Play your strongest card: how to find your Edge as a founder

A few years into running EF, cofounders Alice Bentinck and Matt Clifford continued to see smart people fail and promising ideas lose momentum. They realized that the startups most likely to succeed were the ones with the strongest founder-idea fit.

In How to Be a Founder, they outline how success depends on two things: how well cofounders fit with each other, and how well they fit with their idea. You and your cofounder earn the right to win if you have the combination of knowledge, skills, experience, and network to tackle the right problem, create the right solution and build the right team.

At EF, we now know that finding a cofounder and an idea to work on are symbiotic processes that should happen simultaneously. The best way to achieve this is to lean into your Edge.

Your Edge is the unique combination of skills, knowledge, behaviors, and experiences that put you in a better position than almost anyone else to build a particular company. Think of it as a deck of cards. Your cards are shaped by the skills or experience you already have. You need to know the strength of the cards in your hand in relation to each other and other people.

It’s tempting to believe that anyone can build anything, as long as they work hard enough. But in practice, the best founders play to their strengths. They build companies where their Edge gives them an unfair advantage.

Investors and early employees will inevitably ask, “Why you?” Edge is how you answer that question. It demonstrates why you are uniquely placed to solve this problem now, and why you are credible as a founder.

You have a Tech Edge if you have developed expertise in a technical domain that others don’t yet fully understand, and you see how it can be applied in new ways. A Tech Edge often comes with the compulsion to solve problems and push boundaries, to build and create something new. It gives you the ability to see possibilities that other founders overlook, because you know what the technology can and can’t do.

Zachary Williamson, cofounder of Aztec, was a former physicist at CERN and T2K Japan. Alongside Thomas Pocock, a Maths graduate from the University of Cambridge, he created Aztec Protocol, applying their deep technical expertise in a novel way to address blockchain’s fundamental lack of privacy.

Market Edge

You have a Market Edge if you have had sufficient exposure to a particular industry to understand the status quo and want to challenge it. The key word here is “sufficient”. If you have too much time in a particular industry you become entrenched in the status quo. You need to have developed a good enough understanding of the space to be able to generate non-obvious insights into its challenges and opportunities – insights that someone outside of the industry could not have uncovered.

Barney Hussey-Yeo, who founded Cleo, a leading financial advice app for millennials and Gen Z, had worked for eighteen months at London’s biggest fintech before becoming a founder. He wasn’t a finance expert, but he had enough experience helping people manage their money to understand the status quo and how it could change. During that time, he also built an invaluable network: the founder of the fintech he worked for became one of his seed investors. Cleo has recently surpassed $250M in ARR, and is contemplating an IPO in London or New York.

Catalyst Edge

You have a Catalyst Edge if you have the ability to bring people together, assemble resources, and generate momentum that others can’t. Founders with a Catalyst Edge come from a range of backgrounds, but all show some key traits: they are competitive, ambitious, hard-working, and never satisfied.

If you’re super young and fresh out of college, you’re likely to be a Catalyst Edge. You will win by moving faster than everyone else around you. A great example would be the founders of Mercor, which hit $75M ARR in two years.

Jacob Haddad, cofounder of AccuRx, excelled during his studies at the University of Oxford and Imperial College London. He was student union president, set up a TEDx conference, worked as a first-aid responder at the London Olympics and was a finalist in a top TV cooking show.

While Tech and Market Edges are helpful in generating an idea, a Catalyst Edge will give you an advantage in executing it.

Identifying your Edge (or Edges, and ranking them) is just the first step. The real power comes from finding a cofounder that amplifies your strengths and helps align your unique Edge(s) to the right problem.

Icarus Robotics cofounders Ethan Barajas and Jamie Palmer, used their Edges to form their team and as the foundation for their idea: building the robotic labor force for space. Jamie had a strong Tech Edge: a roboticist from Columbia’s ROAM Lab, specializing in dexterous robotics. He had deployed hospital robots at AKARA and F1 cars at Mercedes AMG. Ethan, a mechanical engineer by trade, had a Tech Edge too, but additionally he had a strong Market Edge, having designed agricultural nanolabs for NASA and the ISS in high school and developed lunar rovers with NASA JPL at Caltech. Icarus Robotics, which recently raised an oversubscribed $6.1M Seed led by Soma Capital and Xtal, was founded because Ethan and Jamie recognized each other’s strengths, and that they were collectively worth more than the sum of their parts.