What are the most important skills to learn to be a successful founder?

I really want to make a course about all the stupid things I did in my own entrepreneurial journey! In the meantime, here are my reflections on the most important skills to be a successful founder:

1. Evaluate and convince an amazing cofounder to work with you. This is the most important point. Your startup idea might change (actually, it most likely will), but your cofounder and founding team are much harder to change. A strong working relationship with a complementary cofounder will make your life much happier, and you're much more likely to succeed.
   1. Most startups die of suicide, not homicide. Startups often end up killing themselves due to interpersonal conflict instead of something like competitive pressure. Your founding team is the best antidote to this.
   2. Put yourselves in positions to meet a good cofounder, ideally someone you've had a relationship with for a long time. Work on projects with them.
2. Ship faster than you think is comfortable. For most software, mistakes and imperfect design is totally fine. You need to unlearn the process that larger companies have. Taro member Darwin Lo has a great article about 90/10 thinking here.
   1. Since you're still employed, you can practice this muscle by building side projects. [Masterclass] How To Build And Grow Tech Products To 500k+ Users For Free
3. Start charging money for something earlier. This is a true test of whether you're creating something of value.
4. Be human, not corporate. You have very few advantages in a startup. One of the main ones is that you can provide a personal touch to customers in a way that a large company with millions of customers could not. Instead of using corporate language on your website, you must lean into the fact that you crafted this product with love and that you're eager to help customers directly.

Some additional thoughts here:

• What are some strategies of getting started with Entrepreneurship And Tech Startups?
• How To Prepare To Leave Big Tech For A Startup

Hello! Y Combinator alum here. Thanks for linking my doc, Rahul.

Before starting a startup, get your physical, mental, and financial health in order.

Physical Health

Sleep: Do you have good sleep hygiene? Do you have any sleep disorders?
Exercise: Do you know how to lift weights safely? Can you jog for two miles at 10:00/mi pace everyday?
Nutrition: Do you have an efficient meal prep routine?

If you're not already, being at low body fat levels, which may require controlling your calories, will give you incredibly high energy levels. When you're doing a startup, you need every edge you can get, especially a big boost like this.

IMO, cleaning up your diet is good practice for a startup: You have to choose wisely within your daily calorie budget -- just like you'll have to spend your time wisely -- and do the right thing even when you really want to do something else, which happens a lot because startups are very counterintuitive. [1]

Mental Health

Do you know how to meditate?
Do you know effective CBT?
Relationships: Do you have a close group of friends? Are you in a stable, long-term romantic relationship? If you're single, I suggest making dating a priority. If you're in a relationship, decide what minimal set of activities you will make time for no matter what: Friday evening dinner, exercising together, one weekend trip per month, ...

Financial Health

Have enough in savings so that you can go a year at your current lifestyle without getting paid. You may need to reduce your lifestyle.
Start contracting so that, if things get low, you have a client pipeline you can turn to.

The above should be heavily optimized in terms of time, effort, and expense and put on autopilot. The above will keep you strong so that you can do the best work of your life. Then you can start building actual startup skills:

• User interviews. This is a guide I wrote for the team at my second startup: Talk to Users Guide -- I had "product engineers" before it became a thing.
• Learn how to build things very, very quickly. Supabase is your friend. And probably Next.js/Vercel. At the time of this writing, Cursor + Sonnet 3.5 is the way to go and maybe v0.
• For your first startup, don't do something completely new. (See Elon Musk's first two startups.) You're not good enough yet for your moon shot. (Or in Elon's case, Mars shot.) Choose a space with successful players that you would enjoy exploring for a couple of years. Maybe even take a job in the space so that you can gain domain knowledge. (See Zoom.)
• Work with other people to find people you can trust and work with. They say a cofounder relationship is like a marriage -- indeed, I went to marriage and family counseling with a cofounder. So "date" a bit before getting "married."

Final note: Most people shouldn't take investment and should instead shoot for a bootstrapped exit.

[1] Startups are an extremely counterintuitive endeavor and the right thing to do often feels wrong. For example, our instincts are honed for survival, which causes us to overreact when there is a problem. In the jungle, this makes sense: That rustling in the bushes could be a tiger. But at startups, these survival instincts actually lead to death: Per Reid Hoffman, if you spend all your time putting out fires instead of letting the (right) fires burn, you burn through your startup's funding before you can achieve liftoff.