A look at one repeat founder’s frameworks for validating ideas — Pilot’s Waseem Daher

 So the place I think we wanted to start was to go back to the origin story of Pilot. And I think, the first three to six months before a company gets started and the three to six months after a company gets started is one of the most underexplored or, um, misunderstood parts of company creation.

And it's generally kind of glossed over. Somebody came up with an idea. They had, you know, some problem at their office and they left and they started a company, but there's, there's not a lot of fidelity in what that process is like and all the different little directions that you could potentially go.

And so I thought maybe as a jumping off point, you could kind of tell us the origin story of Pilot, maybe negative six months through six months and how the kind of different paths you went down and how you landed on the thing you were going to build in the way that you were going to build. Um, and maybe we could use that to get started.

 Yeah, absolutely. Um, so very interestingly, and I'll give you the long version and you can tell me kinda where you want to go deeper and where you don't. The story of Pilot is really quite intertwined with this story of me and my co-founders Jeff and Jessica. And to really understand that story, you have to go back not six months before the founding of the company, you have to go back something like, I don't know, like 10, 15 years before the founding of the company, which is that, Jeff, Jessica and I all met at MIT. We were also in computer science together, undergrad, and we were all in the computer club together. And so I knew them socially and we had taken classes together a long before we started working together. But right out of school, we started a company together called KSplice that did software updates without rebooting. I'm sure you've seen a pop-up it's like you must reboot to install new updates. And we all lived and worked in this like crappy row house in Cambridge, in central square. And the whole thing was extremely scrappy. We bootstrapped, it grew it to six figures in revenue, seven figures in revenue, Oracle acquired it.

And we were at Oracle for a year and a day to transition to the tech and then hit eject. And after that first company, literally the day after we left Oracle, we all got together again and said, we want to do another company. And so we met up, you know, in various people's apartments for the next two weeks, and then ultimately landed on building a group chat tool for business.

It was this company called Zulip. It was basically a Slack like product at a time when Slack was still making a mobile game. And I think we really nailed the market opportunity there based on pain we had ourselves, I would not give us an a-plus on execution though, in the sense that, I mean, we saw what Slack could be.

I think that was the potential for the thing we were targeting. All’s well that ends well, though, Dropbox acquired it. We were at Dropbox for about two years running product and engineering, and then left. And now to answer your very specific question, if we talked about the six months prior to Pilot, after leaving Dropbox, the thing I felt very strongly about was actually taking some time off to recharge.

And so for the six months prior to Pilot, I said, you know what? I'm not going to work. And I'm not even going to think about what the startup is going to be. I'm actively, actively not going to be searching for startup ideas. And so I took a big chunk of time to really just recharge. And I don't know, attend to all the things I had neglected while doing the previous companies or working at the acquirers of the previous companies.

So very, very specifically the six months prior to the beginning of this company, we're six months in which, not literally in that I did nothing, but where I did nothing that was intended to ultimately, you know, yield a startup idea. The time was spent basically visiting friends and family, going to the gym, sleeping eight hours a night, spending time with my wife.

And I just like, it was really just about kind of investing in myself. Fast forward a little bit after the end of that period. The thing that was interesting for us is that again, we knew we wanted to get the band back together. And so unlike, I think other entrepreneurs are unlike some other entrepreneurs, I already knew what the founding team was going to be.

And so the founders got together and we said, fine, what is it that we want to do? And I actually found this to be one of the most painful and unpleasant parts of starting a startup. And here's what I mean, which is in trying to figure out what to work on. There's a lot of time spent thinking and it's hard to go somewhere and just like sit in a room and like think for eight hours a day, it turns out that that's very difficult and it's also very demoralizing because.

Any concept that you come up with, there are a million reasons why it won't work. And those million reasons are very obvious to you. The, the conviction and belief that it will work in general, it's unlikely to work. So your brain you're generating these ideas in your brain is like, well, no, that, that idea sucks.

Like there's no way this thing is going to work because of XYZ. And there's sort of, no, there's no real way to make it go faster. Like you think about what are some spaces I'm excited about and maybe do a little research, but I found it very stressful and very demoralizing because there was not, the, the goal was sort of unclear.

The goal obviously is like, figure out what company we want to start, but there's sort of no real incremental steps along that path, or at least none that I was aware of. But the first, you know, the first several weeks of the company were getting together with my co-founders and saying, Okay, where, what spaces do we think are interesting?

