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Just. Don't. Quit.
The first and only job of a founder is to make sure your company... DOES NOT DIE
There are many things we write in this handbook. All of them should be ignored if you think it will keep your company from dying 💀. Everything is remediable; just hang the heck in there.
Source: Adult Swim GIPHY
What it takes to hang in there is an ever-changing feat. Part of hanging in there is knowing there is no ‘answer’ or ‘right way’ (or indeed a “good founder”). There’s no such thing as being good at your job any more — because by definition if you’re good at one part of your business, you’ll probably be weakening or neglecting another part, and it will bite you.
That said, knowing what to expect, and having some idea of what has happened before is an enormous advantage. We are going to presume you can hang in there.
We also assume you know why you want to start a business. Remember this may change, and that’s OK. But this handbook will only cover that obliquely, through talking about the tradeoffs you may face, rather than saying what you should or shouldn’t do. You shouldn’t die. All other bets are off the table.
Again, we cover more nuts and bolts in this book, but any thoughts you yourself have about what worked or didn’t will be really useful in the future. (And if you think we got something wrong, ping me back! Go on. You may as well.)
Feel free to do this (Source: CBS GIPHY)
OK, so if your job is not to die, where do you start?
As team leader / founder, I argue that your job is to tell everyone about this, to outline the priorities, vision and actions of others, in order to place their efforts in the same “don’t die” direction.
How do you do that?
My theory is that success is often more the passion for one’s given area that makes you keep going above all else, rather than about a checklist of what you should or shouldn’t be.
So: you do it by picking what you think is the thing your business and you have that no one else does. The thing you rant to people at dinner parties at, the thing you rage at because why doesn’t someone just do this, the thing that meant you were crazy enough to start.
Next, think of what you would sacrifice to make that happen — as long as you are clear with your tradeoffs, then these will be the values of your firm. Everything sounds good in the abstract. But if you had to pick between various things, then this will be the DNA of your firm.
There are two things I encourage you to put in this DNA:
In doing this, you will need to deal also with your emotions. Do not underestimate this cost. It is much larger than you might think!
And, given what I’ve said above, it’s important to fuel your energy and motivation. In an ideal world, your goal should be to spend more than half of your time doing things that energise you. If you do, magic will occur; or at least, not dying and staying the course will be easier.
In a less than ideal world — ie, pretty much every single day — it is about knowing you aren’t alone, that nearly certainly it sucks this badly for everyone else too, and the more attractive a startup looks from the outside the more likely it is the startup doesn’t feel like it’s going well on the inside.
Indeed, it’s the reverse, especially for the founder. Almost all of my worst moments have been when it appeared to the outside world that we were doing really well. These will almost certainly be HR-related, and moreover, they will probably be the things you think you’re good at. Being a founder is much like being a well-known politician: what gets you there isn’t what keeps you there.
Another thing that might help to remember is no one is born a great CEO. Product is good. Sales are great. Tech is super cool. But the rest of the skills and relationships required to be an all-around great CEO are things like:
Among many, many others — and these are often antithetical to technical/product development.
Basically, no matter what you do, there will be something else you’re not doing.
So do your best, and remember, a truly great moment is when someone pays you money for a product you made. Not only have you brought something into the world somebody has paid you for it. Whatever you may otherwise be failing at, you have made something.
What next? Some of you may get a chance to go beyond not dying. To do this, you will need to scale.
To crib on something we read once from Michael Mochary, scale requires that you:
“Create massive awareness (Marketing), walk many customers through the sales process (Sales), hold those customers hands as they set up and use your product or service (Customer Satisfaction), build sufficient technology and / or infrastructure to withstand many users at once (DevOps), get rid of technical debt as well as add all the features promised in your roadmap (Engineering), update the product roadmap to meet the most urgent needs of your customers (Product), and all of the non-technical operations (People and HR, Finance, Legal, Office). All of this requires hiring talented and experienced people to fulfill those functions. So you will need to raise the money needed to hire this team, and then begin hiring.” - Michael Mochary
In other words… it’s another book.
In this book, we are trying to get you going, and tell you as much as we can that we learnt along the way when trying to get our own company up and running 🏃. We promise candour and GIFs, and to share some thoughts.
The second we will steal from Scott Kapur:
“We were privileged to have Bill on our board at LoudCloud, where he constantly reminded us in very simple terms of the critical role that cash plays in a startup’s life cycle: “It’s not about the money. It’s about the F-ing money.” - Scott Kapur
Enough said. So, we will start with the money, and then move on from there.
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