Founder

Build startups with product-market fit, fundraising, team building, and founder resilience.

Security Scan

Instruction-only startup/advice skill that contains static guidance and requests no credentials, binaries, installs, or file access — its behavior matches its stated purpose.

Purpose & Capability

Name/description (founder/startup advice) match the SKILL.md content. The skill requests no binaries, env vars, or config paths that would be unrelated to providing advice.

Instruction Scope

SKILL.md contains only static, written guidance (product-market fit, fundraising, team, resilience, etc.). It does not instruct the agent to run commands, read files, access environment variables, or call external endpoints.

Install Mechanism

No install spec and no code files — instruction-only skills have the lowest install risk because nothing is written to disk or executed.

Credentials

The skill declares no required environment variables, credentials, or config paths — proportional to an advice-only capability.

Persistence & Privilege

always is false and the skill does not request persistent or elevated privileges. The default ability for an agent to autonomously invoke the skill is normal and not a concern here because the skill cannot access secrets or system state.

Assessment

This skill is basically a static playbook of founder advice and appears internally consistent and low-risk because it asks for nothing and installs nothing. However, note the skill's source/homepage are unspecified — that affects trust/attribution but not technical risk. Treat the guidance as general (not legal, tax, or investor advice), verify important decisions with qualified professionals, and avoid sharing sensitive company or personal secrets to any skill unless it explicitly needs and justifies them.

Founder Assistance Rules

Early Stage

• Talk to customers before building — assumptions are usually wrong
• Problem validation before solution validation — make sure it's worth solving
• MVP means embarrassingly small — ship the smallest thing that tests your hypothesis
• Speed of learning beats quality of product early on
• Choose co-founders like marriage — complementary skills, aligned values, tested under stress

Product-Market Fit

• Users that would be "very disappointed" without you — that's the metric (40%+ threshold)
• Retention matters more than acquisition — leaky bucket never fills
• Pull beats push — customers seeking you out vs you convincing them
• PMF feels like demand you can barely keep up with
• Before PMF, nothing else matters — don't scale what doesn't work

Fundraising

• Raise when you have momentum, not desperation
• Know your numbers cold — ARR, growth rate, burn, runway, unit economics
• VCs pattern-match — know what pattern you fit
• SAFE vs priced round: tradeoffs on both sides
• 100 meetings to find 1 yes is normal — rejection isn't signal about your company

Team

• First 10 hires define culture — choose carefully
• Hire for slope over experience early — fast learners beat credentialed operators
• Fire fast when it's not working — one bad hire poisons teams
• Equity is precious — be generous but not careless
• Founder doing everything doesn't scale — delegate before breaking

Execution

• Focus is saying no to good ideas — not just bad ones
• Metrics: one north star, 2-3 supporting — more means no focus
• Weekly cadence: set goals, execute, review, repeat
• Ship > perfect — iterate based on feedback
• Default to action — analysis paralysis kills startups

Pivoting

• Pivot on strategy, not vision — the problem matters, your solution might not
• Data tells you what isn't working — customers tell you what might
• Pivots require conviction — half-pivots fail
• Runway determines pivot options — pivot with 18 months, not 3
• Kill projects before they kill you — sunk cost is sunk

Survival

• Cash is oxygen — know your runway in weeks, not months
• Revenue solves most problems — paying customers validate everything
• Cut costs in chunks, not slices — small cuts demoralize without saving
• Down rounds happen — survive now, optimize later
• Mental health isn't optional — burnout helps nobody

Founder Psychology

• Imposter syndrome is universal — you're not uniquely unqualified
• The highs are too high, the lows are too low — regression to mean happens
• Find founder peers — they understand what others can't
• Separate identity from company — you're not your startup
• Ask for help — everyone does, they just don't advertise it

Common Mistakes

• Building in stealth too long — the idea isn't the moat
• Hiring senior too early — expensive people need infrastructure
• Chasing press over customers
• Raising too much and losing discipline — constraints breed creativity
• Optimizing for valuation over progress