The most counterintuitive thing I've learned is that the best way to build a durable company is to be obsessively focused on the problem, not the solution. Most founders fall in love with their solution, which makes them blind to feedback. But if you're in love with the problem, every piece of negative feedback is a gift because it gets you closer to actually solving it.
The best companies are almost never built on the thing that the founder thought they were building at the beginning. What actually matters is that you have a team that is so committed to the problem, so deeply in love with the customer's pain, that they will pivot and evolve and change their approach as many times as necessary until they find the thing that actually works.
The most counterintuitive thing I've learned is that the companies that are most successful are the ones where the founder has figured out that their job is not to have the answers — their job is to build the system that produces the answers. And that's a fundamentally different orientation than most founders have, especially in the early days.
The best companies are almost never built by people who set out to build a company. They're built by people who set out to solve a problem so important to them that they couldn't not work on it. The company is almost an afterthought — it's the vehicle, not the destination.
2w ago
Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.
