Is Your Startup Playing Chess or Checkers?

Fares Ksebati
Jul 10, 2017 · 4 min read

There’s no doubt that building a successful business requires a high level of patience, resiliency and strategy. Watching the best founders scale their ventures, it’s clear that their growth is a result of continuous execution on a well thought out strategy.

Playing Checkers

When you’re building a startup, you live in the moment. You try to stay nimble while continuously evolving your plan of attack based on market forces. You’re always testing different things and are aware of the different levers that impact your business.

After looking at industry best practices and the results of your testing, you invest where you anticipate the highest return. You focus on the core elements of the business: product, solution, distribution partners, etc. and see where you can create disproportionate value in the marketplace.

These are all well understood lean startup tactics. If that’s all you’re doing, you’re playing checkers in a game of chess. After spending time with highly successful founders, this concept become more clear. Let me explain.

5

That’s the average number of moves ahead that a Class A or better chess player will be thinking throughout the course of a game. While checkers is primarily played in the moment, chess requires a complex strategy that is often won by thinking ahead. This strategy is deeply tied to the firm’s vision. It’s flexible and well thought out.

Developing strategy is about evaluating trade-offs, making choices, and creating a process to reach the desired vision. When building a startup, your opponent is not your competition. The opponent is the market. In the end, market forces will dictate the success of your product, conviction of your efforts, and effectiveness of your strategy.

Playing Chess

Like chess, building a startup is a complicated endeavor. A successful chess player anticipates future moves and will position her pieces in such a way that each piece helps add strength to the pieces already in motion. As a founder, I’m continuously learning how to do this and leverage every chess piece’s different role.

Each aspect of the business has a different value, risk and opportunity. Some pieces are there to protect, others are there to attack and the rest are martyrs. All of these “characters” must successfully work together towards a common goal of capturing the king.

Remember, your opponent is the market, and it doesn’t care how you get to the king. To win in chess, much like growing a successful startup requires an early and continuous focus on developing this strategy.

While I respect the notion of favoring speed over pondering ideas; however, more can be said about cultivating deep market insights and positioning your chess pieces for long-term victory.

There Is No Defined Path

The number of electrons in the observable universe is approximately 10⁷⁹, while the number of possible unique chess games is 10¹²⁰. Let that sink in for a second…

There is no one path to building a startup. There is no template to follow. It takes time.

It’s easy to read the headlines and admire the over-night successes that are popularized by the media. These businesses are placed on a pedestal for building incredible products, monopolizing markets, and securing world-class partnerships.

“the dream is free, but the hustle is sold separately” — Gary Vaynerchuk

Reality Check: What It’s Really Like To Be An Entrepreneur

Sometimes we forget the enduring struggle these founders had in the early days before they “made it big”. They sacrificed short-term wins for long-term value. These founders play chess, not checkers. There is no overnight phenomenon and patience is the virtue of success. When it comes to your startup:

Are you playing checkers or are you playing chess?

Thanks for reading! This post was originally published on LinkedIn. If you enjoyed it, please recommend it to a friend!

Fares Ksebati

Written by

Co-Founder & CEO @MySwimPro | Swim Coach @DAC_Detroit | @ChallengeDet & @WayneState Alum | I tweet on swimming, disruptive technology & makin’ it happen!

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