From Solo Founder to Building a 85+ People NGO

Table of Contents

• My Leadership Journey
• Young Founders Network
• Crisis 1: The Cold Water
• Crisis 2: Integrating a Major Event
• Future Leadership Focus
• Conclusion
• References

This essay was originally written for my leadership module at CODE University, where I had the opportunity to reflect deeply on my journey from a solo founder to leading a growing non-profit organization. As I wrote these words, I realized that my experiences, struggles, and learnings might resonate with other ambitious founders out there.

The entrepreneurial journey is often portrayed as a glamorous path to success, but the reality is much more complex. It’s filled with self-doubt, sleepless nights, and moments where you question everything. I’ve been there, and I want to share my story to show you that you’re not alone in this struggle.

Through this essay, I’ll take you through my personal evolution as a leader, the challenges I faced while building the Young Founders Network (YFN), and the valuable lessons I learned along the way. Whether you’re just starting your entrepreneurial journey or already leading a team, I hope my experiences can provide some guidance and comfort in knowing that the path to leadership is rarely linear, but always worth it.

My Leadership Journey

My entrepreneurial career began early with various projects, driven by curiosity and a more or less healthy impostor syndrome. At nine years old, my father motivated me to start my first YouTube channel instead of just playing Minecraft, which accompanied me for four years.

Instead of delivering newspapers like my peers, I wanted to test if I could make money online. This led me to my first online business in affiliate marketing, which still covers my domain fees to this day. Simultaneously, I worked as a video editor, created video courses for SMBs, programmed websites and apps, and launched an e-commerce store where I sold customizable gifts for men. I gained many insights by making practically every conceivable mistake in market analysis, marketing, and business imaginable. In the end, what I lacked was the motivation to drive my ideas forward.

After many failures, I started speaking with regional entrepreneurs to learn from their experiences, especially mistakes not publicly available on LinkedIn. A friend suggested recording these conversations, and the idea for my podcast “How to Fail while Start-Up” (now “Roots 2 disrupt”) was born.

I encountered leadership unconsciously during a 12-month program called “Junior Management School” which I enrolled in parallel to 10th grade. Despite rotating teams for different modules, I often defined goals, aligned groups, and eliminated chaos.

Depending on the situation and team dynamics, I adapted my leadership style to be sometimes more directive and sometimes more supportive.

I did not realize then that I had already intuitively applied situational leadership approaches.

My heart project: Young Founders Network

“The greatest leader is not necessarily the one who does the greatest things. He is the one that gets the people to do the greatest things” – Ronald Reagan

One characteristic ran through all my projects: I was always alone. How much energy this aspect drained from me became clear much later. Despite all my projects and having a big group of friends, none were interested in entrepreneurship or had the same intense, slightly obsessive drive to build things. I was not aware then that my experiences as a lone fighter were already laying the foundation for my later understanding of leadership. Looking back, the lack of community and emotional support were relevant factors in failure.

In 2021, I coincidentally met Leonard through LinkedIn (later a fellow student at CODE) and realized how vital this peer-to-peer exchange is for me.

After the first meetings, we decided to start a Discord server for anyone wanting to create something of their own. A place where young founders do not feel alone, where people meet as equals and support each other. Later, we merged it with an event that started as the alumni event for STARTUP TEENS, and YFN was born.

The challenges were enormous: Expanding without marketing budgets, without a legal structure, and without experience in organizing large communities, purely through word of mouth. But it was worth it. I’ve built myself the group of friends I had always been looking for.

From 30 participants, it has grown into a community with over 1000 members. From 5 initiators to a team of 70 people, of whom I am incredibly proud.

YFN Crisis 1: Being pushed into Cold Water

I experienced my fastest personal development as President/Chairman of YFN. Previously, I was introverted and quickly subordinated myself. This was caused by the fact that the other initiators organized the first events, led the projects, and funded their ventures. This resulted in me feeling like an impostor, partially also because I had not been part of the STARTUP TEENS finals, like my co-initators.

Situation

1.5 years after the first event, the Young Founders Network was in a critical phase. We had just won a €20,000 award and had much support from the Bertelsmann Foundation. The network was growing exponentially while the team was crumbling internally. Torn between YFN, our startups, and studies.

We were getting increasingly burned out, as the event responsibility rested on one person managing this full-time alongside other commitments. Our mood changed dramatically from “It’s pointless because we can not find committed teammates” to ambitious visions like “We’ll make YFN Germany’s leading founding community.” A leadership crisis typical for growth in young organizations where informal structures reach their limits.

