HACKER Q&A
📣 boredemployee

Which skills are essential for a founder and what can be learned?


Which skills are essential for a startup founder and what can be learned through books? Please recommend the most mandatory/important readings (even youtube links are welcome)


  👤 DoreenMichele Accepted Answer ✓
An obvious place to start is probably here:

https://www.ycombinator.com/library


👤 gregjor
“Founder” refers to accomplishments, a shorthand for someone who created something and built a business around it. The term does not refer to a set of skills or some combination of qualities. No one “is” a founder until they founded something, like no one “is” a parent until they have a child.

People who have studied learning mostly settled on focused practice as the most effective way to acquire skills — hundreds or thousands of hours of trial and error. You can read books about how to play guitar or write computer programs but to actually acquire and master those skills you need lots of deliberate practice, and some reference (like a mentor or teacher) to let you know what you get right and what you need to work on.

The skills required to start a software company will vary a lot from the skills required to open a restaurant or a school. People who have founded businesses probably share some traits such as persistence and confidence and abilitity to sell and motivate people, you can read about those people but I don’t think that gets you any closer to founding anything.

Anecdotally the successful founders I’ve known start with some skills they’ve mastered through experience, and an understanding of a business domain. They usually worked for a long time for other people to acquire skills, experience, contacts, and domain knowledge.


👤 sjducb
What kind of company are you trying to found? For this answer I'll assume you're a software developer starting a B2B SAAS.

#1 Product market fit. Skills wise this means you need to talk to customers and understand their problems. Jobs-to-be-done by Tony Ulwick helped me with this. Interviewing customers is super difficult and counter intuitive.

#2 Sales and marketing. This is a huge topic, easily as deep and counter intuitive as software. engineering. I found marketing for developers by Justin Jackson helpful as an intro.

#3 Now you've worked out what to build, and how to sell it, you can do the easy part. Build the actual product.