The 3 Most Common Mistakes Founders Make When Building a Company

Learn from these issues and you may be in better shape at your own startup

Photo: Simon Winnall/Getty Images

After seeing startups from the inside and out, from seed rounds to billion-dollar companies, from board meetings and CEO dinners to coaching sessions and leadership retreats — I see three mistakes get made at companies time and time again:

1. Underestimating the importance of narrative when fundraising (and expecting a good product and/or solution to speak for itself).
2. Spreading solutions too thin, and serving many customers poorly instead of a select group very well.
3. Neglecting to reevaluate and reorganize talent for the startup’s current needs.

Mistake 1: Underestimating the importance of narrative when fundraising

I firmly believe that investors invest in (and employees join, and journalists write about) compelling stories, and your pitch deck is really just a vehicle for telling the story you want to tell. So, start first with the narrative and build the deck after you have it nailed.

The best advice I ever got on narratives was from Slava Akhmechet of RethinkDB on a matter totally unrelated to raising money. He…