The Startup Happiness Formula — This 3X Founder Shares His Approach to Figuring Out What to Build Next

Waseem Daher has proven his startup bona fides. His first two startups snagged successful exits (KSplice acquired by Oracle and Zulip acquired by Dropbox). His current startup, Pilot, recently nabbed unicorn status. And he's managed to stick together with his two co-founders, Jessica McKellar and Jeff Arnold, through the turbulence of all three companies.

But if you ask what's different about the third time around, Daher's answer might surprise you — he leaned on a happiness framework in the earliest days of building the company. “Since we intended to spend years or decades building our next business, I wanted to make sure I was going to enjoy the ride,” he says.

More specifically, the happiness framework relies on two key components: working with smart and talented people and making a product people want. It sounds simple enough — who doesn’t want to work with other sharp leaders or build something that’s useful? But as a Silicon Valley veteran, Daher has found that these priorities often begin to slip along the path of startup-building.

In this exclusive interview, Daher shares his tips for keeping this happiness quotient in the forefront along each step of this 0 to 1 journey. He takes us through each element of Pilot’s first-year founding story — from how the co-founders got together, to how they approached ideation and problem selection, to how they sharpened their product vision and later expanded from their initial wedge.

Today’s article is a must-read for founders and those who have goals to start a company someday. Product folks also won’t want to miss learning from Daher’s frameworks honed over the course of building three successful companies.

As always, thanks for reading and sharing!

-The Review editors

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