Newsletter #10: On running a startup in turbulent times
6 minutes reading time. Thoughts on startups, growth, and technology 🚀
Hey there,
With COVID-19 impacting pretty much everything in an increasingly globalized and connected world, I wanted to share a few thoughts on running a startup in turbulent times.
Every entrepreneur starts a company with a vision for success. We all want to create a fantastic environment, hire the smartest people out there, and solve a huge problem.
That requires a high sense of purpose, relentless resourcefulness, and a belief that what you do is important. To make any progress whatsoever, the founding team needs to consists of smart and accomplished people. Otherwise, they won't be able to attract great talent and/or will create a dysfunctional organization.
But even that is not a recipe for success.
As time goes, you work day and night to make your vision reality. But more often than not, you wake up to find that things did not go exactly as planned. Along the way, many things go wrong, most of them you could have avoided but somehow missed.
Once I read an analogy explaining that growing a startup, in most cases, feels like pushing a boulder uphill.
In other, you achieve product-market fit fast, and it feels like you are guiding a boulder downhill.
Yet, just because you are going downhill and your revenue, users, and capital are growing, it does not mean that things are great. Controlling the growth of a tech startup is not an easy task. Most startups grow exponentially, and the problems you encounter are hardly easy to plan for. Not to mention that most founders of fast-growing organizations are terrified of what will happen when the growth stagnates, and that always happens.
Things go wrong all the time because building an organization to solve a problem that no one else has adequately solved, in a dynamic-highly competitive market, turns out to be really hard.
Having said that, I do think that pushing the boulder uphill is more challenging. Sometimes, you may execute the best practices, pick the low hanging fruits, assemble a great team and secure what it may seem like the necessary capital to make your vision reality, and still feel like you are pushing the boulder uphill.
The number of things that can go wrong is endless; the market is not where you imagined it to be, product-market fit takes longer than expected, your employees start losing confidence, and some are quitting. When smart people begin leaving, the remaining ones begin to wonder if staying makes sense. Then something like COVID-19 hits and the boulder feels much more massive than you ever imagined possible. Completely outside of your control, but no one cares.
There is no answer to what you need to do when that happens. But when the boulder gets heavier, nothing is easy, and nothing feels right. That's what separates the women from the girls. As Ben Horowitz once said:
"If you want to be great, this is the challenge. If you don't want to be great, then you never should have started a company."
Articles worth reading:
What’s The Most Difficult CEO Skill? Managing Your Own Psychology - By far the most difficult skill for me to learn as CEO was the ability to manage my own psychology. Organizational design, process design, metrics, hiring, and firing were all relatively straightforward skills to master compared to keeping my mind in check.
The Struggle - Every great entrepreneur from Steve Jobs to Mark Zuckerberg went through The Struggle and struggle they did, so you are not alone. But that does not mean that you will make it. You may not make it. That is why it is The Struggle. The Struggle is where greatness comes from.
Lead Bullets - There comes a time in every company’s life where it must fight for its life. If you find yourself running when you should be fighting, you need to ask yourself: “If our company isn’t good enough to win, then do we need to exist at all?”
A quote worth remembering:
Jack London, an American novelist, on misfortune:
“Life is not always a matter of holding good cards, but sometimes, playing a poor hand well.”
A book recommendation:
The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution by Walter Isaacson - A masterful tour of the innovative people behind the development of the computer, the internet and in general the digital revolution, where the author questions what played a more significant role individual genius vs teamwork.
Available as an audiobook as well, check it out.
Positive news worth sharing:
There is a lot of negative news going around at the moment. To balance it out, I have decided to start sharing some positive things happening around the world.
It was once the poorest region in the world. But the skyrocketing rise in living standards in East Asia is unparalleled. The number of people living in extreme poverty fell almost a billion between 1990 and 2013.
Check out the source here.
Onward and upward 🚀