How we add value for founders

A perspective on "help"

“Is there such a thing as too much value-add?”

That was a real founder question.

My answer (as always): it depends.

Here’s some background.

The founder asked for a sales intro.

Not a platform strategy. Not a community. Not a portal. Not a webinar called “Scaling Revenue With Intention.”

One person. One problem.

Four hours later, someone named Colton is walking them through the startup-support version of a complimentary multi-point inspection at your friendly neighborhood Ford dealership.

Here is the platform lead. Here is the operating partner. Here is the vendor list. Here is the founder portal. Here is a Notion doc. Here are all the other Notion docs linked from this Notion doc. Here is a Slack community. Here is a person who once ran sales at a company that sounds similar but is actually not similar at all. Here’s a dude who basically invented Square’s GTM. Or maybe it was Foursquare. Either way, everyone calls him Peaches. He’s a gawd.

Here is a 30-minute intro call before the real intro call.

The founder asked for the wiper.

Now they are stuck at the dealership.

That is where founder support has gotten weird.

Founders want help. Of course they do. They want the right intro, the right recruiter, the right fractional CFO, the right GTM person, the right person who has seen their exact problem before and can say, “Oh yeah, this is the part where everyone screws it up.”

But every investor is value-add now. Every fund has a platform person. Every platform person has a guy. Behind every guy is the real guy.

Every studio wants to studio you. Every accelerator wants to accelerate you. Frameworks. Packages. People who help startups help themselves. Strategic advisors with advisory strategy for RevOps. DevOps? BevOps¹?

Every expert has a framework. Every operator has an advisory offering. Every vendor has a startup package. Every community has a Slack.

The founder asks for help and suddenly they are not getting help. They are navigating help. The problem is that support has become another thing founders have to manage. Founders hiring “junior operators” to screen inbound VC calls. Platform team getting handed off to Ryan, he’s an associate on the operations team here and would be happy to kick things off. Okay fine that hasn’t happened… yet.

Too much platform turns help into overhead. More calls. More choices. More follow-ups. More vaguely useful things to sort through. The best support should reduce load. A lot of support now adds load.

Founders do not need more people standing around the car.

They need the exact person who can fix the exact thing.

There is a certain kind of startup helper who claims to do everything. They can help with GTM, hiring, sales, partnerships, positioning, fundraising, ops, finance, pricing, culture, strategy, executive coaching, category design, community, enterprise motion, and probably your marriage if the retainer is high enough.

No.

Founders do not need superheroes with menus like the Cheesecake Factory. They need people with lanes. The person who is terrifyingly good at one thing. In-n-Out. Double-double, ketchup & mustard instead, and fries well.

The person who has done the same painful, specific job enough times to know where the bodies are buried. The person who can look at the mess and immediately see the three things that actually matter.

If someone says they can do everything, they are probably not the killer you need for the thing currently on fire.

This is also not really a pitch for consultants.

Consultants diagnose. They advise. They deliver. And then they dip.

They make decks. Sometimes that is useful. Sometimes it leaves the founder with a strategic recommendation and twelve more things to do.

That is not what I mean.

The distinction that matters is pretty simple: a consultant says, “Here is what I would do.” A fractional operator says, “Here is what I am doing.”

More importantly, here’s how fast they’re going to get out of your way. Like a top tier pit crew. Scary efficient.

Not a massive internal platform team. Not a vendor marketplace. Not an accelerator, a studio, a consultant directory, or a menu of random helpers who all swear they are great with founders.

Just a bench of specific people for specific problems. That’s what we’re calling our crew of operators we’re partnering with for our Fund I portfolio support.

It is less bullshit between the founder and the help.

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The best fractional people are not drive-by advisors. They can grow with the company. At seed, you may need someone to clean up basic finance, hiring, or sales chaos. At Series A, that same person might help build the operating cadence, prep for the next fundraise, or hire the first full-time leader. They can be useful before the company is ready for the full-time executive. They build context over time. They help the founder avoid hiring too early, hiring too senior, or hiring someone full-time for a problem that is not yet a full-time job.

Fractional is not less than full-time. It’s founder-sized and startup speed.

The old flex in venture was having a giant platform team. Look at all our resources. Look at all our operating partners. Look at all our programs. Look at our portal. Look at our community. Look at our content engine.

The new flex should be restraint.

Look how fast we can get you to the right person. Look how little time we waste. Look how few steps there are. Look how quickly the problem gets solved. Look how cleanly the expert leaves when the work is done.

More headcount is not more help. More platform is not more value. Sometimes it is just more dealership.

The future of founder support is not a bigger service department.

It is a sharper bench.

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¹Hire a head of BevOps and every day is a liquidity event.