What are problems we have that we think other people might have and going from there. One step deeper than that. Actually, I found much more engaging, which is when, when you have the outline of something that you think might be an idea, then the thing we did is sort of aggressively line up potential customer conversations.

We'd say, okay, if we are thinking about building a tool for mid-market HR teams, let's say, well, then let's go. And like find a bunch of people who run HR, at mid-market companies, and let's go and talk to them and let's say, Hey, tell us about what your top three priorities are, where your hair is most on fire, where you're spending your time, where, you know, there's a lot of pain that you wish someone could solve for you.

And that I found actually much more energizing, much more productive, because it was very focused. And you were getting this kind of feedback from the real world, as opposed to sort of trying to do the thought exercise in your own head with no real external input. And so basically having thought about this for a while, with our team and we sort of produced a short list of, oh, here's some spaces that we feel like we're kind of excited about.

Let's go talk to lots of people in each of those spaces to understand, not do you like my idea to instead ask what are your actual problems? What are your top three hair on fire problems? And let's see if there are any commonalities there. Let's see if there are any themes that are emerge. And let's see if we feel like we're the team that is well suited to tackle one of those top three priorities for these folks. And so that process allowed us to sort of continue to winnow down the set of possibilities to tackle until we got to a pretty short list. And then from there, the reality is like at some point you just kind of have to make the call, like maybe we should have, or maybe we could have built mid-market HR software and built a very successful business doing that.

I mean, my suspicion is actually probably we could've. But you can't run three startups in parallel. You sort of have to say, well, this is the bet we're going to make. And we're going to be thoughtful about it. If it seems like it's working great, we'll continue to invest. And if it seems like it's not working well, we, of course we can revisit, but we sort of have to plant the flag and say, this is the direction we're going in.

Let's really put all of our fire power, all of our bandwidth behind it and see what a yields 

  I find it interesting that you managed to find a, a founding team that not only really works exceptionally well together, but over multiple companies worked well together and worked so well together that it was the constraining factor.

That it started with, these are the people that I want to work with. And then let's go find an idea, which I think on average is fraught with all sorts of issues, right? Because it's, for example, it's hard enough to find an idea. So now you need to find a exceptional idea, an exceptional solution that also maps to all three, then all three founders want to work with.

So, so it sort of, it, it, it creates even more complexity. And so I guess I'm interested. What is it about the founding team, the makeup of the team, the way that you behave, that you think works and has this level of longevity and worked so well that you would in many ways, create another hurdle for yourself in building a successful or landing, I should say, on a successful idea.

 Sure, sure. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting because the question in some ways is like, what is the limiting agent or what is the scarce resource? That causes your business not to succeed. And I think, or maybe you said another way, what are the, what are the likely causes of death for your company in the early days?

And I think one of the most likely ones is usually founder drama, founder tension, an inability for the founding team who worked together. 

And so actually being able to solve for that from the get-go I think is very valuable in increasing the probability or the likelihood of success of the company. The other aspect for me is that, and I tried to be very principled about this for the third company in a way that I really was not in the. In the previous companies is I really sat down and said, look, what actually makes me happy?

What are the things I enjoy about doing a company? And how do I make sure that the next company that we do has those attributes and far and away, the number one thing for me was actually working with smart, talented people who challenged me to do my best work every day. And that for me, the satisfaction I derive from the company is, is largely, actually about the satisfaction of working with the team that we work with.

And so being able to check that box or make sure that I was going to have that it's scratched by working with a team that I knew I knew and liked and trusted, where there was strong, you know, strong, shared context, strong mutual trust was really, really important and really valuable. And there, the related idea, again, here is people think that the startup is actually is very much about the idea, but the idea in some ways is the most disposable or flexible part of the company.

You may conclude. After your first six months of working on the idea that the idea's wrong and that people actually don't want this thing and that maybe there's something adjacent that they do want, or maybe there isn't, but what you're left with, if you have to make that choices, you're left with the team.

So I would contend actually that the team is much, much more important than the idea. And that in particular, if you had to fix one, if you had to constrain one, I would rather pick the team and then tackle the idea because I would basically work on anything with, you know, with my co-founders and with the team that we've assembled.

