3 questions you can ask yourself as a first time founder

Building straight out of college can be tricky. Being curious can help.

You can be a founder straight out of college. But, what do you need to keep in mind?


I believe the most important thing is being self-aware about your knowledge gap. 

As a first-time founder, you are devoid of the insights people with significant experience in building companies or working at one possess.

While one can argue that’s a good thing, you still need solid foundations to build a company and a product/ service people want. 

To build these foundations, ask yourself these 3 questions regularly: 

(Disclaimer: This is the knowledge that I’ve gathered while building a for-profit and non-profit enterprise. Nothing here (or anywhere you read) should be gospel truth. )

1️⃣ Are you building first principle thinking? 

As young people who’ve gone through a damaged education system, building first principle thinking requires you to unlearn and question assumptions, authority, and arguments.

Do this while building your own company as well. At Mauka, I try to ask myself tough questions every now and then about what we are building. While this comes with its own share of nerve-wracking movements, they are important.


2️⃣ Do you know enough about company building? 

While this question definitely includes the boring but important things like incorporation, taxes, and compliance; What’s more important is whether you’re bringing method to the madness. Can you build processes that can then move into autopilot with basic oversight?

Processes are important. But as a young organization, keep some of the madness alive. Creativity thrives in chaos. You need that as fuel to keep driving your company’s growth.


3️⃣ Are you learning new things intersectionally?

More often than not, most of us acquire knowledge only for the things that can immediately help us or gratify us. This is why most Silicon Valley or BLR folks read the same books, listen to the same podcasts, and follow the same people (Zero to One, Masters of Scale, and Naval)

In my opinion, true knowledge lies in learning from unexpected places and having unexpected applications of that knowledge. An example for that would be: Learning about the Industrial revolution and building insights about the education system they devised instead of listening to a podcast that teaches you how to build an EdTech product.