Minus One Mission Before Startup: Gokul Rajaram’s Playbook for Founders
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Dec 11, 2025 
Gokul Rajaram, an esteemed operator and investor with a legacy at Google, Meta, and DoorDash, shares invaluable insights for founders. He emphasizes the importance of passion and personal connection in choosing missions, highlighting the need to truly understand customers by working within their environments. The conversation also explores how unstructured time can foster creativity, the growing role of AI in startups, and the necessity for multidisciplinary founding teams in this new tech landscape. Gokul calls for deep curiosity among founders to drive innovation.
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Go Native With Customer Research
- Go work a week or two inside the customer’s environment to truly feel their pain before building B2B products.
- Use immersive, go-native research rather than surface interviews to shape product decisions.
Elicit Problems With User Storytelling
- Use story-based interviews to surface real user problems instead of asking for solutions.
- Ask people to recount the last time they did the task and probe the decision points in that story.
Figma's Early Demo Revealed Obsession
- Gokul met Dylan Field when Dylan demoed a fast Photoshop-like app in the browser that immediately impressed him.
- The demo revealed Dylan's deep obsession with design and hinted at the future of Figma.