What is The Founder’s Quandary?

The Founder’s Quandary is a community of founders from all industries, backgrounds, education, and levels of experience. As founders, we share a number of common goals – to become better company founders, entrepreneurs, innovators, managers, and leaders. Yet at the same time, being a founder can be daunting, lonely, and can challenge the best of us as we watch our companies succeed or fail with every decision we make. The best way for founders to learn is perhaps by learning from other founders – some who’ve been around the block already, or others who just have insights, knowledge and experience that we can tap into. The Founder’s Quandary (TFQ) is meant to be a resource for founders to do exactly this. The website is fairly young, and we’re seeking other founders to help make the site richer in both content but also as a resource for other founders to meet each other. TFQ can become the best source for founders to find each other, and organize local TFQ meetups, and much more. Do you want to help? Contact us!

Why create The Founder’s Quandary?

Company founders are often thrust into the unknown once they make the commitment to themselves, to their family, friends, to investors, employees, and others. In many cases, company founders quickly assume the role of the leader, the visionary, the Chief ___ Officer. Some founders take on these roles with ease and with poise, but many struggle with challenges that face all founders – from seeking funding, working with investors, having a seat on a board of directors, seeking advisors, balancing life, juggling many balls at one time, hiring, and so much more. Sometimes founders find themselves stuck – with no where or no one to turn to – a quandary, if you will.

Entrepreneurship is one of the greatest aspects of our economies, domestically and globally. In every country, entrepreneurs are hard at work building out their ideas and visions, and continuously working to get to the next goal post.

So what’s the quandary?

When a founder has a good idea for a product, service, business, they are most likely bringing that solution to market from a unique perspective and position. That may be as an entpreneur, a technologist, or an inventor. This becomes their sole mission, their expertise, and their passion. When a company raises financing, the founder almost always becomes much more operational, or sales oriented, or involved technical details. They have to participate on a board of directors, manage investor and shareholder expectations, deliver results. Oftentimes this results in the mission, the expertise, and the passion becoming jeopardized. These three things are what sold the investors, the employees, the advisors etc in the first place. Without that, the business is at risk. This is a quandary for the founder.

So what’s the criteria for joining The Founder’s Quandary?

We’re still working on that, but we want The Founder’s Quandary to be exclusively for company founders – period. Why complicate it? Whether your a founder working on the next world changing vaccine in your part time, a dot-com entrepreneur, or a plumber looking to franchise your business, you fit the criteria to join The Founder’s Quandary. That’s it! If you have some suggestions we’d love to hear from you!

We Need Your Help

There are only a few people involved in building out TFQ. We have lots of ideas for how to make the site really useful, as well as recruiting leaders to organize local TFQ meetups. If you want to get involved, please let us know! The more people we get involved, the more we’ll all benefit!