Thoughts on scaling when it’s too early!
The entrepreneurial landscape has changed significantly over the past decade with more and more people starting companies all around the world as the complexity of doing so has reduced drastically. When building a company in such an environment, you face competition even in the very early days as it’s rare to come up with a truly differentiated product that has no parallels in the market.
What differentiates the companies that eventually achieve Thunder Lizard status starting out from being a feeble idea in the founder’s head is not the act of starting-up itself but scaling-up. CS 183C is all about preparing for and executing this scale-up, leveraging speed as your primary business strategy to leave behind all competition and eventually achieve an effective monopoly.
The most transformative insight that I have gained from the first few weeks of this course is that you need to be strategic from day one and apply the principles of blitzscaling even during the very early days of the venture. Blitzscaling always feels uncomfortable for the people on the inside of the organization and demands a very dynamic and agile approach where your focus changes rapidly as you progress along the different stages. The key at the family stage is to prepare the company internally and build a strong foundation to support the scale-up efforts when the time comes as you find product-market fit.
Letting fires burn is key
Reid’s point on understanding exactly what you need to focus on and what you can safely ignore is critical and translates to having clarity of vision, ability to prioritize and being decisive. It’s imperative at the family stage to focus on tasks that help you transition to the next stage and convert your advantages into disruptive power instead of trying to achieve perfection and seeking closure on things that really don’t matter.
Product, sales and users
Sam Altman reduced all business functions to three important things that determine whether you win or not. The goal here is to build something people love and to achieve that, you need to iterate quickly on the product while talking to users, to reach a point where you start to feel a strong pull from the market.
Minimize technical and organizational debt
From an actionable standpoint at the very early stage, Ann’s advice on minimizing technical and organizational debt can be reduced to controlling your burn and hiring slowly and only when absolutely necessary. This discipline buys you time to explore the product space and converge on an offering that the user has a visceral need for and is deliverable at scale with favorable economics — the balance point between adaptability and efficiency!
I think that the whole point of applying these principles is to find your ‘growth engine’ that you can then throw resources (money and people) at to achieve scale, capture value and become a dominant force in the market you have just created i.e. a Thunder Lizard.
