Founding rewards reasoning from first principles rather than copying what exists, holding a conviction while taking brutal feedback seriously, and explaining a new idea clearly enough that people fund it, join it and buy it. Nobody asks a founder for their degree certificate.
The lay of the land#
A startup’s life runs in stages: an idea, a first version built by a handful of people (the seed stage), then growth rounds as it finds paying users. You don’t have to found one to work at one. Early employees do a bit of everything, and the titles are loose: founding team, chief of staff, operations lead, generalist. The trade-off is honest: more ownership and faster learning than any graduate scheme, less stability and less structure. Two common ways in are joining an early team to learn how the machine works, and starting something small and public yourself: a newsletter, a community, a tool. Let’s Phi began exactly that way.
Philosophers who’ve done it#
- Christina Norgard Rud — co-founded Squid, a cross-chain liquidity startup; at our May 2023 workshop she talked about co-founding, fundraising and working in a fast-moving space
- Federico Ast — founded Kleros, which turned a philosophical question about just arbitration into a working protocol and company
From our events#
- Philosophers Working in Decentralised Finance with Christina Norgard Rud — includes the co-founding and fundraising story (May 2023)
- The Future of Law-Tech with Federico Ast (June 2022)
Start here#
- Philosophy Means Business — the skills case you’ll be making to co-founders, investors and yourself
- Watch how founders in our community explain their companies; Kleros’ videos on building in the space are a good example of making a new idea understandable
- If you’d rather fund builders than be one, read Venture Capital
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