Founder Friday is a weekly guest post written by a founder who is based in or hails from the Silicon Prairie. Each month, a topic relevant to startups is presented and founders share lessons learned or best practices utilized on that topic. March’s topic is why you should work for a startup.
About the author: Ben Pankonin is co-founder of Social Assurance, a Lincoln-based social media compliance and monitoring tool for banks and other financial institutions.
There’s this common thought that startups develop out of a certain personal belief that the problem you are solving impacts you greatly and causes a deep emotional reaction engaging every fiber of your being to solve it.
At least for me, I always thought that was the way it was supposed to work. I envisioned a love at first sight or in this case, a “startup at first sight” dream.
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But I haven’t always loved the problem I was solving. About a year and a half ago, I was pitching to a group of potential investors and one actually questioned my passion for the business. Of course investors rarely give you information directly, so I learned about it through a friend. The question haunted me.
My company, Social Assurance, builds social media software for financial services. We serve banks, brokerages, investment firms and insurance companies with software to help market, sell and improve engagement with social media.
As I’ve gotten to know more industry insiders, you will often hear them start with sentences like, “This industry isn’t sexy,” and I found myself repeating this phrase. I even spoke to one VC on the East Coast who said, “Your business might not be sexy, but it can make money.” To which I immediately replied, “Which do you invest in?”
I justified what we were doing. My company solves real problems. It applies lean philosophies. It makes sense on paper. But it still felt empty at times.
Solving a problem is not vision.
I’ve learned that each of us has different motivators for our startup and until we understand what personally drives us as a founder, we can’t latch on to our company in the way we need to. Some of us need the startup that develops out of a hobby. In case you were wondering, starting a bank or running a brokerage firm is not exactly an easy hobby to start.
Why I love working for a startup
For me, I’m an extrovert. I love people. I thrive on opportunities to bring people together for a shared vision. But in an industry where obstacles stood in the way of building actual relationships, it began to strike me like a dissonant chord.
When I did business development, I loved being able to use all channels available to me to build closer relationships. Many of my clients became friends, but seeing an industry that struggles because of technical, training and compliance hurdles drives me to help them see the impact of communicating effectively.
My co-founder Matt Secoske was able to connect around solving the problem that the foundation of the banking industry is trust. With so few people having actual trust in financial institutions, as a startup in Nebraska we could materially affect the trust consumers have with their bank.
I’ve listened to plenty of speakers challenge audiences to increase the size of their vision. Often times our obstacle is not that our vision is too small, it is that it is too shallow. We focus on the immediate affects of our solution, not the depth at which it changes industry, relationships and economies.
I always enjoy reading about why founders build their companies. Ours was originally formed to solve a problem, but in doing so, we found a much deeper vision, one that meant more to us personally and has brought our clients to understand why we are passionate about what we do.
Why you might love working for a startup
- You have a desire to see how things are made.
- As a developer in a startup, you get to directly understand customer needs.
- Each employee helps define culture and your imprint is significant.
- If you like to solve problems, there’s never a shortage.
- There are less obstacles when it comes to implementing a new idea.
- Working on new problems, you are likely to become the expert inside the company, and likely your industry.
- Sometimes working for a startup is just what feels right for you.
