Founder

For the few people that don't know you, Harman is the founder and CEO of one of the industry's most consequential tech companies and one of the most valuable and fastest growing companies as well.

And we're going to talk about all that, Canary Technologies.

The tagline of our podcast, the Boardroom Reboot, is CEOs, Founders, and Rebels.

Now, we know that you're the founder and CEO of Canary, but are you also a rebel?

Yeah, you know, I'd say two lenses for that.

Based in the Taipei office, I'm the co-director for the McKinsey Center for CEO Excellence and also a core part of the book team.

In this episode, I am speaking to Cheryl Lim, one of the co-authors of Shapers and Founders, The Untold Stories of Asia's Owner-CEOs.

Cheryl is a partner in our Kuala Lumpur office.

A very warm welcome, Cheryl.

But it was something like that.

This is an opening scene in Arthur Herman's wonderful new book, Founders Fire, from 1776 to right now.

The idea of the founding of the nation, also meaning the founding of the corporations that make the nation strong.

Arthur, the scene is so suggestive.

And that is he doesn't, you know, declaim from the platform or from his chair that, about why it's important to have a new constitution.

What he does is he just gently, quietly guides the agenda, guides the debate in a direction in which it becomes more and more obvious to all of the assembled delegates there in Philadelphia in 1787, that, yeah, we do need a new kind of founding, a founding of a new way of thinking about how we preserve our independence as a unity, as a unified government, as a united states of America.

And, you know, usually we think about, and throughout the book you bump into a lot of them, Founders as being very self-assertive, being rather egotistical, being at times obnoxious because they know they've got the right way of doing things and people who oppose them are the wrong way.

Washington had this other quality, if you like, a maturity, a vision that comes from his long experience at that point in life.

But for employees, these changes can feel threatening.

Who decides now? What happens if I make the wrong decision? Is this restructuring a sign that something is wrong? Will the founder still support us? So even a good structural change can create confusion if it is communicated poorly.

The lesson for founders is that early momentum matters.

The reward based model relies on pre selling.

Founders need to deliver on time or risk eroding trust and backer confidence.

If they miss a deadline, the platform's reputation can suffer.

Equity crowdfunding meanwhile lets the public buy shares in early-stage ventures under Regulation CF after twenty twenty-one changes the ceiling lifted to five million per year.

Still, investors need proof of a viable product before committing equity.

That regulatory shift aimed to democratize capital but it also introduced new information asymmetries and demands for due diligence from both parties Founders must now navigate securities filings in addition to campaign management.

From a founder's standpoint, the key question is whether the platform can translate interest into real funds without compromising the product vision.

You see what's missing, ask why then create something tangible to prove a hypothesis.

That process, asking, what problem are we really solving? And will customers actually pay? Is exactly where Founder DNA starts to show up.

It's not about being a genius.

It's about how you respond when the market tells you no.

That shift is exactly what a founder has to do right out of the gate.

Jump from a brainstorm to real customers and then let data decide where to go next.

The book I'm riffing on calls this the New Founders Guide, and it frames starting a company as an evolving set of experiments rather than a tidy playbook.

It says that entrepreneurs move through cycles of assumption testing, product delivery, and learning in rapid bursts because any longer stretch risks drowning in error before you can bail out.