David Linhardt

Hi. I'm David Linhardt. I started my career at big companies — Amazon, P&G and other Fortune 500 companies. I was successful and created billions in enterprise value, but I never felt at home in the corporate hierarchy. I kept moving to smaller and smaller companies until I finally 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 didn't work when I was on my own.

I made a lot of mistakes but I did enough things right that my first startup was profitable after three months. I kept finding new problems and solved them with new products, which turned into new startups. I created five profitable startups in a row with just $5K of total invested capital. Looking back from that experience, I started to see the patterns of what worked and what didn't, which created the Insight-Driven Iteration method.

I've built 14 startups in total and I just keep going. I build them at my startup studio, InsightStudios. I continue to find new problems that Customers care about and solve them with technology. I follow the same process I teach to others at FounderDojo as I continue to be both a Sensei and startup operator.