Immersion
Startups aren’t typical. All successful startups are anomalous in retrospect. There is a very strange set of circumstances, circumstances that have been controlled to attempt to engineer startups as of late, that cause what would otherwise be a normal company to grow abnormally quickly. These circumstances haven’t all been isolated, and I can’t yet tell you from first-hand experience what they are, but I can tell you that these circumstances are as atypical as circumstances in which a company is incubated come. There are the obvious ones, like an idea with the potential to grow quickly, something with an obviously large market potential and low or already addressed barriers to growth, but there are other circumstances. Circumstances that cause the founders to accelerate the growth of the company where it would have otherwise stabilized at SMB level and been replicated into a business model rather than one singular company. I’ll write them out as I realize them (I can only hope that I realize them through personal experience with Watchsend) but after three months I’ve already isolated one.
That one is immersion. There are decisions that are only rational from an insider’s perspective, and those decisions are the kind that drive a startup to cancer-like accelerated growth. It’s interesting that this only happens if you have the ability to immerse yourself in the startup. Every interaction outside of the startup breaks the immersion, elucidates your accomplishment and makes your problems seem less significant. Your self esteem will skyrocket, but your productivity will plummet. The outsiders’ perspective will rub off, they envision you high up on a perch, with a few more footholds to the peak, but only if they were standing on the perch would they notice the minutiae critical to your climb, that every foothold is precarious and every inch of ascension could be the difference between life and death. So that’s at least one lesson learned; don’t lose the immersion, your insiders’ perspective is critical, and be wary of advice from the outside. No matter how intelligent the advisor, unless you are deluded into believing you’ve communicated absolutely all the information you have in the decision, they are unlikely to be so much more intelligent that they’d make a better decision than you would. That may actually be part of another characteristic of its own. These incredible decisions need to be made, and they can either be made on your own or via the advice of an advisor. An advisor could only provide this information if the founders were sufficiently good at communicating their situation, and a better decision would only be made by the founders if they were sufficiently intelligent. That sufficient intelligence is actually a function of the ratio of their intelligence to their ability to communicate to an intelligent advisor. So, the better they are at communicating, the less intelligent they need to be, and the worse they are at communicating, the more intelligent they ought to be. If they are 25% brighter than another set of founders but 50% less communicative, they have a lower chance of success than the other team. The connection here? The more intelligent you are, the more immersed you need to be, because you are that much better equipped to make the kinds of decisions that will jetset your company. How does one determine this ratio in a set of founders, this FQ? What is the magic number threshold considering all other factors constant? I don’t know. It may be something that can only be evaluated en masse with a population study of successful startup founders, but what I do know is that this FQ exists, and subjectively, all successful startup founders I know have a high one. It appears it’s easy to correct for a low FQ, too. Just communicate more, reduce your immersion until it matches your FQ, but no lower. To make the right decisions here you need to be as immersed as possible while still being intelligent yet intentionally risk inclined.