I happened to be excited about the thing we're working on, but I think there probably a ton of other companies that we could do together. And I would, I would be equally happy about it. And you sort of see that in our track record, this is the third company we've done. These companies have all been very, very different, actually

 So if you reverse engineer, why the team works so well together? what do you think the answer is there? Or, you know, the inverse of that would be a co-founding team blows apart after two years. And they point out the reasons why I think it's, it's not well understood or well discussed when, when co-founding teams have an incredibly successful dynamic, the why behind it.

And, and I wondered if it sort of anything comes to mind for you.

 Sure. Well first and just to be very transparent, like, look, I like and get along with Jeff and Jessica very well. It's not always, you know, smiles and roses and unicorns or whatever. Like there there's always tension. There is, but it's, I think it's like a healthy, constructive tension. And I think in any long term relationship, whether it's your, you know, close personal friends or your spouse or whatever, it's not like you can never fight.

We certainly do. But I think the thing that the through line that exists here, I think the undercurrents that have allowed it to work or. Strong mutual trust and yeah, a strong mutual trust and respect. And what I mean by that is Jeff, Jessica, and I each have big non-overlapping areas of ownership and we trust one another to execute well in those areas of ownership.

So there's very little toe stepping. There's very little getting up in each other's businesses. I think piece one. And that's possible because we have had a track record of working well together. And that I know that if Jeff or Jessica says, I'm going to do X, Y, Z, I know that they'll do it. And vice versa.

So there's, there's that shared trust. The second is what I would, I think about it as having like an extremely detailed mental simulator of the other people. And I could tell you, I think with 95% confidence, what Jeff or Jessica would do or think in any given situation and vice versa. And the power of that is actually that I know, and they know when something is going to be controversial.

And when the three of us should actually discuss it as opposed to, oh, this is a thing that is fine. If I just like go do and again, what is the value of that? The value of that again, is really about that kind of shared trust, shared respect. Like if there's a thing that is actually important and the three of us should talk about it, the three of us will talk about it.

I don't think that like you're off building your own fiefdom or you're going to go do something sneaky that isn't your interest in not my interest. So I think that's the other piece that kind of makes it work. And then the third is I'm just a much more tactical piece and this one is less about the co-founder relationship, but it's a product of the co-founder relationship.

And the fact that we've done this a bunch of times before, is that we can focus more of our mental energy on making the company successful, as opposed to spending that time debugging the founder relationship.

  so switching back to the process of landing on the idea for Pilot, I was interested in maybe having you talk about what you heard from customers, and you talked a little bit about how you approach those conversations, which you could expand on maybe, maybe slightly, but what you heard in that discovery phase that gave you conviction, that, that this is what you wanted to go work on.

And, um, how your point of view on, on a potential solution fit into landing on this as the company we want to build, meaning as, as a few minutes ago, you were talking about exploration. And following some different threads. You are very problem-oriented, but you didn't talk about the potential way you thought about solving a specific problem.

so what was the, the internal informal or formal algorithm that got you to land on this specific problem versus another, you know, you heard X from someone or Y from customers where you could have built an entirely different company. 

 So, you know, I think there's, um, there's like a framework of the heart and a framework of the head on this. And let's talk a little bit more about, I think the, the rational pieces event, which are, I think classically what some investors say is the only problem you can't fix is the problem of market size.

And I think what's interesting is actually most folks intuition about how big a market is or how big a problem is, is quite off, including ourselves in our very first company. You know, the way we landed on the problem for the first company is we were like, well, we have this tack, it happens to have a problem.

We have like, let's go do it. Surely we'll figure it out. We were not particularly thoughtful about how big could this be. If it's phenomenally successful, how many people have this problem? How much pain is there, et cetera. And so for me, I like to ask three questions about a business that I'm evaluating or an opportunity I'm evaluating.

And this is principally geared towards like a business to business product. But I think the spirit of it applies generally. And those three questions are basically, is this a niche problem or a general purpose problem? In other words, how many people or how many businesses have the problem? Question number two is, is this a nice-to-have or a need-to-have? Are people's hair really on fire about this?

And the third question is how much does it cost? And the reason that how much does it cost matters is it implies actually a lot about the business. It indicates how much pain there is, because if there's a lot of pain there should be willingness to pay, but it actually also specifies a lot about how the business is going to operate. Is it going to have to be this freemium self-serve online, only spread virally, product led growth motion.

