Dick Cheney, N vs NP, and Startup Pain Tolerance (a.k.a The real reason startups are hard)
Everyone knows startups are hard, but most are confused about why.
Everyone knows startups are hard, but most are confused about why.
Known Unknowns
People who have yet to run the gauntlet make startups sound hard like number theory is hard. They act like building a company is like Good Will Hunting: the world struggles with a problem until a Jobs or Musk appears, solving it with unique genius and inspiration.
Unsolved math problems like The Hodge Conjecture or P vs NP are known unknowns. You can find a list of them on Wikipedia. At any given time, every entrepreneur faces a litany of known unknowns: Will this VC put in money? Will users like V2? Will we win this account?
IMO, known unknowns are the least of your problems. Why? There’s nothing you can do about them other than manage the uncertainty and tend to the things you can control, such as building contingency plans (filling the pipeline, iterating design, providing great service).
The real challenges fall into two buckets: 1) unknown unknowns and 2) known knowns.
Unknown Unknowns
These are particularly difficult for first time entrepreneurs. Despite the interminable fount of “How to build the next Uber” articles, when you are sitting by yourself at WeWork with nothing but a dream and a pitch deck, it’s hard to figure what exactly one should be doing. I often found myself vacillating between overwhelmed paralysis and frantic action.
Before you’ve begun, you are a fart in the wind. With no momentum, team, or accountability, — random TechCrunch article can change everything. Every competitor launch is devastating. Every rejection casts fatal doubt. Your plan falls apart like overhandled Play Dough.
You know nothing about nothing, so you try to “learn” so you do things “right.” You are thoughtful. You seek advice. You read extensively.
Unfortunately, what looks like prudence is a recipe for going no where. I can’t tell you how many days I frittered away “learning” how to start my company. The answer is to go boldly forth and make a lot of mistakes while moving the chains.
Once you actually get the ball rolling, you have the opposite problem. On any given day at Sonar, my todo list specified 10 critically important tasks, but I only had enough time for 7. So I did 7/10, D+, barely passing. Despite monstrous output, I felt like everyday was an incomplete near failure.
Only with the time to reflect and the clarity of hindsight did I realize that I was spinning my wheels. The things that really mattered were sitting right in front of me, but I was conveniently ignoring them.
Known Knowns
Startup hard isn’t about solving riddles. It’s about pain tolerance. Your biggest challenges will be incredibly uncomfortable. No one likes doing them.
You need to demote your co-founder/best friend who you started the company with in his parents basement because he really has no business being the CTO. You need to let the friends and family who blindly lent you money five years ago know that they are going to get wiped out by a new investor unless they put in more money. You need to acknowledge that there’s not going to be another round and that you need to cut your team in half or else everyone will be out of a job in six months. You need to tell your wife and kid that your not going to be home for dinner, again.
And thus, many founders simply don’t. They ignore their biggest problems. They distract themselves with the 9 other tasks on thier list. The analyze endlessly until the opportunity passes them by. They score superficial wins while their core business rots away.
Then they fail. Bryce Roberts has a great post about this called “Sins of Omission.”
The delusional ones will wonder what happened. Everyone else will know deep down that they chose their fate.
This one goes out to all of you in the arena right now. Look deep down in your gut. Zero in on that one thing that you’ve been putting off, the thing that’s been eating up your sleep cycles and screwing with your relationship.
Put away everyone else and fix that one thing.