163 - Who does a Founder need on their Board - Jordan Schlipf

Jordan is a seasoned entrepreneur, investor, and operator with an impressive track record in both founding and scaling technology businesses, as well as supporting over 1,600 early-stage investments through roles at Rainmaking and Startup Bootcamp. As the current CEO of Cowshed and a co-founder of Rainmaker, Jordan’s career spans founder exits, venture capital, and hands-on company turnarounds. His perspective is informed by both hard-earned lessons from startup failures and successful exits, as well as experience as a non-executive director and venture partner managing institutional capital. Jordan is widely recognized for his candor, strategic insight, and passion for building exceptional business “machines.”💡 What You’ll Learn from Jordan's Journey:🔸 Build the Business to Outlast Yourself: Your job as a founder is to develop a scalable, resilient organization (“the machine”) that continues to thrive without you, not to personally do all the work or remain the bottleneck.🔸 Incentives Are Everything: Crafting effective incentives is crucial, top talent can underperform under weak incentive structures. Constantly revisit and tailor incentives to align with business objectives and each stage of growth.🔸 Beware the Unicorn Myth: The venture capital game’s odds are stacked against founders, with most never seeing meaningful returns. Pursue entrepreneurship on your terms and beware of blindly drinking the VC Kool-Aid, building sustainable, profitable businesses can be equally or more rewarding.🔸 Play the Long Game: Compounding applies far beyond capital, to skills, knowledge, networks, and reputation. Success takes patience and persistence; most meaningful results materialize for those who stick with it for the long term.You can connect with Jordan on ⁠LinkedIn⁠ to follow his journey.👏 Props to the stellar crew: Nancy Nash, Daniel M. Melo, Carlos Javier Chacón Sánchez, Matthew Ray, and host Spencer Walker-Fooks. You bring this show to life.🥂 Want to support the journey? Join us on ⁠Patreon⁠ and help amplify more voices like Jordan.#FoundersVoyage #Entrepreneurship #Podcast