Uninvent is designed to help startup founders build successful companies and stay healthy and sane while doing it. Please see the overview in Welcome to Uninvent and links to past and future chapters in Uninvent Table of Contents. This is a preview of Part One: Leading Yourself.
“Mastering others is strength; mastering oneself is true power.”
— Lao Tsu
“The most important six inches on the battlefield is between your two ears.”
— Jim Mattis, former U.S. Secretary of Defense
“Yesterday I was clever and tried to change the world. Today I am wise and try to change myself.”
— Rumi
Wherever you go, there you are
You interview sales managers at 20 companies about your product idea. Their feedback is lukewarm, but you console yourself that Henry Ford said that if he had asked customers what they wanted, they would have said, “Faster horses.”1 A few of the managers describe an adjacent problem they wish a startup would tackle, but you’ve lived and breathed your idea for a year, so you stay true to your original vision and release the product as envisioned.
Six months later, you don’t have a single paying customer. A new startup that built the other product is signing up new customers every day and just announced a large round of funding.
You spend nine months hiring a VP of Marketing. Thirty days after he starts, he’s accomplished nothing other than alienating your team. You decide you’ll fire him if he doesn’t improve in 30 days. After a month, he’s even worse, so you plan to fire him after the annual user conference he’s managing. After the (predictably mediocre) conference, you decide not to rock the boat until you finish the fiscal year. Then you decide to wait until after your next round of funding, rationalizing that it will be hard to raise money with no VP of Marketing.
Six months later, he still works for you, but the rest of your marketing team doesn’t. They quit because their boss is inept and their boss’s boss (that’s you) is too complacent to do anything about it. The funding you are waiting for hasn’t happened; investors are spooked that you’ve missed your targets three months in a row and can’t hold onto your people.
Your product is selling well within your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile), which is an e-commerce firm with 20-100 employees. You hire a new sales representative with experience selling to those customers. On his first day, he says he also has contacts in financial services and wants to pitch them as well. You know you should stay focused on your ICP, but you hired him from your top competitor, which impressed your board, and you don’t want to antagonize him. You agree he can try to sell to some banks if he has any extra time.
He quits six months later after not closing a single deal. He blames your marketing team for not providing content that appeals to financial services firms, he blames your product team for not building the long list of features those firms need, and he blames you for not having his back.
Your startup finally has a working product and a few customers, but you’ve gained 20 pounds, are drinking too much, and are so stressed out you sleep only a few hours a night. You reach out to some friends to hang out after work, but they don’t respond, probably because the last three times you called them, you either bailed at the last minute to work or spent half the night on your phone.
You go home and stay up until 1 a.m. scanning your Slacks, watching Netflix, drinking box wine, and wondering how bad it would be if your company failed. You could go back to your well-paid 9-5 BigCo job, where you never spent a moment outside working hours (or even during working hours) stressed out about whether the company made or missed its earnings by a few pennies a share.
You already know that a startup is challenging because of external factors. You don’t control the financial markets or the economy. You can’t force great hires to join you or prevent them from quitting. You don’t know when new competitors will pop up or when incumbents will enter your market or acquire a competitor.
But these stories are not about external factors. They are about the only thing at a startup entirely within your control: yourself. Part 1 of Uninvent will cover the only thing every challenge you face has in common: leading yourself.
Knowing ain’t doing
Startup founders face two challenges: knowing what to do and actually doing it.
Knowing what to do
When I joined my first startup in 1989, startups were an obscure art. If you were lucky, you might know someone who had started one and could offer some help. Or worse, you’d raise money from a venture capitalist and rely on him (almost always a him) to share tips gleaned from his previous investments. If you followed his advice, you might fail since the advice probably wasn’t very relevant. If you didn’t follow his advice, he’d blame you if you failed since, well, you didn’t follow his advice.
Three decades later, we are awash in startup advice from blogs, books, podcasts, incubators, courses, advisors, and the odd GPT. You can find hundreds of sample fundraising decks, financial models, online courses from Stanford and Y Combinator, and resources about product design, customer development, sales, fundraising, and any topic you need. You can find software solutions to facilitate anything from recruiting and onboarding your team, managing your payroll and benefits, tracking your sales pipeline, and managing your cap table.
Information overload is a good problem to have, but it’s still a problem. Founders have to carve out time and energy to find the best resources, study and learn from them, filter the good advice from the bad, and not fall into analysis paralysis.
