Getting the help you (actually) need
First-time founders struggle to find the advice they need and to ask for help when they need it. Here are some ways to avoid this pitfall.
You can’t build a company by yourself.[1] Even if you are a solo founder, you will eventually need help with something. It might be a technical problem. It might be a sales problem. It might be a legal problem. No one is a master of everything. Trying to do too many things yourself is one of the worst decisions a founder can make.
At Gliding Ant, we have come across many first-time founders, often solo but sometimes in duos, who fall into this trap. In some cases, the issue is minor. A founder doesn’t want help writing a grant. In other cases, the stakes are higher. A founder doesn’t want help raising millions of dollars despite having never pitched to a VC before.
Why does this happen? There are many reasons, but here are my big three:
Founders undervalue their time
The most valuable and finite resource that a founder has is their time. But, because time is the only resource that founders have complete control over, they quickly start viewing their time as “cheap” compared to paying someone else to do a job. The result is founders taking on tasks that they aren’t equipped for. It also detracts from the core tasks of building, but it feels better than using limited dollars to hire a lawyer or a professional bookkeeper (until you get sued or audited).
Founders are afraid of losing control
After being a team of one or two for so long, it can be hard for a founder to delegate and relinquish control. Every win has been hard-fought to this point. Founders start to believe that only they can do what the company needs. And they don’t want to have regrets taking bad advice or relying on someone who let them down. Ego also gets involved. It takes a certain confidence, perhaps arrogance, to be a founder. That confidence can be a double-edged sword. In either case, founders are often reluctant to ask for help and give up control.
Of course, this type of thinking can lead to very bad outcomes. Founders who can’t let go of tasks risk either A) overworking and burning out, B) achieving subpar results, or C) both.
Founders get lots of bad advice
The current startup ecosystem is inundated with people claiming that they can help. Some of these people are professional consultants, while others are volunteer mentors for accelerators. Many of them have had success as entrepreneurs, but many more have never built a company before.
The challenge of advising a startup is that each one is incredibly unique. Not even comparing them to snowflakes is sufficient. That means traditional advice – “Based on my past experiences, I think you should do X, Y, and Z” – always falls flat.
Plus, everyone has an opinion, so advice is often contradictory - advisor whiplash is real. Entrepreneurs have ample opportunities to receive advice (in WA state alone, there are over 40 startup accelerator programs!) but have to sift through the feedback to find the few helpful nuggets.
As you might imagine, this is a significant challenge for a new founder. It takes time to find people who provide distinctive advice and support, as opposed to those who offer generic, boilerplate platitudes. After a few bad experiences, it’s easy to become skeptical and even cynical about people offering help. It is tempting to pull back from the ecosystem and stop looking for help.
Is there a better way to approach the support ecosystem? I believe that with the right midset and a few tactical actions, founders can get more out of every mentor and advisor relationship and have a greater chance of getting the help they actually need.
Here are some ideas for how to approach this critical part of building your company:
Be real with yourself
Let’s be real - we all have blind spots and weaknesses. Just because you became a founder, it doesn’t mean that these things went away. Take stock of yourself and admit where you need help. Do a self-assessment of your abilities and then seek frank feedback from former colleagues. Then, create a plan for addressing the weaknesses and gaps you’ve identified. Decide what you can learn, whom you need to hire, and what you can outsource. This is way more important than nailing your go-to-market strategy, especially at the earliest stages.
Clearly articulate your needs
As you go along your journey, your company’s needs will be ever-changing. Startups are searching for a sustainable business model. This was one of the most critical insights of the Lean Startup movement. Your job is to summarize and synthesize those needs so that other people can effectively help you. Be specific. Rather than say, “We need help with sales,” say something like, “We need a person with experience selling data analytics software to small businesses where the typical deal size is $5,000-10,000.” If you can’t articulate what you need, that probably means you need to spend more time in customer discovery and validation mode.
Here is an excellent example from Steve Jobs:
I’ve never found anybody that didn’t want to help me if I asked them for help. I called up Bill Hewlett when I was 12 years old. “Hi, I’m Steve Jobs. I’m 12 years old. I’m a student in high school. I want to build a frequency counter, and I was wondering if you have any spare parts I could have.” He laughed, and he gave me the spare parts, and he gave me a job that summer at Hewlett-Packard … and I was in heaven.
Develop a sixth sense for fit
Although I pointed out that founders get bad advice, that doesn’t mean a founder should stop developing their network. Every new contact might hold the key to unlock your current (or next) problem. Even if someone isn’t a good fit in the moment, they might be helpful in the future.
But founders need to quickly decide whether someone will be helpful or not. Part of this is knowing what you need (see above). The other part is having a method to understand what the other person is distinctive at. Some people are intuitive at this. Most of us need help. Go into conversations prepared with a list of questions to reveal what the prospective mentor or advisor has done (look for specifics!) and some hypothetical questions to understand if the person can help you with your current challenges.
This will also pay dividends in the long term. As your company grows, its needs will change. You will need to hire people to do things you have never done and probably will never do. Ben Horowitz has some great insights on how to identify and hire the right people. Putting your ego aside and learning how to lead through others is critical for scaling your startup.
Look for people who want to invest in you as a person
When a founder is seeking help for a problem, they should look for people who want to invest in the founder, not just form a transactional relationship. This gets back to the idea that every startup is unique. Simply applying a playbook probably won’t have much impact. Developing the playbook for you and your startup - that’s the kind of relationship that you want to foster. This will take time, but good mentors and advisors will put in the hours to get the right answer.
When I was at BlueDot Photonics, I found such a mentor in Rajan Kasetty. Rajan started as our mentor in the Cascadia Cleantech Accelerator, but he quickly became a dedicated confidant for the team. Of course, he helped us refine our pitch, but more importantly, he spent several hours over coffee helping us understand the core aspects of our business and what our milestones should be.
The best mentors are those who realize what Galileo recognized centuries ago:
We cannot teach people anything; we can only help them discover it within themselves.
Ultimately, as a founder, you need to find your way of getting the help you need. Next to raising money, building the team and network that will help your company thrive is the most important thing you can do. The execution of the team will determine your success. Put as much time and thought into it as you do on your pitch deck.
If you want talk about how to find help, reach out to Gliding Ant Ventures. We’re here to help you discover what you need.
[1] At least not yet, but AI is making it easier to do more with less. Sam Altman recently got the tech world buzzing with his discussion of a one-person unicorn: https://techcrunch.com/2025/02/01/ai-agents-could-birth-the-first-one-person-unicorn-but-at-what-societal-cost/
Coming up in our series on startup closures (subscribe to get the latest!):
🌃 Dark Matter: The Invisible Engine of Deep Tech
💧 The 60 Percent Leak: How Innovation Disappears during Closures
💡 Why Deep‑Tech Needs a Dark‑Matter Strategy—Now
🌍 Four Ways to Fix a Leaky Innovation Ecosystem
💰 Case Studies on Closure - 8 lessons from $300M invested in Deep Tech Startups