The difference between strategy & operations @ a startup

I’ve spent a great deal of time this summer trying to find various ways of contract, part time, full time labor to help do operations for Last Minute Gear. In the process, I’ve learned a great deal about the difference between operational work and strategic work at a startup*. So here’s my analogy in progress, let me know your thoughts!

Yet, despite the difficulty, operations makes or breaks a startup. Building a startup is like building a house from the ground up, imagine if those tiny beads get jammed in the foundation… that could cause a catastrophe when the house gets built! Think about if you piss off a customer a few months in. Then you apply for funding a few months later and get rejected because that customer actually works at the fund you met with. (Hasn’t happened to me, but I can totally see it.) For startups part of the on-demand economy (Munchery, Uber, InstaCart, Rinse, Shyp [great case study on how important operations was for them], Last Minute Gear, etc.), operations is even more important, because the logistics component is hugely complex and is the sole backbone of the business (as opposed to if your startup were purely software focused).

Furthermore, there are 2 more truths that I’ve come to realize:

1. Many people don’t like operational work — Most people would much rather be the cool kid juggling the tennis balls than the guy running around frantically catching the microbeads! When I was learning more about an operational role at Lyft, the recruiter admitted surprise, stating that most consultants have a “white glove” mentality that would lead them to pass up the role.
2. Not everyone is good at operational work — I used to think that if you were smart enough to do the strategic work, you must be capable of doing operational work. But that’s not always true. To do operational work, you need to excel at being detail-oriented, hyper-organized, and multi-tasking. Any one alone is actually not enough (e.g., if you’re just detail-oriented, you could spend 30 minutes with one customer while neglecting another)

The conclusion is: operations is hard, startup operations is harder. I don’t know the formula to success, but awareness of the above is critical… and that’s awareness on both sides! As much as I hope this post is useful for entrepreneurs trying to tackle startup operations, I hope this post is useful for job seekers trying to figure out if they should take a startup operations job or not**. Good luck all!

*If you’re in a strategy & operations type role at a large company, you may disagree with this analogy. That’s because in that type of role, you’re probably gearing up for management. I.e., you’d manage people doing operations, whereas at a startup, you’d be doing the operations yourself. Further, at a startup, there are always more beads and there are fewer concrete procedures/ checklists to manage those beads.

**I wrote another piece about why a startup might not be right for you from the perspective of the types of problems involved