The one thing you need to do before creating a startup

Most founders start with the idea. Far fewer stop to ask the more important question first: what do you actually want out of this?

Your personal goals — financial, lifestyle, the kind of work that genuinely satisfies you, the reputation you want to build, the values you won’t trade away — should shape the business you build, not the other way around. Take an engineer who gets their energy from solving lots of different problems: licensing their ideas might suit them far better than scaling a single company to a trade sale, even if the headline financial return looks smaller. Same idea, very different business — and only one of them actually fits the founder.

Who it’s for: Innovators, startup founders and aspiring founders — especially anyone at the idea stage trying to work out what they’re really building towards.