The First-Time Founder Mindset
How clarity, urgency, and audacity are replacing experience as the ultimate startup advantage
“You only ever do your first startup once. Try to preserve that naïveté—it’s a feature, not a bug.
— Paul Graham
My first leap
In 2013, I took a flight from Tel Aviv to London with a suitcase and an audacious idea.
I wasn’t a coder. I didn’t have startup experience. I didn’t have the pedigree or the perfect plan.
But I had a deep belief: that anyone, anywhere, should be able to build their own computer and understand the technology shaping their world.
That belief became Kano—my first-time founder’s leap into hardware, software learning, and a venture-backed company.
We launched on Kickstarter and pre-sold 12,000 computers. We later shipped over a million computer kits to learners in over 100 countries. We partnered with Microsoft, Warner Bros, Disney, and many more.
We helped over 1 million young people learn to code, build, and play with the tools of the future.
Over the years, we have raised more than $50 million in funding from VCs, angels, and corporations.
It was wild. It was naïve. It was messy. And it changed my life.
But more than anything, it taught me that a first-time founder mindset is not a disadvantage. It’s an advantage—if you’re brave enough to follow it.
The most important founders of this decade won’t be the most experienced. They’ll be the ones with the clearest insight, the strongest conviction, and the least regard for precedent.
We are living through a great unbundling of institutions, industries, and ideas. The systems that shaped the 20th century are either collapsing or becoming irrelevant. And the systems we’ll need for the next hundred years haven’t been built yet.
This is why the world needs more first-time founders.
And why the most dangerous mindset is: “I’m not ready yet.”
Why the first-time founder mindset matters now
This isn’t about romanticizing inexperience.
It’s about rejecting inertia.
Yes, repeat founders know how to raise money, manage teams, and navigate chaos.
(I say this as one myself.) But they’re also more likely to:
Default to what’s been funded before.
Filter ideas through past market norms.
Underestimate how much the world has actually changed.
While a first-time founder mindset does the opposite:
It favors insight over pedigree.
It asks why not instead of why.
It’s allergic to complacency and obsessed with movement.
Paul Graham writes in How to Start a Startup:
“The best startup ideas have three things in common: they’re something the founders want, that they can build, and that few others realize are worth doing.”
That last part—“few others realize”—is where first-time founder energy thrives.
The world is rebuilding. Founders are the architects
From AI and climate to governance and biology, we’re not optimizing legacy systems.
We’re replacing them.
This is a civilization-level change, fueled by existential innovation. And it’s being led by people who, in many cases, are doing it for the first time.
A few examples to consider:
Founders as the new policymakers
Vitalik Buterin, age 19, wrote the Ethereum whitepaper. No startup experience. No MBA. Today, the total economic value secured by the Ethereum chain is estimated to be as high as $640 billion.
Brian Armstrong, a software engineer without prior founder experience, launched Coinbase in 2012. By 2021, he had helped take it public at an $85B valuation—and brought crypto into regulatory legitimacy.
Sam Altman, co-founder of OpenAI and former President of YCombinator, says:
“There has never been a better time to start a startup. The cost is lower. The platform leverage is greater. And the appetite for bold ideas is back.”
This is the new blueprint: Don’t ask permission. Build the new standard.
And it’s not about having all the answers. It’s about knowing which questions matter.
Founders as the new educators
Ben Nelson, a first-time founder and former textbook executive, launched Minerva to reinvent higher education from the ground up. Without experience running a university, he built a fully accredited, globally distributed institution that emphasizes critical thinking, experiential learning, and real-world problem solving, without a traditional campus.
Melanie Perkins, a first-time founder and former design tutor in Perth, Australia, launched Canva to make design—and by extension, creative communication—accessible to everyone. What started as a tool for students to design yearbooks became a global platform used in classrooms, startups, and Fortune 500s. Without formal training in software or business, Perkins turned a local teaching frustration into an education-adjacent unicorn that empowers millions to think visually and build creatively.
When institutions stop serving people, people start serving each other. And first-time founders are leading that realignment.