My Role

Driven by the need for someone to take ownership, I was given responsibility as the only one without an active startup. It felt like being thrown into cold water and suddenly responsible for YFN alone. I felt irreplaceable but simultaneously knew I was hardly up to the task.

My mistake was not taking responsibility but believing I could carry all responsibility alone. Later, I understood my behavior profoundly. My feelings were a mixture of fear of losing control, feeling irreplaceable, and impostor syndrome since I had no other project to brag about in the startup world. A mentor later explained that this behavior is so typical that it even has a name: Founder’s Syndrome.

The Founder’s Syndrome manifested in me through centralizing all decisions, an exaggerated feeling of irreplaceability, and the inner conflict of delegating responsibility. YFN became an essential part of my identity, while my impostor syndrome paradoxically drove me to take even more control to prove myself.

The Solution

After much struggle and a miserable attempt to handle all five departments simultaneously, we decided to restructure YFN from scratch. At this moment, I began unconsciously applying elements of transformational leadership. A leadership style that resonates with me as it takes vision, inspiration, and individual appreciation as main pillars.

As a result, we built a board and appointed a lead as an owner for each department. Additionally, we introduced co-leads as the right hands to divide the workload and be sparring partners. A few months into the process, I realized we had gone through an enormous change: we recognized the urgency, developed a vision for the new structure, and empowered more team members.

My Learnings

I learned that it is almost impossible to scale a non-profit organization alone. From the feeling that everything had grown over my head, a system arose that independently delegates tasks and distributes structure and responsibilities. It changed my focus from pure doing to enabling. I slowly began to understand that my main task had moved from doing everything myself to creating the conditions under which others could succeed.

The future of YFN does not lie in a single leadership personality, but in a system of distributed responsibility based on shared values and a clear vision to enable the next generation of founders in Germany.

Crisis 2: Integrating a Major Event

I faced a significant leadership challenge when one of our regional leads started a major event project. The ambitious goal: bringing 1000 participants to a central location. While they poured their heart and soul into this initiative, it had developed in isolation from our core structures, creating operational friction and coordination problems.

The challenge wasn’t just about logistics but touched on deeper aspects of leadership. The project owner had poured their heart into this initiative, and there were concerns about maintaining its unique identity while integrating it into our broader structure. We faced the classic startup challenges: limited resources, tight timelines, and the need to balance autonomy with organizational alignment.

This situation pushed me out of my comfort zone, particularly in having difficult conversations about vision alignment and resource allocation. My natural tendency to avoid conflict clashed with my responsibility to guide the organization’s growth.

Rather than imposing a top-down solution or, as some suggested, completely restructuring the project, I took an adaptive approach based on trust and relationship-building:

• Motivation & Empathy: The first step was understanding and appreciating intrinsic motivation. Why does this person invest so much time? What drives them? What vision do they have for the project? What concerns did they have regarding closer ties to the main organization? It was about truly taking their perspective seriously. Here, I applied principles of emotional intelligence, seeing the situation through their eyes, understanding their emotional needs, and focusing on empathy and social competence.

• Appreciation as a Basis: Before structural questions were even discussed, I wanted to honestly and genuinely appreciate their previous achievements and commitment. In an environment based on voluntary engagement, this form of appreciation is not just ‘nice’ but the foundation for everything we do.

• Common Goal Definition (Guided Discovery): My goal was that they viewed my vision as their own and guided the conversation through questions and brainstorming. So, I focused on discussing how our platform could strengthen the event. Instead of pointing out isolation problems, I asked how our brand and network could help achieve the event’s goals faster and how departments could take pressure off the event team. Rather than presenting a solution, we initiated an iterative process where we developed a vision that respected the project’s autonomy and integration into the bigger picture. It was about creating a win-win situation where both sides could achieve their core goals.

• Psychological Safety and Autonomy: Addressing the concern about losing control was crucial, as well as communicating that this was about support and synergy, not a takeover attempt. This led to possibilities such as the event becoming part of our main event series, having more time for fundraising, and also directly accessing organizational budget as a starting point. Despite integration, clear areas were defined where the event team could continue to decide autonomously. This autonomy was essential to maintain a sense of ownership and creativity.

This process was elaborate, caused me sleepless nights, and required more patience than a direct decision. However, it led to a solution supported by all involved, and the event was successfully integrated into the overall structure without destroying the original energy.

