Stop doing what you love
One of the hardest advice for entrepreneurs is also counter to our popular narrative
One of the hardest advice for entrepreneurs is also counter to our popular narrative
It was summer of 1999. I was four weeks into my dream internship: a software development engineer at Microsoft porting games to the Dreamcast game console. Bill Gates, still CEO at the time, had invited all the interns for brunch at his house — a sprawling mansion on lake Washington that featured medieval tapestries and AI-driven modern art. After a brief talk he opened the floor for questions. “When was the last time you have written code” I asked? “It must have been over ten years” he answered. Then he proceeded to say he actualled missed programming. But, as CEO, he needed the discipline do the things he didn’t necessarily enjoy.
I didn’t think much of his comment at the time. But today I realize it’s perhaps the most universal advice one can offer to a startup founder: Stop doing what you are good at and start doing what the business needs.
Most founders are good at and enjoy a particular function — whether it’s engineering or product or sales. Our strength becomes the hammer we use against every problem. If you’re a product driven CEO, you opt for developing version 2.0 instead of making the effort to put version 1.0 in front of customers. If you are a sales driven CEO, you keep selling the vision instead of focusing your energy into the painful minutiae of building a product.
This habit is exacerpated by the fairy-tale narrative our media loves to tell about founders: google founders programmed thier way into building a half a trillion dollar company. Airbnb succeeded becuase the founders loved great design. It’s a great narrative. It’s often a flat out lie.
Google built a great engineering culture, but it was their ad business innovations that made the company into the great business it is today. Airbnb didn’t succeed because of the founder’s passion for design; It succeeded because of the hard and painful work they put into building a two sided market place. It could have looked like Craigslist and still been quite successful.
Bill Gates was an amazing programmer infamous for writing a full basic interpreter that used under 4000 bytes of memory. But when IBM wanted an operating system, he knew he was better off licensing existing software instead of writing a new one from scratch. The nerdy programmer had to abandon the computer lab in favor of striking business development and licensing deals. And that’s how Microsoft was born.
Doing what you don’t enjoy is not easy! You must have the intellectual honesty to acknowledge that what you are good at is not what the business needs. And get up every day and do these hard things — from recruiting to fund raising and sales or marketing. It’s the hard way to build a startup. But it’s also the only way.