Starting a Company Is Normal Now, Becoming an Entrepreneur Is Not

David Frankel, a seed investor with Founder Collective, was asked whether startup programs have made founding a company too normal, especially for graduates of certain colleges and college programs. He said the professionalizing of starting up worries him. His line was blunt. “There are so many founders,” he said. “There are fewer entrepreneurs.”

What he meant, he explained, was fortitude and the ability to energize other people while climbing a steep learning curve. He pointed to the difference in how the trajectories go for the chief executive and the technical co-founder. The technical leader is golden up to about 50 people, he said, and then at some point a company could bring in better technical skills, with a good technical co-founder becoming, in his image, a kind of Swiss Army knife used in different ways.

The chief executive, by contrast, goes on what Frankel called a serious journey. That person has to learn to manage, and to learn to hire enough people to fill the team, what he calls putting “bums on seats.” He pointed to T.J. Parker, a founder of the pharmacy startup PillPack, and Jack, a founder of the ticketing company SeatGeek, as changed individuals after that process.

The most concrete example came over coffee last week. Mikey Shulman, a founder of the music startup Suno, told Frankel that 30 to 40% of his time is just recruiting.

It reminded Frankel of a lunch decades ago with Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder, when someone asked Bezos what he spent his time doing. Bezos answered that 50% of his time was bums on seats. That answer, Frankel said, has never left him. That is the chief executive’s journey, and the entrepreneur’s journey, and many founders do not get that.