By Tanuj Saraf | 04 December 2024
It was a warm summer afternoon in 2008, the kind of day when time feels like it’s lazily stretching out. We had just moved to a new house, not far from my childhood home. That afternoon, as I returned from school, my eyes caught something peculiar on the kitchen balcony — a chair-like structure draped under a cloth. “Mummy, what’s this?” I asked, curiosity bubbling over.
But I didn’t wait for her answer. I couldn’t. I had to know. I pulled off the cover with dramatic flair, fully expecting something extraordinary. Beneath it was… a Singer sewing machine. Foot-operated, no less. My initial excitement evaporated in seconds.
But as I sat at the dining table for lunch, the disappointment didn’t entirely push the image of that machine out of my mind. Something about its foot pedal and the heavy iron wheel spinning so smoothly nagged at me. Back then, I had just gotten my first taste of unrestricted internet access and was obsessing over concepts like magnetic fields. Our daily 6-10 hour power cuts added another ingredient to my simmering thoughts. What if that spinning wheel could be more than a wheel?
I imagined magnets carefully placed around the wheel, each pulling the next in perfect sequence — a perpetual motion machine that could end power cuts for good. World-changing stuff! Physics, of course, had other plans.
It’s funny to look back on these moments — when you don’t know the limits of the world yet, and you’re bursting with ideas that might just change everything. And that’s the thing about early-stage founders: they don’t start as leaders. They start as tinkerers, obsessives, and dreamers with unproven potential.
We’re not looking for polished track records or guaranteed successes. Those are products of time and refinement. Instead, we seek the sparks of something raw — the insatiable curiosity and drive to take things apart and rebuild them better.
Think about Elon Musk in his early days, not as the larger-than-life innovator of Tesla and SpaceX, but as the kid teaching himself computer programming and selling a video game at 12. Or Steve Jobs before he was a visionary CEO, fiddling with circuits in a garage. Or Sara Blakely, who started Spanx with no background in fashion but an idea she couldn’t let go.
Their greatness wasn’t obvious from the start. What set them apart was their willingness to dive into the unknown, to question everything, and to experiment relentlessly.
For an early-stage founder, tinkering is no longer a hobby — it’s survival. It’s how they find gaps others overlook, ask questions no one else is asking, and figure out answers that don’t exist yet. It’s also how they navigate the inevitable missteps, because failure for them isn’t final; it’s just feedback.
These tinkerers haven’t yet built empires or proven themselves as leaders. But they show signs of something more important — a mindset of learning and adapting. They see problems not as barriers but as puzzles to solve, and every attempt, successful or not, is part of their growth.
When we evaluate early-stage founders, we’re not looking for the finished product. We look for the ones whose hands are already dirty, whose curiosity keeps them awake at night, and whose obsession with solving the unknown is contagious.
These aren’t leaders yet. But they are the ones who have the mindset to become one. Because in the world of startups, success isn’t handed to you — it’s built, one experiment at a time.