The Soul of Startups

CHAPTER 5The Unlearner

Every startup was born from an idea to solve something that isn't working right now in our world. It's natural to believe that the startup was born from the frustration of a founder to create a solution that doesn't quite exist yet. If you've ever been in a room with enough founders, you'll know that the majority of them are 80 percent frustrated and 20 percent excited.

It doesn't matter if they're in an accelerator (to help a startup with scaling up and growth) or an incubator (to help founding teams’ disruptive ideas with the hope of building out a business model and company). Their anxiety is evident to me.

Not all founders are leaders in armor rising from the ground to bring us answers the world doesn't know are needed. Not all founders are the same shape. Some have never done this before, let alone are leaders or managers in their lives.

Some have spent most of their last decade or two being managers and executives, fulfilling someone else's dreams. So, now it is their turn to realize their dreams, vowing to be better managers than those duds they were just reporting to a month ago. I call these new founders corporate hackers.

This is a polite way to describe them, but another slightly more discourteous way of describing them would be to call them the Unlearners. Individuals who have lived in frustration with others have found a way to redefine themselves to compensate for what they couldn't have in their last positions. They go into redemption mode ...