David Linhardt

Hi. I'm David Linhardt. I trained as a chemical engineer at Purdue, got an MBA at Harvard Business School, and spent the first part of my career inside big companies — Procter & Gamble, AT&T Wireless, Experian, Amazon. I was good at it; at AT&T I helped launch Digital One Rate, a $1.5B business, in ninety days. But I never felt at home in the corporate hierarchy, and I kept moving to smaller and smaller companies until I admitted I should be doing my own thing.

I struggled with the transition. I went from a corporate environment with endless resources to a business I started in my house with just $5K. I learned fast that a startup is NOT a smaller version of a big company. It's fundamentally different, and most of what worked before actively hurt me.

I've founded fourteen startups since — seven profitable, three exits, and more than $3B of enterprise value created along the way. Today I run InsightStudios, a startup studio applying the same Insight-Driven Iteration process we teach here to find product-market fit. I've lived the transition from employee to entrepreneur, and now I teach other founders how to make it with far less wreckage.

That's why FounderDojo is a program, not just software. The Workbench is the instrument; the coaching and the cohort are what make you actually run the loop. As I tell every founder: startups are easy — the hard part is your insistence on a particular outcome and your resistance to what is. In every cohort, I coach personally.