Everything At a Startup Is a Bet

I was talking to a friend yesterday about how everything at a startup is a bet.

I find this to be a truly useful idea. It helps me in planning and helps manage some of the psychology that can be hard at startups.

Lots of classic startup advice lines up with the idea that what you’re doing at a startup is placing bets.

For example, I’ve always really liked — maybe liked isn’t quite the right word — let’s say, appreciated, Reid Hoffman’s observation that if you’re not embarrassed by the v1 of your product, you took too long to ship.

Shipping is perhaps the most important category of bet that you have to be comfortable making at a startup.

Relatedly, Eric Ries’s Lean Startup framework, which emphasizes how important a repeatable “build, measure, and learn” cycle is, is another example of this kind of thinking.

But more broadly, everything is a bet.

Hiring somebody is a bet on that person. Spending time developing a channel partnership is a bet on a go-to-market lever.

Every product decision is a bet. Small product decisions are small bets, although maybe with big leverage, big product decisions are big bets.

Really, “experiment” is a better word here than “bet” because the emphasis is on learning from everything you do. And bet doesn’t quite capture that.

But bet works better for me in my own mind and is the word I use when I talk to myself about this stuff.

Because part of the framing here is about being okay with making decisions based on too little information. And being okay with the fact that some things work and some things don’t.

And both of those things are big parts of the reality of startup life.

Today’s music is Chick Corea playing “All Blues” live. From the “Trilogy 2” album. Christian McBride playing the platonic ideal of the acoustic bass. Brian Blade doing what Brian Blade always does on drums.