We’re frequently told that the best founders have real, first-hand experience of the problem they’re trying to solve. It’s received wisdom that the acumen acquired at the coalface of your industry translates into the rocket fuel a startup needs to thrive.
But is ‘living the problem’ really the holy grail it’s made out to be? Or is this cancelled out by the startup and fundraising knowledge most operator founders lack?
For me and my cofounder Anas, ‘living the problem’ is what led us to launch our startup. While working as doctors on the NHS frontline, we witnessed the realities of the staffing crisis currently gripping the health service. Having watched many of our colleagues pushed to the brink of burnout and felt the realities of that ourselves, we took a step away from clinical work to build a solution.
Without this lived experience, we would never have had the knowledge or motivation to found Patchwork Health. And our medical backgrounds still help us every day as we work to build a truly nuanced, effective solution that NHS teams want to use.
Yet, despite these clear benefits, being a medic was scant preparation for the intensities and idiosyncrasies that come with being a startup founder. We had all the motivation and sector understanding, but faced a major gulf about how to translate this into action.
Learning a new language
After six years of gruelling training, I entered the NHS with a significant amount of specialised knowledge. I knew my arrhythmia from my arthritis, could insert everything from a cannula to a catheter, and was confident dealing with a broad spectrum of patients. Whilst every day brought a new challenge, I was taking thousands of hours of training into the hospital with me.
Stepping from this environment into the startup world was like arriving on an entirely different planet. Despite still working at the heart of healthcare, there was a whole new language to learn and none of it in my textbooks. I had thought medics were fans of jargon, but they’ve got nothing on the tech scene.
From Go To Market (GTM) to Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) and ‘term sheets’ to ‘cap tables’, Anas and I found ourselves having to brush up quickly. While our medical knowledge was invaluable for helping us communicate effectively with our NHS clients – giving us a true understanding of their pain points and the obstacles we’d need to account for during implementation – we faced a steep learning curve to bridge the gaps in our knowledge when it came to securing funding, managing a team of developers, and designing the operational infrastructure of our startup.
Our industry experience was scant preparation for the application of our health knowledge. To build these crucial startup skills, we had to get fluent in a whole new language.
Navigating without a blueprint
In my life as a medic I was dealing with life or death situations every day. It meant I built a strong capacity for working under extreme pressure. But whilst being a doctor is a huge responsibility, you’re also a small part of a much bigger machine. You have a clear set of responsibilities as the ‘doctor’, while hundreds of people around you are fielding other responsibilities as the ‘nurse’, ‘porter’, ‘HR’, ‘admin’ or ‘ward manager’.
In contrast, during the early days of launching Patchwork, as a team of two, we were very much on our own. We had to fulfil every single role – Sales, HR, Finance, Marketing, you name it – all by ourselves.
Our prior experience in the NHS may have meant we were used to being thrust into the helm and figuring things out on our feet. But it had not prepared us for being completely alone at the wheel, in charge of steering the entire ship.
That ‘sink or swim’ feeling was scary. But it also lit the fire beneath us to do everything we could to make our mission a success. Each milestone passed – from securing our first round of funding to winning our first commercial partnership with an NHS trust – enabled us to take another step towards the re-creation of that supportive team structure all organisations need to scale and thrive.
Having the confidence to be vulnerable
When working as a doctor and dealing with patients, you have to be a constant source of reassurance to patients. No patient wants to see their doctor’s hands shaking as they go to draw blood, or looking panicked while reading through test results. You have to act as though you’ve been doing your job for years – even if it’s the first time you’ve set foot on the ward.
It’s easy to assume that this outward confidence would serve you well in the startup world, too. But I was shocked to find the opposite is often true. Contrary to my experience as a doctor, I’ve had to learn to show a much greater level of vulnerability as a founder. That has meant being vocal about the things I don’t know and speaking up when I need more support.
As a first-time founder, you’re not expected to know everything. And ‘faking it ‘til you make it’ will only get you so far. For investors in particular, too much bravado from a founder is often a giant red flag. They want to see your confidence in your vision and that you have the capacity and skills to drive it forward. But they also need to know that you’re receptive to direction and advice, and that you know where the gaps in your own knowledge lie. They want to see who you are as a person. Because it’s this that will determine whether they trust you and are excited to work with you to pursue your mission.
‘Real world’ experience can certainly be a vital resource for any founder. But it’s not a one-way ticket to success. When entering the startup world, prepare to be unprepared. Building a startup is as much about learning how to exist in a unique, idiosyncratic ecosystem – with its own language, rules and processes – as it is about developing a novel USP or achieving product-market fit.
As a founder, your previous experience may help fuel the perfect solution, but it’s never going to be enough alone to help you drive it where it needs to go.