One of the ideas behind Founder came from something that has fascinated me for years: the amount of knowledge hidden inside the history of great companies, and how rarely we take the time to study it in depth.
In technology, we spend a lot of time talking about tools, frameworks, startups, and emerging trends. Yet some of the most valuable lessons are not found in the latest innovation. They are found in decisions made ten, twenty, or even fifty years ago by organizations that managed to survive multiple technological, economic, and cultural shifts.
I am not interested in studying companies to copy them. Most of the time, that would not even be possible. Every company operates under different circumstances, with different people, opportunities, and constraints. What is valuable is understanding how leaders thought about problems when the outcome was still uncertain.
Looking at a company with decades of history allows us to observe something that is often missing from business books: evolution. We can see products that failed, acquisitions that looked promising but did not work out, strategic pivots, internal conflicts, risky bets, and periods when the future of the organization was far from obvious.
We often look at successful companies and assume their path was linear. Reality is usually much more interesting. Many companies that seem inevitable today were once close to failure. Others spent years building advantages that did not produce visible results until much later. Some made unpopular decisions that only made sense in hindsight.
That observation became one of the motivations for building Founder. I wanted to create a more interactive way to explore these stories. Not as a traditional biography or a chronological summary, but as an experience where people can step into the shoes of those who faced difficult decisions.
The goal is to approach business history from a more practical perspective. Instead of simply reading about what happened, users can explore the context, examine the available options, and confront challenges similar to those faced by founders and executives at the time. It is a way of learning not only what happened, but why it happened.
After more than twenty years working in software, I have found that many of the most useful lessons do not come from technology alone. They also come from understanding how organizations learn, adapt, respond to uncertainty, and build capabilities over long periods of time.
Tools change. Programming languages change. Platforms change. But challenges related to strategy, execution, leadership, growth, and adaptation keep reappearing in different forms.
That is why I continue to find value in studying companies that have operated for decades. Not because they have all the answers, but because their stories contain questions that are still worth asking. Founder is, in many ways, an attempt to explore those questions through interaction and experimentation, turning business history into an experience rather than simply a lesson.