Is it something that's going to be very marketing driven? Is it going to be a really classic B2B enterprise sale and having a good sense of, well, as a nitro general purpose, is it a nice to have, or need to have and how expensive it is? You basically multiply those numbers. And then You're like, oh, okay.

This is approximately kind of how big the opportunity is. And so one of the things we were definitely orienting around is we want to tackle a problem where the opportunity size and the total addressable market was really, really large. And the reason we want to do that is because look, if you're going to go to the work of building a company, why would you not build a company that has the potential to have huge impact?

That was sort of the, the calculus of the head. And I think the calculus of the heart, one of the things that, you know, as you go around and talking to people about is this pain that you have, like, tell me about, you know, what your top three problems are one shortcut for doing that as well. What are problems you've had?

Like you can ask yourself those questions and you're, you're allowed to ask yourself those questions. If there are lots of people like you, if you're a total weirdo and like your needs are totally different than everyone else, that's actually probably not a very good strategy in the sense that it's not going to be generalizable into something that ultimately serves a larger market.

But one of the things we liked about the problem specifically that we landed on was we had a deep and personal connection to it. It was a problem that we had in our previous ventures. It was a problem that for me personally, like my relatives who were all small business owners in Ohio also had very personally and that, you know, I, I saw firsthand and I like when there's a strong kind of founder problem fit or a strong founder problem fit narrative, I don't think it is required.

I think you can definitely build a large successful business without that. In other words, I think we probably would have built a very successful enterprise HR business or whatever it happens to be, even though maybe there's not an obvious. Narrative for why we were the right team to build the enterprise HR thing for pilot, there is an extremely strong narrative about why this was the right team for the problem.

And I think that was a nice icing on the cake. I think the other thing just to say it directly too, is I think sometimes the narrative is actually not that obvious and might become more clear in retrospect, like thinking about it more on a spin market, HR thing, probably the narrative would have been a little bit counterfactual, a little bit revisionist would have been like, you know, when we were at these big companies, when we were at Oracle and we were at Dropbox, we saw that the, you know, people ops problem was X, Y, Z.

And you know, it was very painful for us and therefore we were motivated to go fix it. So it was not so far out of left field that like, we were the wrong team to work on it. It was like adjacent, I think for the, the place we landed, one of the things that took it from good to great was that there was this very visceral personal connection for it.

 You're sort of touching on this as you've been explaining the backstory, but could you put a finer point on your, your thesis as to why this company, is already much larger, but has the chance to, to really be absolutely massive sort of transcended company where your first two attempts were? Not that.

 It's, it's an interesting question. one of the things that's interesting about the second company is actually that the thesis was a, was a thesis capable of being a large, iconic enduring public company. In the sense that slack basically had the same thesis that Zulip had.

Now, they executed better on it. They executed differently on it and that, and those differences happen to yield a much, much better result. But I think we, we picked the right target in our previous venture in that. I think it had the chance to be a giant iconic and during public company had we operated it differently, but yes.

What is the sort of, what is the story or what is the narrative for why the opportunity is so great at pilot? Well, first of all, like what is pilot and what is the thesis of pilot? Pilot is your external finance team. We take care of your bookkeeping, your tax prep, your budgeting, your forecasting, CFO services, et cetera.

And the way we do it is that you're paired with your dedicated account manager. Who's a full-time employee. In our US-based offices in San Francisco or in Nashville. And there it's a really white glove experience where we're going to help out and take care of all this stuff for you. And under the hood, the way we do it is we have an engineering team and the engineering team has a built what you should think of.

There's the iron man suit for our account managers. So then the pilot thesis is really people doing what people do best and softer. What software does best working together will yield a result that.

is higher quality, more, reliable, more consistent, more accurate than what you could get. If someone just did, it entirely by hand.

And the reason that we have such that this has the opportunity to be an iconic and entering business is if you go back to my framework of the three questions that I asked for every company I evaluate, well, is this a niche thing or is it a general purpose thing? Well, literally every business in the world has to deal with it's accounting.

And is it a nice to have, or a need to have? Well, it's basically legally required. That's about as need to have, as you can get. It's not, this is not quite true, but it's, it's almost like if you don't buy pilot, you'll go to jail. Like that's pretty neat to have. And then the third question is, well, how expensive is it?

