You need different sets of skills at different times. Peter Thiel eloquently articulated this as “before you can have a company vision, you need a company mantra”.
In the beginning the work is about instantiating the product into the world. It’s unclear what bumps you’re going to run into so you have to be careful about overdefining the problem. You also can’t have no definition or no work gets done. It’s tricky (this is the 0->1).
The 1->Many is different. You also can’t over constrain the problem but you need a lot more definition and constraint than you did before product market fit. Not everyone likes this part.
If you have a founder who does the 0->1 really well and has a massive equity position, but they don’t do the 1->Many well, that’s going to make the company very, very difficult to govern.
It’s tricky to think about how to reason about this because many people think they can do everything. Not everyone is a creator, and not everyone is an operator.
It’s not obvious (and if there isn’t a big success incentive, it’s hard to get good people to work on the problem).
In the beginning the work is about instantiating the product into the world. It’s unclear what bumps you’re going to run into so you have to be careful about overdefining the problem. You also can’t have no definition or no work gets done. It’s tricky (this is the 0->1).
The 1->Many is different. You also can’t over constrain the problem but you need a lot more definition and constraint than you did before product market fit. Not everyone likes this part.
If you have a founder who does the 0->1 really well and has a massive equity position, but they don’t do the 1->Many well, that’s going to make the company very, very difficult to govern.
It’s tricky to think about how to reason about this because many people think they can do everything. Not everyone is a creator, and not everyone is an operator.
It’s not obvious (and if there isn’t a big success incentive, it’s hard to get good people to work on the problem).