How come nobody talks about founder-market fit?

I was recently listening to a podcast from the Yale admissions office. The team discussed the importance of students expressing their “authentic” selves in their applications. 

The idea that students who try to come across as something they are “not” comes through, and very often, students try to represent themselves as what they think the admissions office wants rather than representing their true selves.

The same is true for founders and startups. 

Startups often find themselves faced with one of two market realities:

The first is the race condition. They come up with a good idea, and magically, the venture industry funds 3-5 similar companies. They are in a race to launch their product, raise capital, and prove their escape velocity. The “perceived” leader gets a massive advantage over the other similar startups.

The second market condition founders find themselves in is one in which there are no material competitors (which could be a good or bad sign). In this case, they should operate their business at a very different cadence and consider very different metrics to determine success, future fundraising, and future product development.

We often see a mismatch between the founder's temperament and the conditions they face.

A great founder with urgency can build a culture/team around the battle cry of urgency, raise the capital, and quite possibly win the race. Alternatively, some CEOs are not well suited for the race condition. They are methodical, thoughtful, and careful by nature, and their foray into race conditions is often not pretty. They can’t build the right culture, create the right incentives, and paint the correct vision to succeed in this scenario.

Of course, the same is true in the inverse for a company with little competitive pressure. Pressing too fast, putting on too much urgency, and trying to make things move at an unnatural pace will only create risk and strain that works against the company’s success. Alternatively, the CEO conditioned for this type of growth can do an amazing job of matching resources and needs with the market’s ability/desire to accept the new product.

Either the company is too slow out of the gate to gain leadership and/or lacks the urgency required to succeed in the first place, or it pushes too hard and can’t make things happen as fast as it wants, which creates a very different set of problems.

Our job as investors is to ensure a match between the founder’s authentic self and the business's needs.