Well, interestingly, we're not selling you accounting software. We are selling you. We will take care of this stuff for you. And the consequences of that end-to-end ownership is the alternative to hiring pilot, hiring, you know, the local provider whose offices downtown, and maybe show up with a shoe box of receipts and the landscaper, the, the nature of that provider is that they're fairly excited.

It's skilled human labor at someone who you know, is studied and has a lot of expertise. And they'll charge you some number of hundreds of dollars per hour, and they'll work on your stuff. For several hours a month. And the consequence of that is actually, it's not a cheap transaction, it's fairly expensive.

And so the, the consequence of all those, those three things, again, you do that multiplication and what you get out of the other side is that the market size is really enormous. And this is also validated by the kind of top-down math on this, where something like $60 billion a year are spent every year in the U S on SMB bookkeeping and accounting.

That's SMB only U S only 60 billion. So you could build a large economy, enduring public company doing nothing, but this bookkeeping accounting work. Now, I think the thing that's really interesting about pilot is that the ultimate opportunity is not, we do your accounting. And in fact, if you talk to our customers, they don't want to buy accounting from us though.

I mean, in some ways, obviously they do want to buy accounting from us and that, that, that's what they buy from us. What they would really love to buy from us if we could sell it to them is pilot runs my back office. So I can focus on running my company, because if you look at any business owner, whether it's the tech startup founder, or the coffee shop or the doctor's office, or the florist or whatever it happens to be, you started your company because there was something you wanted to do in the world.

And one of the things that you pretty rapidly discover when you're actually running this company is, Hmm. There's a lot of back office stuff I need to do. And it's important. It's tedious. It's not your area of expertise. You don't particularly want it to be your area of expertise. Like you want to focus on the reason you started the company in the first place.

And so the longer term, like the 20 year vision for pilot is, well, if we could do all of that stuff for you and you could focus on running your business, we could do it more accurately and more efficiently, more scalably, more painlessly. And you have a greater chance of making your business successful because you can focus on those unique areas of high leverage for you.

And now if you apply that same framework, well, what is the opportunity size? If you're really running the back office, if you're doing accounting and legal and lending and insurance and HR and it, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, for every business out there. Well, very, very clearly. That's not the multi-billion dollar business.

That's the trillion dollar. Yeah. And I think the business has these sort of things. Amazon-like attributes in a way. And in two ways, one is like Amazon, okay, you first they're selling books. Then they sold CDs and they sold books and CDs and MP3s. And now you can buy literally anything you want an Amazon Amazon can provide for almost every aspect of the consumer's life.

I think of related Amazon services. If you look at something like Amazon web services, like the insight of AWS was look, your engineers could be Spending their time running your data infrastructure, or you can host it in the cloud and have Amazon run your infrastructure so that your engineers can focus on actually building the application.

And I think similarly, the pitch for pilot is could you hire someone to stitch together a bunch of your back office stuff like, yeah, you could, or you could hire us to do it. And the advantage of hiring us to do it is that we can do it more scalably, more reliably, only more consistently, more accurately with capabilities that are simply not possible if you were to just do this yourself.

And so if you, if you kind of look at the vision even more expansively, really the opportunity here is that is an opportunity that is in the trillions of dollars, not billions of dollars. And that, and the question for pilot is not, is the market large enough? The question is really well. Can we actually deliver a product that is so good that our customers love it?

That they refer it to their friends and fellow business owners. And can we continue to grow at the rates we'd like to grow, to actually bring that vision to the world?

 did you have this clarity of thought when you landed on we're going to go build this company or has this opened up in front of you in the past few years of building

 the honest answer is I don't know, which is, here's what I would say. You know, I should do go back and check my notes. Definitely. The, one of the critical insights when we were first starting the company, it was this idea of we're not going to sell you accounting software, that we're going to be people doing what people to bass Salvadoran what's offered as best that we're going to own the problem end to end, and that there is real power in owning the problem at hand.

So that I'm positive was there on day one. I think the notion that there was more than just the accounting. Yes. I think had occurred to us in the sense that. At the very beginning of the company, all we do is bookkeeping. We didn't even do tax preparation. And one of the things our early customers told us was, Hey, it's great that you do bookkeeping.

You also do my taxes because I have This problem. And it's a huge pain. Like I would love for some mistake, that's on my plate for me. So I think we knew certainly the vision of like, let's run your financial back office was clear to us. I think from the outset was the fact that there would be such strong customer pull into everything else obvious to us on day one, probably not.

