Principles for Builders
I woke up this morning thinking about writing more reflections on building companies. I think I’ll work on blowing through some of the ways startups die posts in the next few days just to get them out of the way, it’s been a fun time of reflection. I’m also working on some agent work that I’ll release soon! Something at the gym drew me to thinking about higher-level principles for building so I thought I’d write ten down:
Foundation is everything
Your personal foundation is the foundation you build the company on. If you fail (in life) the company you’re working on will surely fail. Therefore it is important to put your own personal foundation before anything to do with your company if you want to prevent your company from failing.
Everything is a power law
The engineers you hire, customer contract sizes you close, days of crazy high or depressingly low growth, the people you date, the insights you get from the books you read, the level of fitness you have, the food you eat, company outcomes, how hard you and your team work, the personality and talent of the sales people you hire, the attention each launch gets and more. Everything is a power law. Your job is to find the outliers.
Winning
Winning is what makes people happy
People are happy when they’re winning and sad / frustrated when they lose. Startups have a lot of losing so it’s important to focus on winning.
When making deals make sure the people you want around win
The people who win with you are the people who will stick around. Make sure that the people you value win when you win and they’ll keep playing the game with you.
Resilience
Faith
You can’t have resilience without faith, anything else is based on ego which is bound to fail.
Pain Tolerance
The easiest way to find outliers is to expose yourself to a lot of not-outliers so that you know one when you find one. This will mean losing a lot in order to learn how to win.
Skin in the game is the foundation of growth
You need to take risks in order to learn the lessons that will be the foundation for your growth. You can read, listen and learn all you want from others but without skin in the game you’ll never make progress.
What matters for building a business (in order): team, market, idea
The team building the business are the ones who decide everything else so they matter more than everything. Second to that is choosing a market which will determine how fast the business can grow. Third is the idea within that market and if the customers truly want it.
Trust your intuition
You as a leader have the most information on any given situation to make the high-level decisions the business needs. Anyone else presenting with strong opinions has bias and blind spots that almost always make those decisions the wrong ones.
The best products are more like paintings than they are tools
The best product builders are closer to artists than they are engineers, so if you want to create great products focus on learning how to paint (build) and then making great art (creating products).
Do what you love
If you don’t love it there is no shot that you’re going to build something that is an outlier because it’ll be too hard and you’ll give up. Focus on what you love first.
The future hinges on doing the next right thing
In every moment each one of us has the choice to help determine the future by doing the next right thing. Sometimes those things are non obvious, sometimes they are obvious but if you can manage to keep doing the next right thing over and over again that is one of the main keys to doing something great.