Part deux in the "Advice Regurgitation Series".
Creating a startup is a process. It is one filled with ambiguity and uncertainty. You'll be continually making decisions in what seems like a fast-paced, highly-dynamic environment without even a fraction of the information that you wish you had. This is the reality for being in startups and it doesn't change regardless of how "skilled" of an entrepreneur you become. Simply said, no one knows how your startup is going to go down, so be wary of people who claim to be experts.
Your startup is a collection of assumptions and hypothesis. Whether you are in the idea stage or making 50M a year, you are continually making assumptions about your customers (who they are, what they want/need, how much they are willing to pay, etc), your competition, you/your organization's ability to execute and deliver. Some of these assumptions are known, others are hidden and undeclared, resting in your subconscious aka your "blindspots." This is stuff you don't know you don't know. Managing the startup process is setting up cheap, iterative experiments to uncover and incorporate the things you are ignorant about your market and how your product/service fits it.
The mainstream talking heads call the process of creating a startup "business discovery". There are many people out there who talk about the business discovery process (Marc Andreessen's "Product-Market Fit", Steve Blank's "4 Steps to the Epiphany", Eric Ries's "Lean Startup Movement"). I invite you to read their blogs and familiarize yourself with what they talk about as they are useful frameworks to gain access to your blindspots. This is why I have never done a business plan for any of my companies: it changes as soon as you take the first step.
Business discovery is actually a derivative of learning to execute precisely. I touch about this in one of my recent posts, we aren't as good at managing as we think we are when the guard rails are removed (often the biggest difference between Corporate America and StartupLand). As such, we have a lack of integrity (think data integrity, not morality) around simply doing what we say we'll do. It is the main premise of the Foundry that continuously searching for and uncovering all of the known and unknown "unknowns" and simply doing the unseen, unglamorous work of getting on the court, stating the step you think you should take and then just *stepping* will allow a business to fall out. Even if you don't know where to step for the the first few weeks, the act of doing so will reveal much more about the reality of the space and thus whether or not you will be able to accomplish what you have in your head at this point in time.
Creating businesses as a "hard" entrepreneur is no different than a "soft" entrepreneur. It just costs more and you have less degrees of freedom. All businesses (and I mean every single one) have underlying commonalities to them. Kind of like "The Last Samurai" and "Bad Boys II" are both buddy flicks, all businesses share a motif of figuring out what to sell, to whom, for how much more than it cost you to produce and how to do so such that the firm can sustain itself from operations and hopefully grow and expand. There are many ways to navigate this process, all lead to the same destination.
Over time, you begin to develop the mental muscles necessary to spot and evaluate opportunities before exploiting them - I am on my third business in a year. I have probably advised for about 100 different companies solving different problems in different markets at different stages of life (most in the earliest stages). The overall impact of this to my bank account has been $0. However, my ability to parse through convoluted information to learn new underlying relationships in the world, especially those contradicting existent knowledge, has expanded and I am finding that I am getting better at spotting which assumptions matter and which hypotheses make the most sense to test next as well as how to do so in a way that you uncover the most knowledge with expending a lot of time and resources and possibly even make a profit. Though I haven't yet financially benefited from these actions, I view it as "start up practice" to better prepare me when I find a big opportunity to go after. Because the truth of the matter is that I'm not going to wake up on the day that opportunity comes and suddenly be an expert entrepreneur. There is no some day.
Failure is the path from novice to master - You may or may not succeed on your first startup, but your probability of succeeding after *n* tries will be higher. In this regard, early-stage entrepreneurship is largely democratic - it doesn't require that you be "special" or be "good' at anything, but that you simply get on the court and stay there long enough for the distinctions to take hold and the world begins to occur differently for you. This is the difference between a novice and a master.
No comments:
Post a Comment