Following up on the heels of what I wrote yesterday, I want to share an alternative path for people who want to be an entrepreneur but haven’t found a problem they’re passionate about solving. A lot of people think entrepreneurship is binary: you’re either a founder or you’re wasting time working for someone else. I disagree. I believe this thinking contributes to people forcing entrepreneurship.

Working for an early-stage company with ten or fewer people can be a great path. It’s incredibly risky to work for a company that could fail—but it’s less risky than founding one! You’ll learn what start-up life is like on a day-to-day basis. You’ll also gain invaluable knowledge about what does and doesn’t work when you’re trying to take something from zero to one. That knowledge and the relationships you build during that journey will position you for success when you do find the thing you want to go all-in on. I think of it as a try-it-before-you-buy-it approach and a terrific stepping-stone for aspiring founders.

If you want to be a founder but haven’t found your thing yet, this and other alternative paths are available. Don’t feel you have to force it by pursuing something you’re not passionate about. That could really be a waste of time.

I love hearing the origin stories of successful founders. Most people think they’re usually overnight success stories. The truth is that people hear about those founders after journeys that are commonly at least ten years long.

Today I began reading about the background of a founder who reportedly personally realized over $1 billion from his start-up. As I would have expected, he formed his start-up over a decade ago. And it wasn’t his first start-up.

This founder watched all his friends and siblings begin to have professional success while he struggled to find his footing. He felt like he was being left behind. To keep up, he decided to start a company in a space he knew nothing about. He thought it would be cool if a certain product existed. He did no customer discovery before he created the product, nor did he really understand the problem. As one would expect, the product was a disaster and never got off the ground.

He still wanted to keep up with his friends and family, so he started another company—again in a space he knew nothing about. This company had some success and got to seven figures in revenue, but it ultimately folded.

He was making a common early-founder mistake: instead of trying to solve a problem, he was creating a solution and forcing it on customers. He wasn’t passionate about what he was doing; he was trying to keep up with those in his social circle. In other words, he was forcing entrepreneurship and pursuing it for the wrong reasons. That was why his first two endeavors didn’t scale.

He learned from those experiences and changed his approach. He found a problem he wanted to solve, spent time understanding his customers, and started a decade-plus journey to solve the problem. The result was outsize success.

I applaud anyone who wants to pursue entrepreneurship and be a founder. It can be a life-changing experience. Before you go on the journey, consider asking yourself: Am I focused on being a founder or on solving a problem?

I watched a fireside chat by a successful founder yesterday. He shared his thoughts on the importance of one’s network and the impact his has had on his career. Advice he got from mentors twenty years ago continues to be the foundation for his growing enterprise. He believes strongly that you’re an average of the five people you surround yourself with. He also believes your net worth is a result of your network.

The people in your network can have a big impact on your trajectory, for better or worse. I was a nontechnical founder who knew zero about software. Being friends with other founders who were building software was the impetus for me to pursue building software for my start-up. The software was the backbone of our ability to scale the company to over $10 million in annual revenue. And I could give you countless other examples of how my network led to big wins throughout my journey.

Founders should be mindful of the outsize impact their network can have. A strong network can’t replace execution. You still must do the work. But a network of credible people can be a great complement that accelerates your success.

A few months ago, I shared my thoughts on rethinking recruiting given the labor shortage. How companies attract talent doesn’t appear to be aligned with today’s labor market. What matters to the talent pool has radically shifted, and some companies haven’t adapted. Today I read an article about rethinking job credentials given the shortage of workers. It touches on some of the things I’ve been thinking about. I don’t agree with everything, but it’s an interesting read.

Some of the smartest and most successful people I know have the fewest credentials. Some barely made it out of college (or didn’t graduate at all). They may not have been top of their class, but they’re action-oriented people who’ve made things happen. They’re constantly evaluating the world and adjusting their decisions and actions so they can achieve their goals. It’s anecdotal evidence, but it’s shaped how I think about this topic.

I don’t believe credentials predict one’s abilities. In some fields they’re vital (e.g., medicine). But lots of other fields and jobs don’t involve life and death or other high stakes. If someone has the personality type for a role (e.g., being outgoing if it’s a sales role), want to learn, and are given proper training, I believe they can excel even without credentials. I know many start-up founders (including myself) who gave uncredentialed people opportunities and found that those folks exceeded their expectations. If people are given an opportunity and set up to succeed, they can.

I’m excited to see how companies adjust their recruiting strategies. I like the idea of giving more people opportunities by removing hurdles AND training them properly.

A fellow investor told me about one of his better-performing portfolio companies. It’s executing well, hiring amazing people, and seeing a path for scaling if things go well. One area of uncertainty right now is the customer relationship. The company generates revenue by performing work on behalf of other companies. Translation: it doesn’t know or own the customer. The other company has a direct relationship with the customer. This investor believes that to unlock exponential growth, this portfolio company must develop a strategy to own the customer relationship.

Acquiring a direct customer can be hard and expensive for start-ups in some industries. Partnering with a larger company that has an established customer base and can funnel those customers to you is attractive in the early stages of going from zero to one. The cost to acquire them is usually low (if not zero), and the customers can be plentiful if you solve a pain point.

