Female founders - don’t make these mistakes.

It’s 7 am on Saturday morning and I’ve stolen away to the Starbucks to get some writing in. Only my 6-year-old heard me sneaking out and asked if she could come with me. So I now have a buddy sitting across from me, learning her ordinal numbers as I sit down to write my thoughts of the week.

I check my Twitter and happen to see a debate raging that I can’t help but get involved with:

How important is it that non-technical founders find a technical partner?

There are those saying it’s imperative and those saying don’t snub the efforts of those hustling to just keep their dreams alive.

Ugh. This one hits so close to home. This has been my life for the past 4 years. This is my life today.

Being the founder and CEO of a company that fundamentally builds software but starting with the barest of technical foundations and the added complexities of a young family.

Four years in, I have made so many mistakes I sometimes cringe in horror as I reread old emails. But I am fiercely proud that somehow I persevered.

If, though, there is even the smallest chance that others in the same boat can learn from my experience, I want to share more fully my thoughts and experience on this matter.

(And while this maybe applies to any non-technical, underrepresented founder, I want to speak specifically to all the women out there that I know this impacts more than any other group.)

So my fellow women just getting started, here are 5 mistakes I implore you not to make:

1) Leave out the tech - it’s what will enable the 1000x scale.

I’ve lost count on how many times I’ve talked to women who don’t think they need tech, mostly because they’re not technical, and they can’t see how it will help or how they’ll be able to build it.

I come from a “traditional” CPG and retail background. I understand better than most that good businesses can be built without a significant technical component. But I’m here to tell you, with where the world is going, it will never be great. Never be industry leading. Never be revolutionary. And never make you rich.

Even today’s retail or branded goods start-ups should have wicked smart inventory, merchandising and distribution software. Maybe not right off the bat but it has to be a part of the founding vision and ambition.

More than that, the magical of software is that it enables scale without cost where people simply cannot. That doesn't mean it replaces people in core functions - I run a company that enables incredible people to provide childcare for families. I get the role of humans. I'm saying that for us to do this for millions of families in a safer and smarter way, I rely critically on data and technology.

We're about building BIG, amazing companies, are we not? Then to my thinking, they better have some significant technical foundation.

2) Rely solely on dev shops to build the tech.

This is controversial simply because it is the only apparent path for so many of us and so to say that it’s cancer makes us want to say “F you - what would you know about fighting every day to keep this dream alive. I do what I do to survive.” But I will tell you this - if your vision and ambition involves tech, whoever is writing the code is building the very foundation upon which the rest of your company will rise or crumble. Worse yet without a tech partner, you don't know what kind of foundation is being built. Those kinds of decisions can severely impact the potential of a company.

Dev shops (and I've worked with a few amazing ones) are there to offer targeted help based on your requirements. The less you know about how to write those requirements and how to QA their code, the less you know what is being built.

I'm not knocking dev shops - they've helped Poppy stay alive and thriving - but as an addendum to our Eng team. As a non-technical founder, using a dev shop right off the bat WON'T kill your company. It will, in the short-term keep you alive. But what you won't ever know, is that it killed your potential to be a 1000X company.

Slope is all that matters in those precious early days. Even a couple degrees of difference in the early days will create massive differences in simply 2-3 years.

(Also, btw they’re crazy expensive - I don’t know about you, but I didnt have that kind of money to throw at an ultimately poor solution).

There are ways to find that person - whether you need to join a company with tons of smart engineers for a while, whether you take 50 intros each week to technical folks while keeping your company growing, whether you grow your way into getting noticed by the right person.

Persist and don’t settle into the illusion that a dev shop is fine for the long-run. It’s a salve, not a solution.

3) Let other people be the experts. 

If it is core to your success - learn the ins and outs of it yourself. I don’t care if it’s the tech stack, labor laws, sales funnels, financial modelling, inventory management, shipping logistics. If it drives your top line, your bottom line or is fundamental to your winning or losing - learn it. It’s f’ing hard. But let your curiosity propel you through.

Then, once you’ve mastered it, only then should you hand it off to someone you’ve hired to take it to the next level. It’s a classic mistake to “hire for your holes” too soon. Unless you really know it yourself and your company’s POV on how to address it, you won’t ever be successful in hiring for it.

Notice that I’m not saying be a micro-manager or hold onto everything yourself. I’m saying, the founding team should cover in first degree knowledge everything that is core to your business (including as prime example the tech). It’s also, by the way, why having a co-founder or 2 is helpful - holding all that knowledge in one person is terribly hard. Not impossible - just again, harder.

4) Shrink your ambition to fit the size of the world’s expectations. 

We as a species are programmed to resist change. Change could kill us. But it’s also what has propelled us forward. We rely on the crazy few to pull the rest of us towards progress.

If you have an audacious vision of the future - don’t ever let anyone talk you away from that. Not friends that love you but are worried about your financial future. Not mentors that have guided you in the past but you’ve outgrown. Not “advisors” or would-be “investors” whose incentives are not aligned with yours.

5) Apologize or give up. 

Grit and perseverance are the only things that ultimately make or break a founder. We who are so used to busting through one wall or another don't even notice one more wall. What we maybe lack in some discreet skills like programming we more than make up in a myriad of more important ways. Don’t let anyone let you forget that.

It is so fundamentally important that we get more successful founders that are women - that gain valuable experience on how to build and run tech companies. That get rich and make their (likely disproportionately female) employees rich. That spark the connections between engineers and product and operations folks that will spin off and found their own amazing companies.

But the only way we’re going to do this is if we do it right. Because the market, the customers don’t care if the founder is male, female or anything in between. And that’s ultimately who decides.

So - my fellow women. Let’s commiserate how much harder it is to start companies when we have 6 year-old buddies tagging along or when you have to learn what to say when someone asks about your tech stack or when no one will take us seriously, as people with half our talent and half our heart get millions in funding and attention.

But then let’s get back to work. And when we do - let’s not make these mistakes. Because we’re about big things. And we have no time to waste.