This video features Frank Rotman, co-founder of QED Investors, discussing various aspects of entrepreneurship, including surviving hypergrowth.
This video features Frank Rotman, co-founder of QED Investors, discussing various aspects of entrepreneurship, including surviving hypergrowth, founder-market fit, and lessons from building companies in the early days of FinTech. The content focuses on the mindset and experiences of a founder.
Knowing what you know now, you know, with all the experience that you've been able to get with whether it's on the operator side or on the investor side, what would be that one piece of advice that you would give to that young Frank about what it takes to start and and build a company? >> Um the reality is like starting a company, building a company, it it's not for everyone and that's okay. Um for the people who it is for, it it's actually pretty magical and you can't imagine not doing it. But if you can imagine doing something else, like if you're actually very comfortable um you know, in an organization with a lot of structure that basically gives you the work and you know how to do the work and you can uh succeed by just doing the same thing better and better and better, you know, over time, but you're comfortable having someone else um kind of queue up the problems for you,
then bigger companies might be your thing. But if you like solving new problems every day, if problems don't intimidate you, you just see them as challenges to overcome, if you can obsess about something where every spare moment of your day, like you can't help but your stray thoughts turning towards whatever that problem is, um if you go to bed at night wondering like how fast the night's going to go so you can wake up in the morning and get to the problems that you have on your desk, like there's this level of obsession uh about the problems that you're actually facing and the fact that you know, like you you just know that if you put the time in, you and your team are going to figure out how to solve the problems. You don't let things get in your way. You know, you figure out how to get to yes every day and you don't let no's deter you, a startup might be for you. Um but it really
isn't for everyone because it does end up consuming so much of your mind share, so much of your day, um you know, you you have so many problems that you have to face every day. Things are going wrong more than they're going right. But when you put the pieces together, they're like there's no feeling like it if you're the type of person who likes that type of thing.