Why We Started It
When we want to do something ambitious, we’re too often on our own.
We realized that when we were working at both large organizations and in our own startups, we felt siloed, with limited interactions with people outside our teams.
As a result, we were constantly missing opportunities to do better work by building on what other teams had done. And we were constantly reinventing the wheel because we weren’t learning from other teams’ experience.
So we set out to make it easier for teams to move each other forward.
We started by reaching out to other startups and creating a structure where we would regularly help each other on our most important issues. The big stuff – like reaching out to customers, onboarding new users faster, and simplifying our product development methods.
It felt like magic. We got:
- Motivation and accountability to get out into the world and do intimidating things. For example, as startup founders, we know how important it is to talk to customers, but it’s often tough to implement. We’ve made helping each other do this a priority.
- Concrete feedback on the things we’re doing – what we are building, how we talk to customers and clients, our pitches, our planning, etc.
- An easy way to interact live with other smart people about our work! This has been really energizing.
The Founders Project grew from there. As we went, we tracked the insights we learned, and we built tools to make our interactions and insights-tracking more powerful.
From there, we started using the methods and tools we developed to help teams elevate each other within organizations like universities and large companies.
Our vision is to make it much easier for teams to build on each other’s work, both within and across companies.
Learn more about how we do it here.
The Founders Project 