Before you run these exercises
Chapter 3 reframes what "team" means at the earliest stage — and the answer is probably not what you're thinking. There's a specific way the best early companies are structured that has nothing to do with org charts or headcount, and understanding it changes how you spend the next six months before you raise.
The chapter also covers something most founders get badly wrong about building their network — and offers a concrete, repeatable system for fixing it. One of the exercises below is taken almost directly from a suggestion the book makes about using AI. It's one of the few places the book names the tool explicitly.
The chapter opens with a story about someone who built one of the most influential networks in venture starting from nothing — no connections, no credentials. The mechanism wasn't charm or luck. Read the chapter to find out what it was, then use this exercise to build your version of it.
Most founders underestimate how accessible people are when you approach them as a student rather than a pitcher. The chapter calls this "borrowed credibility" — you don't need an audience of your own because the person you interview has one. AI makes the preparation effortless enough that the only remaining excuse for not doing this is inertia.
Claude can search the web — ask it to find real people active in your space right now.
Before you start doing your own interviews, there's a faster first step: hundreds of founders in your space and comparable spaces have already been interviewed — on podcasts, in newsletters, at conferences. They've explained what they got right, what they got wrong, what they wish they'd known earlier, and what the pattern is for companies that made it. That knowledge is sitting in transcripts and YouTube videos, largely unread.
NotebookLM (notebook.google.com) is Google's research tool that lets you upload a collection of documents — podcast transcripts, interview articles, investor memos, blog posts — and then have a genuine conversation with all of them at once. You can ask it to find patterns across 20 founder interviews, pull out what the successful ones had in common, or surface the insights that seem to generalize to your specific situation today. It's the kind of synthesis that used to take weeks of careful reading compressed into an afternoon.
The output isn't just research — it's a founder playbook built from people who've actually done it in adjacent territory.
The Heartbeat Email is one of the most practical, underused tools in this book. The premise: a short, warm, personal update sent to your network on a regular cadence — monthly or quarterly — that makes you memorable as a full human being, not just a LinkedIn title. The book is specific about what goes in it: a professional update, something personal, a reflection, and a hook.
The failure mode is sending something that sounds like a corporate newsletter. Claude's job here is to make it sound exactly like you — and to hold the format without letting it get stiff.
The book explicitly calls out AI for this exercise — one of the few places it names the tool directly. It's in Chapter 3. Read that section, then run this prompt.
Most co-founder relationships break down not because of bad intentions but because of unexamined assumptions — about who makes what decisions, about what "fair" looks like when one person is more technical, about what happens when one person wants to sell and the other doesn't. The time to surface these is during the trial, not two years in when you're stuck.
The chapter has a specific framework for when to hire that most founders get completely backwards — one that changes how you think about the whole timeline. Read that section in Chapter 3, then use this prompt to apply it.
AI can help you design the full blueprint before you've made a single hire.
The "Board Before the Board" is one of the most useful concepts in the chapter — a lightweight monthly meeting with three trusted people before you have real investors or a formal board. The three personas the book describes: the Business Modeler (creative with numbers, full of ideas that actually pencil out), the Insider (voice of your customer in the room, knows the history of attempts in this space), and the Lifeline (your honest friend who calls out your bullshit while also being in your corner).
Most founders skip this because they don't want accountability before they have to have it. That's exactly backwards. The pre-board is where you catch the mistakes before they compound. Use Claude to find your candidates and draft the structure.
The pre-board meeting agenda is a recurring structured document — the same sections filled out fresh each month, with a history you can look back on. That's exactly what Notion is built for. Notion AI can scaffold the whole template in about 30 seconds. No app to build, no setup friction, and it lives where you probably already do your writing.
- Open Notion, create a new page, and click the AI button or type /ai to open Notion AI.
- Give it this prompt:
- Once Notion generates the template, click "Turn into template" so you can duplicate it each month with one click. Each new month gets its own page; the parent page becomes your archive.
- Share the page with your three pre-board members before each meeting. The discipline of filling it out is half the value — it forces you to articulate what you've actually done versus what you planned to do.
Chapter 3 is ultimately about one thing: you cannot build this alone, and the sooner you start acting like that's true, the faster everything moves. The parade doesn't assemble itself — you have to start walking and invite people to join.
Before you move on, you should have three things in motion: some version of a curiosity content practice (even just one interview scheduled), a heartbeat email drafted or sent, and a pre-board in place or at least three names identified for the three roles. The co-founder alignment questionnaire and the hiring blueprint are tools to use when the moment is right — but having them ready before you need them is the whole point.
One more thing worth repeating from the chapter: don't pre-reject yourself. You don't know where someone is in their career. The worst they can say is no. And even the no's build the funnel.