Every stage of company building is hard, but getting your company off the ground at the 0-1 stage brings unique challenges. Many founders face the journey alone without access to the right resources, capital, or advice from people who have done it before.

To address some of the questions above we gathered a group of 85 founders and builders at Atomic’s Future Founder Summit to compare notes and share their experiences on company building. Below is advice on getting through that critical early stage from two prolific builders, Atomic’s own founder and general partner Jack Abraham and Chris Lyons, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. We also heard from three Miami OGs about how Miami has transformed into a startup city over the past two years and what it’s like to build companies here. Read on for more.

Finding the right idea

The most important thing you need to do when starting a company it’s finding the right idea. But how do you go about doing that? Is there a process for identifying the best idea? A common trap people fall into is brainstorming ideas to start a company instead of identifying problems in the world and coming up with solutions to solve them. Observe what's broken, look for patterns, and then find the white spaces.

Sometimes a person’s skill set isn’t right for one idea, but if you take that same person from one company and plug them into another, the result can be transformative to accelerating that company. Assembling the right team around the right idea is paramount.

“You can fall in love with ideas, but it actually doesn’t matter unless it can scale to reach a massive number of consumers and businesses,” Jack said as he explained the process Atomic uses to test ideas before committing resources and capital to them. “Kill bad ideas quickly,” he advised. “It can be a slippery slope and suddenly you’ve been working on an average idea for 5 or 10 years of your life.”

Power of law of time

Time is a finite resource, it’s critical to allocate it with intent. “One hour can be worth more than all the other time you’ve spent in your entire life.” Jack explained. “It can be worth more than hours in a week, a month or year. Engineer time to increase your odds of having a power hour. You never know when that can happen.”

Sometimes it takes someone with an unconventional background to approach problems in a different way.

Chris Lyons went from a music producer to startup founder to his current role as investor where he founded the firm’s Cultural Leadership Fund designed to connect the world’s greatest cultural leaders with the best startups. He coined the term “shared genius” to describe how leaders in culture and in tech can learn from one another. Today Chris leads investments in some of the hottest startups (see: Yuga Labs and the Bored Apes franchise) that drive culture and venture returns, but he had an unconventional path to get there. Here’s some of his advice.

Create your own rules

Being a founder is one of the hardest things you’ll ever do. “You have to think of it as a journey not an end-game,” says Chris. “If you aim for the destination it seems impossible. Stay focused on getting to the next step because you’re going from 0 to 100 in a short period of time.”

Don’t get tripped up on established rules that seem written in stone. “If no one’s ever done it before it’s a perfect opportunity,” says Chris. “Good ideas look like bad ideas. You have to look at problems in a non-traditional way. Come up with the unique strategy that no one is thinking about to get to that next point.” This is what will help create the next billion dollar opportunity.

There’s always a move

Taking your company from idea to a high-growth business is never linear. There are ups, downs and everything in between.

As you’re continuing on your journey Chris has three pieces of advice for every founder. “There’s always a move,” he says. “Trust the secret that you have that no one else has. It always seems impossible until it’s done.. And if people think you’re crazy, you know you’re on the right track.”

Miami as a competitive advantage

By now, everyone has seen all the Twitter buzz on Miami. Founders often ask us, “What’s the deal with Miami? Is it really a good place to start a company?” We invited three Miami OGs to share their insider views on what it’s like to build here.

Tech and startups have been in Miami for years, but it’s exploded over the past two years. “Ten years ago if you said your tech company was headquartered in Miami, people looked at you like you were crazy, “ said Melissa Medina, co-founder and president of eMerge Americas, an organization she started to change that perception. “It was very difficult to evangelize Miami as a tech ecosystem and to hire talent.”

“The tech community was a very small group of people,” added Andrew Parker, founder and CEO of Miami unicorn, Papa. “There were about 25 of us building tech companies. I raised money for Papa from someone I met at CrossFit. None of my friends were in tech, it wasn’t really a thing.”

Today, building in Miami is a unique opportunity to be part of the city’s history-in-the-making. Miami’s was recently named as the #1 city in the US for tech job growth and tech worker migration and is poised to continue this growth momentum over the next several years.

Diversity breeds innovation

Diversity is clearly one of the biggest draws of Miami. “Miami has always been an open place for people from many diverse backgrounds who care about each other and are just trying to do what’s best for the world and their community,” said Andrew Parker. “People don’t get into arguments about your views, they’re trying to understand what your views are and that’s a really important thing. Miami was founded by women and that’s inspired a lot of who we are today,” he added.

“We reinvent ourselves constantly, we’re a very open place and we want people to feel welcome,” said Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine-Cava, also the city’s first woman Mayor.

“Miami’s DNA is an immigrant built, woman-founded city,” said Melissa Medina. “This is a place here to live, work, thrive, and build your company. The most exciting thing to me is that everyone can be an author in helping the next phase of Miami’s ecosystem.”

Miami is being built like a startup itself and requires the same things founders need to think about: moving quickly, learning from user feedback, and building a culture that embodies the right values. Going from startup to scale up is a hard-won journey for any builder, but we hope this advice will help along the way.