This experience made particularly clear to me that authentic leadership isn’t about having the correct answer but rather about shaping the process so that the team collectively finds the best solution and recognizes it as their own.

In this conflict, I could apply the theories of emotional intelligence, situational leadership, and transformational leadership and experience their effectiveness. Combining these different leadership approaches led to a result that would not have been possible with a single, rigid leadership style.

Leadership topics I want to explore further

Antifragility & decentralization

The big question for YFN’s next phase is how we create systems that give teams and chapters autonomy. That shifts decision-making power to the lowest level, allowing the team to experiment, grow, or even fail. We want to live the system of antifragility, to strengthen projects with potential and let projects without it die. This must happen without team members fearing expulsion or humiliation. It requires much trust and challenges our communication and coordination unprecedentedly.

Making female entrepreneurship one of our core topics

According to this year’s German Startup Monitor, the proportion of female founders has dropped to 18.8%. It is not enough to complain about this pattern – we want to tackle this actively. In our previous efforts, we tried focusing on female entrepreneurship with various female-led teams, but many faced challenges with establishing a clear vision and owning the projects. This time, I built a clear vision with the team leader and enabled her to develop and run the project independently.

While doing the research, we came to an important insight: we need more authentic role models who inspire young women to take the lead and build their own companies. This task requires me to thoroughly guide her hand, helping to face the challenges of building the team and resolving obstacles along the way. By mentoring and equipping her with the necessary resources, I ensure she is empowered to develop the project independently on our green field. This approach not only fosters genuine female leadership but also creates a sustainable model where emerging female leaders are encouraged and enabled to shape the future of the startup ecosystem.

Conclusion – Between Struggle and Purpose

“The most difficult CEO skill is managing your psychology” – Ben Horowitz

My leadership journey with YFN has been a wild mix of struggle, chaos, and luck. Reading “The Hard Thing About Hard Things” during vacation, I recognized myself in Horowitz’s descriptions of the “struggle”: That crushing feeling of being overwhelmed and spending nights awake imagining YFN’s failure. Questioning my purpose when self-doubt morphs into self-hatred. Feeling isolated despite being surrounded by people.

During a deep conversation with my partner, I finally acknowledged my contribution to YFN’s success earlier this year. This realization helped me redefine myself as an enabler and servant leader rather than someone constantly needing to prove their worth.

These doubts originated during our founding period. Despite leading the association for over 1.5 years, I felt I needed to prove myself to co-founders and still do somewhat. These inferiority complexes drove me to handle everything personally, and when all responsibility fell on my shoulders, the pressure became crushing. Impostor syndrome became my constant companion.

What helped was brutal self-honesty and accepting that feeling overwhelmed is part of the journey. Appreciation from others also made a difference.

“Good leaders share the credit when things go well and take responsibility when things go badly” – Simon Sinek

Through this roller coaster, I learned that leadership is not about being the controlling “boss” but rather the gardener who prepares soil for others to flourish. The most fulfilling moments make everything worthwhile: the sparkle in a young founder’s eyes when he finally felt understood by peers, the energy of teams driving beyond expectations, and watching others grow further than they could have imagined.

Today, I know authentic leadership lies in radical honesty, modeling what you expect from others, and building systems that embrace failure as learning. My self-doubts will not disappear, but I’m learning to use them as a compass rather than an anchor.

I commit to greater transparency about these insecurities. I want to be a leader who asks the right questions rather than pretending to have all the answers, and illuminates others rather than seeking the spotlight.

For me, the true core of leadership is not perfection but continuous growth; not having all answers but asking the right questions; not walking alone but finding paths forward together.

Now to you:

If you’re leading your own organization or team right now, I hope my chaotic journey gives you some comfort. The sleepless nights, the self-doubt, the overwhelming responsibility – they’re all part of it. But so are the moments that make everything worthwhile: seeing someone grow beyond what they thought possible, watching teams take ownership and run with it, building something meaningful together.

Don’t try to be the perfect leader with all the answers. Instead, focus on creating the conditions where others can thrive. Be brutally honest – with yourself first, then with your team. Model what you expect. Build systems that embrace failure as learning.

Leadership isn’t about controlling everything but enabling others. It’s messy, it’s hard, and some days it feels impossible. But it’s also incredibly rewarding when you see the impact ripple outward.

My passion lies in supporting young people, enabling dreams, and building a community. And that’s what I burn for every day. I hope you find what you burn for too :)