Key Takeaways
- Legal counsel, accountant, and banker chosen well at the start save enormous cost later.
- A peer founder group, not advisors, is the most underutilized support structure for entrepreneurs.
- The personal board of directors concept applied to your career is worth developing explicitly.
The co-founder is the most discussed relationship in a founder's support structure. But the quality of several other relationships, legal counsel, accountant, insurance advisor, and peer founder community, determines a significant portion of the outcomes that co-founder gets credit or blame for.
Professional Services as Strategic Resources
Most early-stage founders choose professional service providers based on cost. The more useful criterion is domain expertise and startup experience. A startup attorney who works exclusively on VC-backed company formations and transactions is more valuable than a general business attorney at a lower rate, not because quality correlates with cost but because the specialized knowledge prevents mistakes that the generalist does not know to watch for.
Saim Abbasi's experience is that the money saved by choosing cheaper generalist advisors is almost always exceeded by the cost of the mistakes those advisors make or miss. This is not universal but it is consistent enough to be a strong default.
The Peer Founder Group
The most underutilized resource for most founders is a peer group of other founders at similar stages. Not mentors or advisors, who are operating from positions of experience and authority. Peers who are in the same situation right now, making the same types of decisions with the same uncertainty, and who can share what they are seeing in real time. This kind of group requires deliberate curation and maintenance but provides a quality of support that no mentor can replicate because the context is current rather than historical.
"The loneliness of the founder role is real, but it is partly self-imposed. There are people who want to help if you ask specifically."