What Should a Young Founder Optimize for?

Pooja Brown tells a young founder to optimize for the learning. She says it is a really hard time to start something new, the space is messy, and founder journeys are hard. Things change so fast every week and every month, and what is true in March is not true in September.

Noah Labhart asks what she would tell a young entrepreneur on a plane who has just built the next big thing. Pooja Brown says the founder should meet enough real problems to hold a strong conviction that the product solves the problem. When she moved from founder to Tribe AI, she chose the place where she would learn the most and the fastest. Sometimes the answer is your own company. Sometimes the answer is going where people and problems give the most exposure. At Tribe AI she sees many industries and every frontier model at once, and she learns more in a month than she would in a year in one product. She also says to get close to the problem and sit with the people who do the work before calling the idea the next big thing, and before building anything. Being right about the future is not enough. She was building agents in 2009, 15 years early. The idea was right and the tech was not there. She says to build what exists today and solve outcomes.