Why “Pre-Founder”?
What’s Pre-Founder and how does it relate to Creator Investing?
Pre-Founder is an individual with operational experience that fit expected qualities that would make for a good founder.
Investing in 2025 is getting earlier and earlier. Pre-Product. Pre-Idea. Pre-Idea? At some point, it gets silly on fund-qualifications that still mean the same thing: Pre-Seed.
The idea here is that an investor can find someone before they have an idea, but share qualities the investor deems to be right before they decide to take the journey of becoming a founder.
Depending on the investor, that can turn one of two ways: working with them or investing in them.
Most people think of starting a company as binary: either you’ve started one, or you haven’t. But that’s not how it works. Before anyone becomes a founder, there’s a critical incubation phase where they’re learning, exploring, and preparing—whether they know it or not. That’s what Pre-Founder is about. It’s a platform, a mindset, and a movement to help people succeed in this in-between phase.
Why the Pre-Founder Stage Matters
If you look at successful founders, you’ll notice a pattern: they didn’t just stumble into their companies. The most successful ones were deliberate. They prepared, sometimes for years, without even realizing it. They built skills, developed networks, and immersed themselves in the problems they’d later solve.
But here’s the thing: most people don’t know how to prepare to be a founder. They think they need a brilliant idea first. So they sit and wait, paralyzed by the fear of starting something mediocre. Meanwhile, others rush into bad ideas, burning through savings or investor money, only to realize they weren’t ready.
What if we treated the pre-founder stage like its own phase of the startup journey? What if we helped people navigate it intentionally, instead of leaving them to figure it out on their own?
The Problem with the "Right Idea"
The myth of the “right idea” is one of the biggest traps for aspiring founders. People imagine startups begin with a lightning bolt of inspiration: the one perfect idea that changes everything. But that’s not how it works.
Ideas evolve. Airbnb didn’t start as a marketplace for lodging—it was a website to rent air mattresses in someone’s apartment. Instagram was a check-in app before it pivoted to photos. Startups rarely begin with the “right” idea; they get there through experimentation and iteration.
The truth is, you don’t need an idea to start preparing to be a founder. What you need is a founder mindset—the ability to see opportunities, act on them, and adapt when things don’t go as planned.
As always, if you have any particular questions, feel feel to reach out to em@pre-founder.com.
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