If there’s one thing all founders can agree on it’s that you can never have it all.
Maybe one day after you’ve IPO’d, retired, and spend half the year traveling the world on your mega-yacht it’ll be a different story.
But being a founder inherently means making tradeoffs every day and the earlier your startup is the more you need to make.
Even if partners, investors, employees, and customers all asking for different things it’s up to you to guide the ship in the right direction and make hard decisions.
This week I’m highlighting 6 tradeoffs that all founders need to make 👇
6 Tradeoffs Founders Make
Control
I built products at both Uber and Airbnb. At Uber every team member had tons of autonomy — the person closest to the problem was the one who was trusted to find the best solution for it. At Airbnb all strategy and direction was handed down from above — the person with the broadest context was trusted to solve the problem and individual team members were just there to execute.
As an employee I enjoyed my time at Uber a lot more but as a founder I understand why Airbnb was built the way it was.
Both are excellent companies in their own ways. But one big difference was that you could always find people in the Uber office late at night, working hard. At Airbnb we had lots of meetings and people left on time.
As a founder it can be hard to give up any control. Your company will make more mistakes if you do. But allowing those mistakes to happen creates more buy-in from your team. They’ll work harder to prove themselves.
Focus
When you’re a startup you have unlimited opportunity — you could build anything!
But you also have incredibly limited resources. Often you have no money. You’re on the Soylent and ramen diet. You’re sleeping under the stairs.
Startups need flexibility to adapt, survive, and pursue new opportunities — sometimes rapidly. But they also need focus to avoid getting lost in a sea of half-done ideas.
The more you focus on a single thing, the more you may have blinders on and miss a big breakthrough, or a connection to someone who ends up mentoring you and helping you meet investors. It can be tough to say no to happy hours or new product ideas for this reason.
But on the other hand, a lack of focus means you never make enough progress to reach conviction about whether something is useful or not.
A good tactic is to run time-boxed sprints against specific ideas. Give yourself 1 month to reach conviction one way or the other. Pursue whatever gets you closer to that. If you don’t hit it in a month, move on — you’ve had long enough.
Opportunity
The less you take on, the more you’ll accomplish.
Startups are successful when they solve a very specific problem 10x better than what currently exists. They fail when they try to do 10 things, or 1 thing for 10 different types of users.
But it can be hard to know what to prioritize.
A strategy that’s worked well for me is to say “yes” 90% of the time before I know what problem I want to solve with a new project, but then say “no” 90% of the time once I do.
Once I’m in the “no” phase, I only say “yes” to things that will measurably and directly help me make progress against my north star goal for the business.
It feels bad saying no to opportunity, but if you’ve correctly evaluated that what you’re working on is a big opportunity already then your best bet is to continuously work on it — your results will compound. Other things will provide linear gains or short-term wins.
Be confident you’ve chosen the right path already.
Advice
When you’re building something interesting, a lot of smart people want to help.
But the most successful founders tend to be great at filtering out bad advice. They identify the signal and ignore the noise.
Unfortunately much of their advice tends to be conflicting. Why? Because even knowledge outsiders don’t have the depth of visibility into your specific company and situation that you do.
A startup built on the advice of others tends to look like a patch-work of decisions rather than a singular vision.
So despite the good intentions of others it’s usually a bad idea to blindly take outside advice. Instead founders should seek out counterexamples to most advice they get as quickly as possible.
And if they’re unable to get clarity on a tradeoff before needing to make a decision they should trust their gut, especially if it’s a two-way door.
Size
Startups are desperately trying to grow. A bigger company is generally a more stable company.
However a bigger company is also generally a slower moving company. And a startup’s biggest (perhaps its only true) advantage is speed.
Founders fight the constant battle to keep a team small while still having enough firepower to achieve the startup’s goals without burning the team out.
The best founders keep teams small and fight the creep of bureaucracy at all costs, for as long as possible and ask a lot of their teams.
Vision
Founders are visionaries. They chart paths through new markets before the rest of the world knows they exist. Just look at Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, and Jeff Bezos.
But it’s easy to get lost in the clouds.
No matter how far along your startup is, every day is a fight for survival with changes to your market and competitors who are either much larger and well known or newer and faster moving.
The grand vision you’re trying to build doesn’t matter if the company doesn’t grow enough to make it a reality.
Be pragmatic about the short-term and build a company with strong executional DNA.
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