But I think it, it became clear pretty quickly in the sense that our customers were really beating down our doors, asking for it. And we still get this all the time where, I remember in the very early days a customer called us up and they said, Hey, look, one of my employees is about to have a kid.

What should my parental leave policy be? And that really struck me because. You know, these customers are also buying, you know, Expensify or, you know, some other piece of software that's designed for the back office, but I'm sure that no one is calling up those companies and asking what should my parental leave policy be.

But the reason they're asking us is because we have this unique and powerful high trust human relationship with them, which is again, when you work with pilot, you're paired with that dedicated account manager who knows you, who knows your industry, you know, their name, you correspond with them. And the consequence of that is extremely powerful.

And I think that was known to us quite early on

 This might be a great place to spend a little bit more time on how you landed on man woman plus machine versus accounting software and the area that I'm really excited to to get your thoughts on is what you did to make this work, because it's been very in Vogue for call it the past five to seven years, uh, to do something that's more full stack where you're buying the service, if you will, as opposed to a piece of software and the amount of companies who have gone down this path and raised a tremendous amount of money and then not worked is extraordinary.

Um, and, and, and as I've spent a lot of time, you know, at a high level sort of studying this, I think a lot of it comes down to, to sort of one of two parts. One is that the original pitch is it's going to be human plus machine. And over time it's going to be a heck of a lot more machine and very little human and fast forward four years that doesn't pan out.

It's actually harder to, to create the software infrastructure, to provide a lot more leverage. The second is that as you start to build, uh, you realize that it's actually harder to, uh, to have more and more things automated. So you hire more and more people. And then generally speaking, quality goes down and then you have a tremendous amount of churn. 

And, uh, and you seem to have done something really special. And so I'm, I'm curious both when you thought what you had a very clear understanding of the problem, lot of, a lot of pain, personal pain market pain in the interviews you did. And then you said, okay, well, how do we want to solve this? And you became quite opinionated that it was human plus machine, and then you made that actually work.

And so it would be great to learn more about that sort of path, how you landed on it, and maybe any primitives or principles that you think you got, right. That I'd argue that most everyone, nearly every other company got wrong.

 Yeah. I mean, you're, you're definitely right that this idea of kind of tech enabled services is quite in Vogue and the track record of businesses kind of in this, in this space has actually not been phenomenal. And so let's talk about the three points you imagined would just like.

Well, why did we decide to get on this red specifically and maybe what are we doing differently? And I think the, the risks you identified are exactly right. So, okay. First, why did we decide to go down this path as opposed to a path and making pure software? Well, I think it's really because we want to solve the actual problem and the actual problem That the business owner has is not, I want to buy accounting software, but the problem the business owner has, is I want this stuff to be taken care of.

So I can focus on running my company. And in some ways the, the, the power of their relationship comes from owning the problem end to end. And this is not a perfect, this is not a perfect example, but if you look at something like Uber, Uber, I would have sold ride hailing software to taxi companies, but actually as it turns out as much more powerful to own the customer relationship by actually providing the service end to end.

Now, the difference between something like an Uber and something like a pilot is. Uber is a marketplace. Whereas with pilot, all of our folks are full-time employees of ours. We supply the quote unquote supply side of the marketplace. There is no marketplace. We are simply providing the service that we provide and we could talk at length about why that's the case.

Okay. So then the question, I think the risk of any of these tech enabled services business shapes is, well, is it actually tech enabled or are you really just building a services company? And I think the most ungated metric that captures that is gross margin, which is, you know, what do people pay for the service and what does it cost you to provide the service?

And one of the things we were very opinionated on from day one was that we were going to track this hawkishly and that the solution for improving margin had to be the computer actually does more of the work. In other words, that we build software tools. That actually make life easier or faster or more accurate for our internal team.

Today’s episode is with Waseem Daher, co-founder and CEO of Pilot. Prior to Pilot, Waseem co-founded Ksplice, which was acquired by Oracle in 2011 and Zulip, which was acquired by Dropbox in 2014. In this conversation, he pays particular attention to Pilot’s first year — including validating the idea, choosing an ICP, and outlining the product roadmap for a company that can go the distance.

A look at one repeat founder’s frameworks for validating ideas — Pilot’s Waseem Daher

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