7 things I’ve learned about startups

And maybe life

It doesn’t matter what color your bike shed is.

Parkinson’s Law of Triviality states that organizations - and people - give disproportionate weight to trivial issues. They really do. Here are some egregious examples:

• Designing your logo before you understand your business
• Focusing on your technology stack before you understand your customers (not a single customer cares whether you’re writing your stack in Go or PHP, or what your architecture looks like under the hood)
• Focusing on your business model before you’ve validated the problem you think you need to solve

It’s sometimes comfortable to focus on these tertiary issues, but the bigger deal is: does what you’re doing matter? Does it solve a real problem in a useful way? Is that solution valuable?

About a decade ago, blog developers got lost in a debate about whether their data feeds would be powered by RSS, by a competing technology called Atom, or something else entirely. Some people still refer to it as the “RSS / Atom war”. In the meantime, everybody forgot that they needed to be solving real problems for people, and feeds scared most non-technical users away. Outside of podcasts, they’re barely used today. The debate was meaningless.

You’re not going to save the world.

Lots of people think they’ve found a giant conceptual problem, and that their solution will make the world a better place. They choose to think about this overarching bigger picture, rather than which problem they’re concretely solving for a real person today.

Guess what: there isn’t a single customer who cares about your big vision. They care what you can do for them right now.

A classic example of this is decentralized social networking. You can see the conceptual problem: the world’s online conversations are owned by a small number of companies, and therefore subject to their content policies. It’s a recipe for censorship and homogeneity. If we all used a platform that was decentralized like the web itself, we would promote freedom of speech and elevate more disparate voices.

I buy into this idea - but it’s still just an idea. If you drill down, you might find lots of different people who have this problem. Marginalized groups who might be censored or outed on other platforms; political activists; journalists who need to protect the sanctity of their sources; teenagers who want to keep their communications away from the prying eyes of their parents.

These are all separate products. They’re also separate businesses, if they’re businesses at all. You can imagine supporting yourself by selling advertising on the product for teenagers. The product for political activists or for marginalized groups might be better run as a non-profit or volunteer project. The tool for journalists could potentially be sponsored by news organizations themselves.

All of this is before you’ve actually validated the problem: if you think you can solve a problem for teenagers, you need to talk to lots of them. Not just at the beginning to validate your idea, but again and again, to test and refine.

You’re not the Jesus of computers. You’re just some schmuck. You don’t get to solve everybody’s problem.

If someone desperately wants to be the boss, run away.

The CEO is the worst job. The buck stops with you, you need to make decisions stressfully fast, and everyone thinks they could do it better than you. Hell, if you’re really lucky and your startup gets super-successful, you might be ridiculed in the press.

The people who are looking for that kind of position are often in it for the glory. They don’t necessarily want to build something sustainable and great as much as something that makes them look good. Worse, they’ll argue with you about every decision you make.

Some people just think they should be the boss. That’s not leadership, it’s megalomania.

Another version of this occurs when someone desperately wants to be known as the inventor of something. They’ll argue in favor of their technology or idea, regardless of whether it’s actually the best thing for the job. Just as debates about feed standards arguably sank the idea of reading content in an aggregator at all, I think these debates have a danger of harming the principles they’re intended to advocate for.

At Known, Erin and I have been lucky to have a different kind of relationship. Neither one of us is in it for any kind of glory. But at other startups I’ve seen this create dysfunctional team dynamics and even descend into lawsuits. It’s crazy.

Don’t avoid conflict.

Ugh.

I hate conflict.

I really hate conflict.

But nobody respects you for shoving a discussion into a drawer and putting it off. If you go quiet, or try and deflect from a difficult conversation, you’ll find it snowballing and becoming worse over time. And, yes, that reflects badly on you.

In a startup, you need to make decisions quickly. That means you need to head things off quickly and get it out in the open, so you can talk about what happens next.

If you’re like me, that makes your heart sink into the depths of your stomach. Making people unhappy is never fun. Some people talk about the “shit sandwich”, where you bury bad news between two positive things. It’s pure avoidance. The only real way I’ve found is to close your eyes and just say it. And then move on.

Don’t fall into the live-to-work trap.

Just don’t. I know Jack Dorsey works 18 hour days, and Elizabeth Holmes works 7 day weeks. But this isn’t a rational approach to work, and following their schedule won’t automatically make you the CEO of a unicorn.

Stress is real; chronic stress kills. You’re not going to be able to do your best work if your brain and body aren’t fully functional. Moreover, building a business isn’t the be all and end all. Everybody needs to have a life.

This January, I got stress-induced shingles. The doctor told me that while it’s stereotyped as an older person’s disease, she’s seeing more of it in young people in Silicon Valley. More and more people are pushing themselves beyond their limits.

My startup has left me with real, physical scars - and the shingles took me out of full-time work for longer than I would have liked. It was probably avoidable. Everyone needs to take care of themselves, have fun, exercise, spend quality time with their families, be social, and, y’know, be human.

No cargo cults.

Remember Jack and Elizabeth? It’s true that copying their superficial work patterns won’t suddenly make you the CEO of Twitter or Theranos.

The same is true for every pattern you see. It’s not enough to chant the slogans and go through the motions. You need to decide what works for you and your team. Blindly following people won’t take you on the same journey. Everyone is different; every startup has different struggles.

Take a moment to read about cargo cults:

Since the modern manufacturing process is unknown to them, members, leaders, and prophets of the cults maintain that the manufactured goods of the non-native culture have been created by spiritual means, such as through their deities and ancestors.

The truth is that with any successful business, you don’t really know how the sausage was made. I can tell you, however, that just because the processes are unknown to you, the startups you seek to emulate were not created by spiritual means. It’s not magic, it’s slog.

Everyone needs to bring something to the table. (Not just themselves.)

Remember the people who just want to be the boss?

If you’re forming a team to work on a project, everyone has to bring something. There needs to be a kind of equilibrium at the center of your team, both in order to avoid resentment and to maintain forward momentum.

Some people can build technology, or are awesome designers. Some people have a business pedigree. Others have an address book full of sales contacts, or money. Any of these - or any combination - are valid, and important.

“Being organized” is not one of these skills. There’s nothing at all wrong with it - it’s important! - but it’s not a hard skill. Nor is being a front-man. Unless you can quantifiably turn these traits into revenue, predictably, they’re not table stakes. If you can’t concretely use your skills to build a startup, you should not be in one. More importantly, you don’t get to run a startup without at least some of these skills. Having fewer hard skills than the rest of your team doesn’t mean you get to be the boss.

That doesn’t mean you have to be trained already. I’ve seen startup founders work 3x harder to build their business because they understood they had a skill deficit. There’s nothing wrong with that - that’s admirable!

The cliché is that when startups fail, they always say “thank you for joining us on this journey”. Criticism for this is unfair, because it is a hard, emotional journey. In order to get there, you need make sure that everyone can pull their weight in a healthy, informed way.

Thoughts? Ideas? Let’s have a conversation below. Alternatively, fight with me on Twitter.