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Startup School

I started a company in college so I’d have something to do, other than homework.

Nathaneo Johnson and Sean Hargrow took it a step further. They’re 21-year old students at Yale who just raised $3 million for their startup, Series.

And they did it in 14 days.

People think speed is about working long hours or shipping fast.

That helps, but it’s not the real reason why some teams move so much faster than others. The fastest startups aren’t just quick to build. They’re quick to decide.

That kind of speed doesn’t come from action. It comes from alignment.

When you watch great cofounders work together, you’ll notice they hardly ever have to explain themselves. One starts a sentence and the other finishes it.

Or they shortcut entire conversations with a single look.

When cofounders aren’t on the same page, every decision takes longer. They over-explain things. They have to persuade each other.

Multiply that by every hour of every day and you get an invisible tax. You can’t see this tax on a roadmap, but it shows up everywhere:

• Disagreements over what “MVP” really means

• Tension about whether to fix bugs or chase growth

• Pitches that sound different depending on who’s talking

• Features rebuilt because the first time meant different things

So how do you move supernaturally fast like Nathaneo and Sean?

Forget the Ivy League flex or the AI buzzwords. What actually made that speed possible was years of cofounder calibration.

They’d logged hundreds of hours together before writing a single line of code. Hosted a podcast, interviewed founders, discussed what’s broken about social media.

The best cofounder often have a long history. Steve and Woz were friends in high school. Drew and Arash (Dropbox) were MIT classmates.

Even good cofounders who didn’t know each other before starting often build intense shared context early on. They simulate years of collaboration in months.

Shared context is also why solo founders can sometimes go faster. It’s not that two brains aren’t better than one. It’s that one brain doesn’t argue with itself.

So if you’re starting a cofoundership and wondering how to move faster, start here:
Don’t just build product velocity. Build partner velocity. That means:

• Make sure you’ve both seen the same landscape. Read the same books. Talk to the same users.

• Establish taste. You don’t have to agree on everything but you need to know where your tastes split.

• Decide how decisions get made. Fast teams have clear owners and trust.

The more context you build upfront, the fewer arguments you’ll have mid-flight.

Startups die from running out of time. And the biggest time sink is misalignment.

That’s all for now,

BTW — Grab yourself some dumbfound coffee. Our grind fuels yours.

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