However, this usually isn’t a reliable long-term strategy. It can have lots of downsides. A major one is lack of feedback. You need feedback to make your product better, which you must do to achieve product–market fit—but it’s difficult to get feedback from customers you don’t know. Most companies don’t provide you with their customer contact information (email address or phone number), so it’s hard to reach out after the transaction is completed. You never really know what the customer loves or hates about your solution.

Another downside is concentration. You’re at the mercy of someone else to acquire customers, and they can make a change that severely and negatively affects your business without warning. You could see your business evaporate overnight and not be able to do anything about it. Conversely, if you’re ready to scale, the bigger company can limit your growth if it chooses to not play nice.

Customer relationships are key, and there should be a plan to have direct relationships. It’s OK to have partnerships and other go-to-market strategies, but the core strategy should be a direct relationship.

Today I chatted with an early founder. His business creates video content for automotive enthusiasts. He’s been at it for a few years and has built an audience of over 2 million followers on a single social media platform. With this following, he’s been able to develop several revenue streams. He’s a solopreneur who’s looking to expand his business and team.

We discussed his business high-level. He faces two challenges. The first is seasonality. His revenue streams are good but variable based on the time of year. The second is bandwidth. He has ideas that will provide more consistent cash flow, but he doesn’t always have the time to execute consistently on them. He works on them during slow periods, which prolongs getting those initiatives off the ground.

I get it. It’s the all-too-familiar story of the bootstrapping entrepreneur. I’d imagine he isn’t the only small creator experiencing these challenges—but he’s different because he’s proven he knows how to build a large audience and create content they enjoy. He just needs capital (and mentoring) to scale his business and make it a big one. I’m not familiar with the content-creation world, but I imagine that providing growth capital to proven early founders with aspirations of creating large content businesses is a good opportunity.

I’m a big fan of YouTube. It’s an amazing educational tool for users and a powerful distribution method for smaller content creators.

I watched an episode of The Pivot where a professional athlete announced his retirement from the NFL. It was evident that he isn’t planning on slowing down anytime soon. He’s in his early thirties and has been building a variety of businesses in anticipation of his retirement. He’s planning now to build these businesses at full throttle and also spend more time with his family. He’s not thinking about winding down. The participants pointed this out and agreed that retirement isn’t the right word for his announcement. They decided to describe his announcement as a “career change” instead. This really stuck with me.

I have a few entrepreneurial friends who’ve been blessed to achieve financial freedom. They can do what they want, when they want. They joke that they’re retired, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. They’ve all started putting their time and energy into their next thing, whatever it is. They’re all doing something. None of them are idle.

Most entrepreneurs have a fire that burns inside them that can’t be extinguished. They focus that fire on what matters, and it’s often building companies. They aren’t the kind to retire and do nothing. Instead, they refocus their fire and change careers.

A few days ago, I posted about bad days. They’re inevitable—part of the founder journey (and life in general). After revisiting that post with someone, I realized I didn’t say anything about how to cope with bad days.

I’ve found that talking through bad days can be a tremendous help. Peers (early-stage founders) who can relate or people who’ve taken your journey are most helpful. They understand exactly what you’re going through and have valuable perspectives. When I tried to have these kinds of conversations with others in my circle, it just fell flat. They wanted to help but couldn’t understand what I was going through.

If you’re having a bad day, consider talking it out with a peer or someone credible. And if you know someone who’s having a bad day, can you lend an ear? Your roles might flip tomorrow.

I previously shared my thoughts on how more people are taking control of educating themselves and how future generations’ education will be radically different. Information is more readily available and distributed than ever before. Credible people can now talk directly to the people who want to consume their teachings. While democratization of information is positive, it does present a new challenge: how do you find the information that will be valuable to you?

I regularly listen to podcasts and watch YouTube videos. Many are up to an hour long. I often don’t have the time to consume the entire episode in one sitting; it takes two or three. Many times, I’m not interested in significant parts of the conversation. Some of the YouTube channels I subscribe to include a table of contents, so I can jump to the exact minute/second mark of the interview that has the information I want to hear. Most don’t, though, and I end up listening to lots of content I could have done without. It’s also hard to go back and find the relevant information unless I take a detailed note of the exact minute/second mark in my personal notes.

Today I listened to a founder who’s trying to solve this problem. He’s helping people find relevant information on long-form content platforms faster.

This is a great next step and could transform how people learn. If more people can find the information they care about and consume it faster, the speed at which people are able to self-educate could drastically increase. People learning faster could have broad implications for society and help close some historical gaps.

I’m excited about what this founder is building and can’t wait to watch his journey.

Part of being a founder is having some rough days. Nothing will be going right. Just when you think it can’t get any worse . . . it does. It can feel like you’re being kicked while you’re down. The reality is that this is par for the course. You can’t eliminate bad days—that’s out of your control. What you can do is change how you react to them and minimize the mental toll they take on you.

I listened to a seasoned founder describe how he thinks about bad days. He said that everybody’s bad-day survival rate is 100%. He believes eventually you get out of your bad day—as long as you wake up the next day. It’s an interesting way of saying that this too shall pass.

I totally agree with this founder. When you have a bad day, keep in mind it’s just that. A bad day. You’ve had many good days, and you’ll have them again. Don’t dwell on the bad day or let it throw you off mentally. Tomorrow is a new day and a fresh start.