Key points
- Snow Lee, who sold his first two startups to Kakao and Buzzvil, argues founders and leaders are not the same and that successful founders must become good leaders.
- Runbear's Plugbear, described as Zapier for LLM apps, connects custom GPTs to Slack, Microsoft Teams and HubSpot and signed up over 1,200 companies in three months.
- Snow Lee says OpenAI Dev Day killed thousands of startups including Runbear, but the launch of GPTs and Assistants pushed Runbear to ship Plugbear in one or two weeks.
Snow Lee on why founders must also become good leaders
Snow Lee has sold two startups and is on his third, Runbear, and his argument is that founding and leading are different skills the same person has to hold. Leadership, on his account, is an activity, learned by doing it badly first. Runbear is a five-person bet on staying close to customers and staying lean, and he delegates by task while remaining a player on the field.
Takeaways
- Founders and leaders are different jobs. Leaders nurture team members, want them promoted and acting independently, and are judged by the team's success. Founders nurture the business, are judged by business success, and must stay players on the field while hunting product-market fit.
- Leadership is an activity that can be learned. Snow Lee's 2011 startup had seven co-founders on equal shares, all calling themselves CEO. Without clear roles, discussions ran long and pivots stalled. He says the team had good founders but no good leaders, and that leadership can be taught.
- Coaching a team leader clarified Buzzvil's customer. A team leader Snow Lee coached ran customer interviews and defined a clearer target customer. At Buzzvil he led up to seven product teams at once, a period in which annual revenue tripled.
- Plugbear is a Zapier for LLM apps. Runbear's product connects custom LLM apps and GPTs to workplace tools such as Slack and Microsoft Teams. The team shipped it in one or two weeks after OpenAI launched GPTs and Assistants, and more than 1,200 companies signed up within three months.
- Dev Day killed Runbear and opened a door. OpenAI's launch wiped out thousands of startups, Runbear among them. Snow Lee says the same shift created new opportunities, and Plugbear is what the team built out of it.
- Do not write people off by other playbooks. At Buzzvil an underperformer moved teams on his upper leader's advice and became a top performer. Snow Lee warns against importing other companies' philosophies, Netflix's included, and says people who do not fit are the hardest part of leading.
Runbear's operating choices
- Runbear settled on two principles at the start, customer centricity and a lean approach, and chose them over blitzscaling.
- The five-person company is made up of people who had all worked together before, so hiring rests on trust rather than screening interviews.
- Snow Lee considered dividing customer engagement among the team but dropped it because every customer story matters to him.
Advice for early founders
- The idea is the cheapest thing and execution is everything, so validate before building. Snow Lee recommends The Right It.