Here are the five best founder tips I’ve learned as a Found host

After more than two years — and nearly 100 episodes — TechCrunch recently came to an end I found a podcastI learned a lot about how founders approach building their startups.

I’ve heard stories about how founders know when it’s time to scale from their core product, to how startups approach hiring, to what motivated entrepreneurs to make the leap in the first place, and everything in between.

Even though I’m not a founder, some of the lessons and tips I heard on the show stood out more than others. I’ve compiled a short, sweet list of the top five pieces of advice for founders I’ve heard on the show, both practical and philosophical.

Founders have to rely on what they’re not good at

While many founders talked about finding co-founders or hiring early hires who helped fill their experience or knowledge gaps, Riebling, co-founder and CEO Parker Conrad He believes founders should do the opposite.

Conrad called the practice of hiring people to fill roles that the founder isn’t good at, or doesn’t want to do, nonsense.

“You have to find the things you hate within the company, and you have to run toward them and bear to embrace them and care about them and focus on them, because those are the things that will probably kill you,” Conrad said. “These are the things that you might avoid because it’s uncomfortable to focus on. I’ve definitely seen that myself, and the things that you really hate are, like, this is where you should be spending all your time.”

Venture capitalists aren’t always right

While the right venture capitalist can provide invaluable insight and guidance to a startup, good VCs are hard to find, and even the best VCs don’t always give the best advice for every startup.

When Ashley Turner, Founder and CEO of FarmboxRxa direct-to-consumer produce box company aiming to help solve the food-confectionery problem, offered venture capital, and they asked it to turn into a meal kit company, the trend at the time. She’s glad she ignored the advice and got baptized instead.

“All the venture capitalists we talked to, any of them that were nice to us at the time wanted us to become a meal kit,” Turner said. “That wasn’t what our focus was. We didn’t want to jump on the meal kit bandwagon. Now, looking back, I’m really glad I never raised any capital and we haven’t raised any capital to this day. You know, most Meal kits are a slow death.

Instead, after just a few years, FarmboxRx was able to tie up with insurance companies and start sending boxes of its products as part of patients’ prescriptions, a revenue stream that Tyner said has been really profitable for the company.

It pays to not be the first

If you read a lot of PR pitches, as I do most days, the common denominator is that many companies like to tout that they were “first” in either a technological innovation or a new market. But is being first always the best thing?

Jordan Nathan, founder and CEO of non-toxic housewares company cuminI wouldn’t necessarily agree. Nathan told TechCrunch that when he was preparing to launch Caraway’s first line of non-toxic cookware, he wasn’t happy at first because it seemed like they would be the last to launch in an increasingly crowded category, but it worked out. Nathan said the launch allowed the company to finally find gaps in the market that were left open from what had already been released, and allowed Caraway to cater to those audiences directly.

“It helped us change our color palette, it helped us change our price point, and the pieces we put in the collection,” Nathan said. “And while a lot of those other brands did a lot of things right, we were able to carve out our space within the (direct-to-consumer) kitchen world that others weren’t playing.”

Companies should try to get to market immediately, regardless of their long-term goals

While some startups build software that can start acquiring customers and making money within a week, the same cannot be said for startups looking to introduce innovative deep tech companies or startups. But that doesn’t mean these deep tech companies have to wait years to make any money.

Joe Wolfel, Co-Founder and CEO Depth of terraina company looking to build autonomous drones to map the ocean floor, told Found that Terra Deep has been very intentional about establishing its revenue streams. While it still has a way to go before its drones roam the ocean floor, the company is looking to offer the same services to commercial and government customers in the meantime, whether manually or through a dashboard, because companies need information about the ocean floor now.

“One of the things you learn very quickly in combat is that you can’t direct something that’s not moving,” Wolfel said. “There’s no substitute for real-life learning, right? We eat our own dog food every day.”

We’ve heard different approaches to this same concept from Paul Hedrickfounder of the western clothing company Tecovas. Hedrick told Found that he knew he wanted Tecovas to be a direct-to-consumer brand, but he didn’t want to build a website and wait for sales to come in. For this reason, he started selling his shoes outside the country. He backs his car into farmers markets right away so he can get customer feedback and sales from the get-go.

Don’t forget to build a company around your product

When a startup is on its way to launch, founders focus on building a product and getting said product to market — as it should be. But founders must make sure they don’t forget to think about building the actual company around the product as well.

Gavin Ubertico-founder and CEO of chipmaker Etched, told Found that one of the company’s mishaps was that it didn’t think about setting up employee benefits until it was too late. Uberti said the company realized it had waited too long when one of its employees broke his leg before the company set up health insurance — a process that wasn’t quick to fix.

The Uberti story was a good reminder that when founders are trying to move fast and break things, it’s important for them to also take care of all the other elements needed to build a lasting company that takes care of its employees.