My dad told me my life would change when I became a father. I smiled, nodded, thanked him for the wisdom and had absolutely no idea what he meant until my son arrived.
There is no amount of reading or preparing that gets you there – you only understand it by living it.
Founding a company is exactly the same. I’ve spent time in environments that demand everything from you – particularly rowing for Team GB at the Olympics – and I still walked into building Navigator without truly grasping what it would ask of me.
You can talk to founders and study the frameworks but none of it fully lands until you’re the one making the calls and discovering at close range how to carry the weight and what you’re actually made of. It becomes apparent that the gap between knowing something intellectually and understanding it in your bones is wider than most people realise.
Here’s what I was least prepared for, though, and it isn’t what most people would expect. It wasn’t the difficulty, the pressure, the sleepless nights or even the moments where the path forward wasn’t clear. All of that I had braced myself for, at least in theory. What I genuinely wasn’t ready for was the generosity.
The number of people who showed up and wanted me to win – not in a polite and passive way but in a way that translated into their time, their expertise, their belief, their money – was something I could not have anticipated.
People with no obvious stake in my success went out of their way to open doors. Experienced operators sat down with me and shared hard-won knowledge they had spent years accumulating, freely and without conditions. I use the word humbling, and I mean it – though I’m aware it gets said so often it has started to lose its weight.
I think elite sport had, in some ways, given me a slightly skewed picture of how the world works. Rowing at the highest level is fundamentally competitive and you are always measuring yourself against others, always aware of the gap between where you are and where you need to be. It conditions you to see the world through a particular lens.
What founding Navigator showed me is that the business world – or at least the parts of it I’ve had the good fortune to move through – operates with a different and more generous logic than I had expected. People remember what it felt like to be starting out and many of them go out of their way to make it fractionally easier for the next person.
The only constant in a founder’s week is that nothing stays constant
What I’d say to any founder reading this is that the version of the journey you have in your head before you start is going to be wrong in ways you can’t predict. Some of those surprises will be brutal but some of them will stop you in your tracks for entirely different reasons.
Plan for the hard parts, build your resilience, tighten your circle and make peace with the fact that uncertainty is the permanent backdrop to all of this. But leave some room to be caught off guard by the good things too because they are there – and they are more plentiful than the prevailing narrative around founding a company tends to suggest.
Nobody told me that part, I wish they had.