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Sarah Gill Martin
Founders Fieldnotes
11 min readNov 17, 2020

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After three pivots in as many years, Tobia de Angelis was just about ready to close down his company. Instead he took some time out and taught himself to code. Along the way he saw an opportunity to radically transform the digital learning experience matched with an epic market need for talent.

Last year he co-founded Strive School with long time partner Diego Banovaz. They have been running live remote classes ever since and themselves just graduated from fêted Silicon Valley accelerator Y Combinator’s first ever fully remote cohort. They also just launched an AI track to their syllabus — just the latest milestone in their mission to explode the number of job-ready software engineers in Europe.

Top to bottom — Strive School co-founder and former Founders EIR Tobia de Angelis in conversation with Founders partner Stefano at remote family breakfast in October 2020

Today, we are a happy investor in Strive but our story together starts way further back. Founders partner Stefano Zorzi originally invited Tobia to join us as entrepreneur in residence in 2016. They had met on Twitter and discovered they shared more than a love of AS Roma. Tobia started working on an education-related project back then, but as is common, the path to building Strive School has been far from direct.

In startup folklore it’s often this linear narrative about about the founder in a basement, attic, (or other small dark space) with this single burning idea that then turns into a great company. In reality, it’s often just about getting started in the first place.

This is one of the ideas that emerge in Stefano’s breakfast talk with Tobia about his entrepreneurial journey so far — which has ranged from club running to B2B SaaS tools for onboarding new employees to managing payroll for remote workers to the colourful world of crypto kitties.

Watch the video or read the transcript below as they talk about falling down and getting back up on the winding road of company building.

Take-aways + video time stamps

  • Getting started > knowing all the answers (08.06)
  • The butcher mentality: keeping it simple> over intellectualising (09.52)
  • Don’t fret about being called the ‘X for Y’ if it’s the easiest way to explain what you do (12.42)
Tobia de Angelis, co-founder Strive School in conversation with Founders partner and head of creation Stefano Zorzi at Founders Family Breakfast

Transcript

Stefano: What has the journey you have taken to get where you are now taught you about starting companies? (02.38)

The reality is I had no clue what I wanted to do.

I was actually thinking about this the past few days: where do ideas come from? I think they come from three places. It’s always an intuition —you’re walking somewhere or having a shower or talking to someone. That’s how it starts. It’s either you have an insight so you know there is a problem because you are experiencing it or you are working at a company and you discover the problem through the company. So I am sure people working at Pleo can be great fintech founders in the future because they are touching many angles, like through Pleo they are learning a lot about a specific thing. So you can have insights that generate ideas.

They can be problems like your mum has a problem or your mum has a problem and you want to solve it and that is another way to generate ideas. And then the other thing is desires: I want more comfortable jeans so I start Levis or something like that. Or Nike if you want better running shoes.

So it’s desires, problems or insights.

If I look back the problem was that we did not start from any of those. It did not start from a desire or a problem we were experiencing. We did not start from an insight from our own journey. The only one we started from an insight was the payroll problem. I would even argue a better idea than we we are working on now if I had to be devil’s advocate. If you are looking at companies that executed well on helping remote teams succeed like Deal — a YC company — or Pilot, it is extremely clear there is a market need. The reason it was good for us was that it came from an insight. We were running a small distributed team and as a CEO I knew it was a f***ing pain with compliance and contracts and stuff.

If I look at Strive. What happened was that I wanted to fold the company (05.53) because after failing three products you don’t feel like the greatest entrepreneur in the world. Life sucked. I felt like a failure, I felt like I failed you, the team, the early investors, the angels, the team. I felt very beaten up. After speaking to my dad who is a mentor to me and an inspiration, I decided to fix the biggest problem I always had as an entrepreneur in tech , which is that I had no idea about coding.

I couldn’t code anything. I only put together excel stuff. That was my biggest coding project. That was what I knew about coding and was trying to be a CEO of a tech company without being able to code without previous product management experience. My only experience was as an investor. And that is clearly not the best way to succeed. So I started learning to code. After 5 months I looked back and realised part of me was learning to code and part was the entrepreneur Toby, evaluating the options.

If you go to Coursera and are a normal human being what you do is like it or not. If you are an entrepreneur you go through Coursera and you think ‘if i would build this I would do this this or that’. That is always the mindset of people who want to create things.

So after 5/6 months of experiencing the problem of learning to code online and trying various solutions and looking at the market I came to the conclusion there was an opportunity and if I look back it was a five month exploration of an idea from customer point of view that led me and Diego who was basically my mentor in this project to the insight. So we experienced both the problem and an insight to some extent and I think that’s why it’s going well. (08.06)

Stefano: My point is that you did not have any of those three sources of ideas at the beginning but you probably would not be where you are now if you had not started no matter what.

Tobia: That’s the other point. I think younger entrepreneurs have an advantage. If I look back, one of the things that made me anxious is ‘how do I explain this to my investors, friends, my mum. ..what happens to my life if I do that?’. As soon as we progress in life, I mean you know — I am 32 and it’s just a different feeling than when you’re 22. I think kids have the advantage that they just try things.

It’s something YC really taught us — we saw people come into YC with an idea, two days later pivoting and at the end of YC raising 5m dollars on paper for no reason. I am not saying this is right or wrong — just what is the reality. This team is called Digital Brain and these two kids who are probably 19 flew to Silicon Valley — lived on hackathon prize money for 4–5 months and just tried shit. They build stuff and try it out.

