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Founder Readiness 53

Years from now, after your startup journey is complete, what ques-
tions or issues will you wish you had thought about in advance? What
will you regret having learned the hard way? As a new founder, while
the clay of your idea is still moist, you have the opportunity to stand
on the shoulders of hundreds of millions of entrepreneurs who have
come before you, to leverage the wide body of existing knowledge
about what works and what doesn’t. The premise of this chapter is
that the most fundamental driver of your startup’s early success, or
failure, is you—your purpose, goals, skills, personality, relationships,
resources, and needs. These factors will either enhance or diminish
your ability to achieve your startup dreams and, just as important, de-
termine your level of happiness as you pursue them.

The Fundamentals of Founder Readiness

It’s hard to imagine a founder better prepared to launch his or her
chosen startup than J.C. Faulkner. On the personal side, J.C.’s capacity
for empathy, his natural charisma and self-awareness, and his initia-
tive, communication, and interpersonal skills were all evident long
before he launched D1. Professionally, he spent twelve years learning
the fundamentals of mortgage lending, navigating the up-and-down
cycles common to the industry. He led a number of First Union’s
sales branches and regions across the United States, turning many of
them around from under-performing to high-performing units. In
the process, he got to know a lot of talented, well-connected people
in a highly relationship-driven industry. And he gained a decade’s
worth of leadership experience, building sales and service teams and
managing bottom line results of large, high-growth business units.

Despite his expertise and experience, J.C. took the time to pa-
tiently prepare himself and his startup plan until the window of op-
portunity was right. “It took me a year and a half,” he says, “from
waking up one day and thinking I could be doing this, to getting up
one morning and saying I should be doing this.” He studied the mar-
ketplace, developed an initial game plan, recruited a colleague to build
financial models, and quietly began lining up prospective investors. “I
was ready, emotionally, long before I could piece it together logically.

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