Founder Instinct
One of the most pervasive myths about starting companies is that you need to sit down, strategize, and consciously decide on the "next big thing". If you've ever tried it, you've likely found that staring at a blank page in search of startup ideas is remarkably unproductive. Sitting and thinking rarely brings breakthrough ideas. In fact, it might be one of the worst ways to spend your time if you're hoping to build something genuinely innovative.
Real founder instinct is less about waiting for inspiration and more about noticing problems and responding to them. It’s about the person who, when they see something broken, doesn’t just grumble but starts thinking, "How can I fix this?" The truth is, many founders didn’t set out to start a company. Instead, they found themselves so irritated by a problem that they couldn’t ignore it, and the company was born almost as an afterthought.
Take Airbnb, for instance. The founders, Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia, didn’t begin with the notion of disrupting the entire hospitality industry. Instead, they were just trying to pay rent in San Francisco, one of the most expensive cities in the U.S. Chesky and Gebbia were designers, not hotel moguls. When they found themselves struggling to afford their own rent, they didn’t sit down and think, “What’s the next big industry we could disrupt?” They looked at their immediate need money for rent and asked themselves, “How could we solve this problem?” They decided to rent out air mattresses in their apartment to visiting conference-goers, framing it as a low-cost lodging alternative. The solution seemed almost trivial at first, but this small, resourceful fix turned out to be the seed for a multi billion dollar company. They didn’t invent a problem for the sake of a startup, they encountered a real one and hacked together a solution.
Similarly, consider Uber’s origin story. Travis Kalanick and Garrett Camp didn’t set out to build a global transportation giant. In fact, the original idea behind Uber emerged out of a simple frustration: getting a cab in San Francisco. San Francisco, despite being a hub for tech innovation, isn’t known for its public transportation system. Frustration with the availability (or lack) of cabs led Kalanick and Camp to start brainstorming a way to solve their own transportation headache. Uber’s first prototype was a basic black-car service aimed at solving a specific problem in a specific city. Once they saw that people shared this pain point, they began to realize just how big the opportunity really was.
If Kalanick and Camp had lived in, say, Vienna or Zurich, where the public transportation is highly efficient, it’s unlikely that Uber would have emerged in the same way, or maybe even at all. It was the context of a poorly served city that led them to notice and ultimately act on this opportunity.
Founder instinct is rooted in the ability to notice problems in the wild and to see them as opportunities. Many of the best ideas don’t come from brainstorming sessions, they come from everyday problems, often sparked in moments of frustration. They tend not to look glamorous from the outset, nor do they often signal the billion-dollar businesses they may one day become. But they are real, grounded in problems that people feel acutely and that’s what makes them powerful.
The founder instinct is like a muscle, for you to develop it keep your eyes open, see problems, and instead of shrugging, think, “How can I fix this?” and become obsessed on fixing that problem.
And remember
Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. Once you learn that, you'll never be the same again.
- Steve Jobs
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