your door.