For months now, I’ve been involved with a project that has too many chefs in the kitchen. The truth of the matter is, it seems that too many times (as I’ve read other VC blogs and start up stories) there’s a good chance that there are waiters pretending to be chefs, in the kitchen. Politics has been all but impossible to avoid, benchmarks seem to be mythological creatures with horns coming from their foreheads and weekly conference calls become either therapy, interventions or party lines when one waiter decides to draw another in much to the surprise of other chefs.
If I really had to boil things down to good advice as to what to watch out for, I would advise focusing on two key points: Never speak badly of any one or any thing, and, make a business out of what you can already do. The first expression is a personal favorite and beats “politics” over the head in your social life, business life and family life. Doing what you can already do rather than starting out trying to do what you want to do seems like non-advice, but if you think so, I then know you’ve never successfully started a start up!
Let’s define a successful start up: A successful start up is any endeavor that somehow fulfills a service to the public and is regularly referred to positively by ten times the number of people it took to start it. Being profitable has nothing to do with success in this case – a close-to-true statistic would be that only one in a hundred successful start ups actually survive to being profitable. So three people starting a public review blog or community of some sort (or even a brick and mortar bakery) would be considered successful by this definition if thirty people both regularly and positively thought of and discussed the presence of this effort. Hardly profitable unless you’re selling million-dollar magic cars, but the seed for a larger community has been properly sewn.
A personal mantra of mine, “never speak badly of any one or any thing,” has served me so well through and through that I can’t emphasis this enough. For one thing, you learn how to insult people in really clever ways behind their backs: Sarcasm is nurtured to maturity by following this important, first rule of strifeless existing. Additionally, no one but NO ONE can follow a trail of gossip back to you and reiterate some insult you bestowed upon them in private to some loose-lipped mutual acquaintance. They can’t do it, because it never happened. Your response to a comment about appearance could be something like, “I never said you were ugly! I said you sure have a way of making cheap clothes look really good.” See how great? Hence: Politics and politicking against you is neutered and useless. Audiences can infer all they want; it’s hearsay and all in their little, ugly minds.
Do what you can do. How simple and how horribly forgotten this can get. A wordier thing to remember along these lines is the following: Don’t confuse enthusiasm for ability. I’ve had to watch that other people not offer or be allowed to do things that I already knew they couldn’t do. The results are far from mystifying and time is wasted. If no one you’re working with can play a musical instrument, put ‘make a band’ on the list of things NOT to do no matter how appealing having groupies is. If you hate art, have nothing to do with it. If you can’t type or speak another language, don’t try to start up a translating service. Do a few things and do them really well! Start ups are not the time to try your head out at wearing lots of hats – jack-of-all-trades need not apply.
There’s an aspect of this, “do what you can do” that applies not only to people, but also to the business itself. We got so engrossed in what we wanted to do, that we weren’t doing what we already could do. Guess how far that took us in these passed few months? A car dealership doesn’t sell a car by saying that next year they’ll have motorcycles for sale. Just sell the damn car; keep the vision of selling motorcycles to yourself until you can just sell the damn motorcycle.
Finally, how you look when you say what you’re going to do is nothing next to just doing what you can do. Perhaps this is vague. This advice is probably the hardest of all to take. As the author of Dinarius.com, I am NEVER EVER satisfied with the way things look. I reinvent and re-tool and never ever re-purpose the site. Consider that redesigning should accompany re-purposing a product. Case in point: The very first phase of what I’ve been helping to build is finally done. It’s unsuccessful because, by the definition above, not even ten times the four people it took to start up ever refer to our project positively on any regular basis. Hence, all my months of work is currently a flop.
Making it look better or different doesn’t help. Just selling the damn site is a damn sight more useful. When constantly asked to freshen up the look and say what we’re going to do rather than pushing what we already do, I replied cleverly, “you can try on and wear twenty different suits to look great but if you don’t go to the job interview,” I illustrated by analogy, “you’re absolutely 100% guaranteed to not get the job.”
