There are a lot of advantages to being a repeat founder. It is often easier to attract talent and capital. You have pre-existing relationships you can leverage. You have less stuff you are figuring out for the first time. One thing I've reflected on over the past year though is how being a repeat founder can also lead to blindspots.
In my first couple of venture backed companies, we scaled aggressively before having firm product market fit. When we started Reforge, our first Growth Series had over 2K applications, $1M in revenue, and solid NPS on a super embarrassing MVP. It was the strongest early product-market fit I had experienced in my career.
But because of my prior founding experience, I was too conservative and methodical in the early days of Reforge. Rather than trusting and leaning in hard to the product market fit, I spent a lot of time and energy being very methodical about making sure we had it. Had I done the opposite, we could have probably grown even faster than the 2X YoY that we did.
I've discussed this with other founders who have experienced a similar pattern - repeat founders have a bias to overcorrecting for mistakes in prior companies. I've also seen this in career searches. For example, someone feels they were under paid in a prior role, so they optimize for compensation but don't take into account all the other factors like manager, role, and more. Overall, learning from prior mistakes is essential, but overcorrecting is the trap.
Comments