But even if you solve that, you face a bigger challenge.
Actually doing the things
As anyone who has ever tried to lose weight, write a term paper, or break up with a toxic partner can attest, knowing what to do and actually doing it can be in different postal codes.
Your technology might be cutting-edge, but your brain’s wiring is medieval. A cursory reading of Shakespeare’s soliloquies or Epictetus’ neurotic late-night musings confirms: same crap, different millennia. We are anxious, fearful, and irrational, prone to denying bad news, delaying hard decisions, and deferring awkward discussions. Human nature doesn’t change. In the year 2075, some startup founder working from her Mars colony will be rationalizing why she doesn’t really need to fire her VP of Marketing.
Uninvent doesn’t have a solution to human nature that a millennium of philosophers and self-help authors have missed. We can, though, pinpoint the areas that trip most founders up, where the demands of a startup intersect with the foibles of human nature to create friction points that stall your progress or even send you backward, like restarting a hard videogame level.
Multiple-time startup founders can move quicker because they’ve developed the pattern recognition to spot these friction points and quickly push through them. Less experienced founders can get stuck, and since the margin of error between success and failure for a startup is often just a few weeks or a few thousand dollars, losing momentum can be lethal.
What Part One will cover
“Leading Yourself” will tackle:
Getting started
A startup can’t succeed if it’s never started, and although a founder shouldn’t start a startup for the wrong reasons, many potential founders don’t start a startup for the wrong reasons. They never reach the point where the motivation to get started builds up enough force to overcome the resistance from the long list of reasons not to do it.
We’ll explore both motivation and resistance in “Start Where You Are,” “Know What You Believe,” “Ignore the Noise,” “Choose Abundance” “Cohabitate With Failure,” and “Unmask Imposter Syndrome.”
Not quitting
Starting up is hard, but keeping going can be even harder. Most startups fail, and they all fail for the same reason: the founders quit. Often, they should quit if they don’t see a path to success. But sometimes they quit because of problems that could have been solved, most of which involve managing their own physical and mental health, being realistic about what a startup requires and how long it will take, and making good decisions.
We’ll talk about some of the barriers that can derail founders in “Start Out the Right Way,” “Face the Abyss,” “Accept a Bit of Chaos,” “Stop Crushing It," “Zen Til it Hurts,” “Don’t Blow Up,” and “Never Arrive.”
Getting things done
Starting and not quitting are the bare minimum. You have to get s–it done (a friend of mine calls it “GSD”). You have to GSD, and they have to be the right things. There is never enough talent, money, or time to do all the work, though, and it’s hard to know for sure it’s the right work.
We’ll talk about how you can identify the work that matters, put in the time and energy to get it done, do hard things, and keep up the pace over the long run in Become a Learn-it-All, “Train like a Startup Athlete,” “Do Real Work,” “Do the Free Things,” “Embrace the Grind,” “Tune Your Patience-meter,” and “Guard Your Reputation.”
Knowing your stuff
Getting stuff done is necessary for startup success, but it’s insufficient. No one rewards you for being dedicated, persistent, and productive (who exactly would?) Clever ideas and a buttoned-up operating plan don’t get you anywhere unless you are right.
You have to be right about your insight into a market and the product to serve that market (or quickly pivot to something that is right). You have to learn enough about hiring people, managing them, raising money, getting product/market fit, generating pipeline, and dozens of other functions. No one starts out knowing these things, so how quickly you learn will determine your success.
We’ll explore how to learn the right things and, just as importantly, how to unlearn the wrong things in Embrace Contradiction, Know Why You Get Paid, “Be a Learn it All,” “Be the Adult in the Room,” and “Be Humbly Confidently Humble.”
Some of these topics will be covered again in the context of leading a team and a company in “Part 2: Leading your Team” and “Part 3: Leading your Company.”
The first step in starting a startup is to overcome inertia and start it, which is the topic of Start Where You Are.
Clever and pithy quotes like Henry Ford’s “faster horses” can contain wisdom but also can shut down debate and discussion. Ford’s quote is often abused by startup founders who don’t like to talk to customers or don’t like what they hear when they do. Ask about the problem, not the solution. If Henry Ford had asked, “Would you like to get where you are going three times faster?” he surely would have gotten some takers.