Now I’m not saying that’s the best way to do things but if you don’t get started then you don’t get started. It’s like going to the gym. You just have to get started and be ok with failing. (09.52)

Stefano: I wanted you to tell your version of it — of course there are a lot of different ways to build companies — but your story very much also speaks to what we believe at Founders. That you set out to start a company and then you get at it and you start one eventually. In our case more than one but I really love your story and I think it really exemplifies that spirit. It goes against the common knowledge that you need to have that ‘one something’ before starting- I mean if you don’t have it you will find it along the way.

You just mentioned YC — a famous place for startups to be - what is the most counter-intuitive thing you took from them and what did you take out you did not expect to take out that positively surprised you?

They think like butchers. In Italian you say macellaio — literally “the butcher”. I think they think like that: “how much money do you think you could make per year?” — that’s a simple question they may ask. They don’t want a complicated answer. They want: “I can have 50m users paying two dollars each = 100m dollars per year’. That’s it. Everything they do is very much with this spirit of extreme simplicity.

There is no over-structure, no over-intellectualising. It’s an attitude that is not the consultant attitude or the intellectual’s attitude — it’s the butcher’s attitude. If you take a butcher and teach him everything about tech he is more likely to become a partner at YC than someone else like a professor. They can think like a partner at YC. They are butchers. In a good way.

That was pretty comforting. Going in I thought I would be blown away by this intellectual greatness or something like that but no: they are actually just very practical people. That was refreshing. (12.42)

Stefano: You get to think about the basics right? How much money do you make how much money do you have? Is someone giving you money? Take it. I like it — you can of course intellectualise what you do but at the very beginning it boils down to being very simple.

Something else I think you can talk about that is interesting is that there is a company that is older and better known, if not for anything else then just size and age, that does a similar thing to you and people know it: Lambda School, which also went through YC. At demo day you were encouraged to say “we are Lambda School for Europe” — that was kind of your tag line and in the same batch was company saying “we are Lambda for South America”.

How has it changed your view about cloning and competition and doing ‘the same’ thing others do?

Do you know Brex? I think it’s called that because it’s Amex from Brazil. That is what they have built, they are two Brazilian kids. I have not seen their pitch but they are worth 3 billion dollars in 2 years or 3 years. They said we are building Amex for Brazil and it’s tech so Brex.

We are building Strive which is Lambda School for Europe. Now if you look at Brex of course it is not Amex. It has nothing to do with Amex. At that specific point in time, which was demo day and where you have two minutes to catch people’s attention, you have to say something that people understand immediately in one second. You do not have time to explain the overall vision. The easiest way for us to get the message to people who were interested was: ‘Lambda school for Europe’.

If you look under the hood of course we are not Lambda School for Europe. We are preaching deferred tuition models and pay only after you get hired but the reality is that Europe is much more complicated. We are looking at other monetisation strategies for the future and it’s going to look completely different to Lambda but the easiest way for us to say who we are in one minute was like that. That is why the butcher mentality matters.

If I was not or they were not really a butcher it would be like let’s find a way to say what you do without mentioning Lambda. Their strategy was the opposite: let’s mention Lambda it’s the easiest thing to do. (15.50)

Stefano: This goes back to a principle I wanted to talk about and there are so many good things Strive tells us about what we like in general and in this case it is again the principle: start easy — don’t worry too much. The fact you say you are ‘Lambda for Europe’ is just a starting point. You feel protected by the fact they are doing something proven, you get going and as you get going you’ll end up doing something that is not what they end up doing. I really like this idea that you don’t have to find something unique or intellectual or to find something at all, you just need to start.

Lasse, from the audience: What was the best thing about YC?
Tobia: Again getting back to my roots — I dropped out of college and started selling event tickets. That was my first real job. I was a club runner. That means you clean up and bring flyers here and there and sell tickets and I think that was one of the happiest times of my life and we got to organise incredible concerts and it was very fun but I was a very practical person because in the end I had to sell tickets. In the end my job was selling tickets.

After getting into tech I started reading books too much and I started over intellectualising everything which brought me a lot of anxiety and imposter syndrome. I think YC was kind of going back to my roots like, I am authorised to be a butcher in tech. I am finally authorised to be who I am, I don’t need to be an intellectual or ‘as smart’ as other people want to be and I just need to ‘sell tickets’ and now selling tickets for me is getting students in, teaching them, placing them into companies and collecting money. Repeating this process a million times. And that is it. (19.11)

Simon: there were some very good thoughts around the whole part of getting started. My question is about when you should stop. You’ve done it 2–3 times and one thing is about getting started and the other is about sticking it out and trying to survive the trough you are in.

Tobia: The reality is that unless you are working on a topic you know really well and change idea but stay in the same topic, I think 3–6 months. If it’s a web app and something you can test with a landing page and small ads and talking to 20 companies, if you can’t to it in 3–6 months you are toast anyway. Unless you are building a nuclear reactor. My feeling is spend 3–6 months, spend as little as possible, pay yourself as little as you can so you are hungry and don’t overspend. 3–6 months to validate an idea and then after that move on with no personal attachment and try to live the ego out of it. Try it three, four or 50 times, sooner or later you will hit something. And keep swinging.

About us

Founders is a startup studio. Together with exceptional entrepreneurs we build products and companies that radically improve how people and organisations work. Whether it’s a bank for freelancers, a way to kill the pain of doing expenses or reimagining life in cities, we are always on the lookout for opportunities to improve the way people work and live.

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Head of brand, community building & proper cuppas at Founders startup studio in Copenhagen. 🇬🇧🇩🇪🇩🇰