Founders as the new energy utilities:
David Kirtley, a physicist turned first-time founder, launched Helion Energy with a vision to make fusion power practical within a commercial timeframe. With no prior experience building a company, he and his team have pushed Helion to the forefront of private fusion, securing over $600 million in funding and landing a landmark agreement to supply electricity to Microsoft by 2028. It’s one of the boldest bets on solving the energy equation for civilization.
Mateo Jaramillo, a first-time founder after leading energy products at Tesla, started Form Energy to solve one of renewable energy’s most critical bottlenecks: storage at grid scale. Rather than chasing lithium trends, he bet on an unconventional iron-air battery capable of powering entire cities for days. Today, Form Energy has raised over $800 million from investors like Breakthrough Energy Ventures and ArcelorMittal. It is building U.S. manufacturing infrastructure to deliver on its mission of a fully renewable, resilient energy grid.
These founders are betting on major infrastructure plays and building these companies with domain expertise but little experience as founders.
What the moment demands
We’re at a point in time when incremental improvement is useless. We need to replace obsolete systems with better ones—fast.
So what does this mindset require?
Clarity → Know the problem. Make it impossible to ignore.
Urgency → The future isn’t five years out. It’s being written right now.
Audacity → Most things that matter sound impossible at first.
Resilience → It will feel lonely before it feels obvious.
Service → Build for others. That’s where longevity lives.
Sara Blakely, the first-time founder of Spanx, once said:
“Don’t be intimidated by what you don’t know. That can be your greatest strength.”
She turned $5,000 into a billion-dollar company by solving a problem others ignored.
That’s first-time founder energy in action.
Three reasons to build like it’s your first time
1. The frontier is wide open
This is our generation’s 1960s moment—for AI, climate, biology, space, and governance.
The biggest companies of the next 50 years will be built by people solving today’s deepest challenges from scratch.
Marc Lore, founder of Jet.com and now CEO of Wonder Group, said:
“When you look around at what’s broken, that’s your cue. That’s where you go build.”
And so, the opportunity isn’t necessarily in beating incumbents.
It’s in building what they can’t even see.
2. Capital wants conviction again
Despite the downturn, capital is flowing to ideas that feel like movements.
Anthropic raised $18.2B on a grand vision for AI alignment.
Retro Biosciences secured $180M at launch to fight aging.
Fervo Energy raised $786M to scale geothermal power.
The best investors aren’t chasing hype.
They’re chasing clarity, courage, and asymmetric upside.
And first-time founders who speak from conviction—not just credentials—are raising.
3. The next generation is watching
We don’t need more startup influencers. We need builders with backbone—people who see the world breaking and choose to repair it anyway.
Every time someone says:
“I didn’t wait. I started.”
They give someone else permission to do the same.
This ripple effect is real. It’s how new founder ecosystems are born—from Nairobi to Columbus to Kuala Lumpur.
What to do if you’re sitting on a big idea
If you’re on the edge, here’s a playbook you should consider:
You don’t need:
A cofounder (yet)
A perfect deck
A pre-seed check
A Notion doc full of product specs
You do need:
One clear problem worth solving
One insight others haven’t absorbed yet
One prototype or a conversation with a few users
One week of movement, not months of planning
As Richard Branson said:
“Screw it, let’s do it.”
That’s not bravado. That’s momentum.
Final thought: Don’t wait to be ready
The systems we inherited were not designed for this rapidly changing world.
We need new ones. And someone has to build them.
The most potent fuel for that kind of work isn’t experience.
It’s vision paired with velocity.
Whether you’re starting for the first time or starting again, what matters is that you bring the energy, urgency, and conviction of someone who knows this might be your only shot at moving the world forward.
Act like it’s your first time.
Because in a world this new, it always is.
Go build.
Yon
👋 Hello! My mission with Beyond with Yon is to ignite awareness, inspire dialogue, and drive innovation to tackle humanity's greatest existential challenges. Join me on the journey to unf**ck the future and transform our world.
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AI assistants were used to help research and edit this essay.