Founder's motivation

One of keys to evaluate a startup is to study its founder

You are considering joining startup X. One of the key considerations you should consider is the founder's motivation.

Why did she start that journey? You are looking for something more profound than just money, a good opportunity, fame, or having the right skills.

Building a startup is like running a marathon where you will keep getting cramps along the way in the moments that you didn't expect. You will not finish that marathon only with extrinsic motivations.

Successful startup founders had a strong internal motivation to change the status quo. Here are two examples:

Whitney Wolfe (Bumble): underwent a personal experience of harassment while working at Tinder and realized that dating was broken for women. She went to build Bumble, a dating app that puts women first, valued at $8B+.

Tony Xu (DoorDash): working in his first-generation immigrant mom's restaurant made him develop a great passion and respect for local businesses. He then built DoorDash, a company that helps small businesses thrive, valued at $50B+.

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