culled from:http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com
I
had a picture in the office of my first company with the logo above and
the capital letters JFDI. (In case it’s not obvious it’s a play on the
Nike slogan, “Just Do It.”) I believe that being successful as an
entrepreneur requires you to get lots of things done. You are
constantly faced with decisions and there is always incomplete
information. This paralyzes most people. Not you.
Entrepreneurs
make fast decisions and move forward knowing that at best 70% of their
decisions are going to be right. They move the ball forward every day.
They are quick to spot their mistakes and correct. Good entrepreneurs
can admit when their course of action was wrong and learn from it. Good
entrepreneurs are wrong often. If you’re not then you’re not trying
hard enough. Good entrepreneurs have a penchant for doing vs.
over-analyzing. (obviously don’t read this as zero analysis)
I
spent nearly a decade building software for large companies and then
advising companies on the same. I didn’t have to make many serious
decisions. So I was surprised at the sheer volumes of decisions that
had to be made when I became a startup CEO. Most of them are completely
mundane such as choosing which: bank, office space, 1-year lease vs.
2-year lease, logo, URL, pricing structure or which VC.
The
technology team disagrees on direction and wants resolutions. Your head
of sales thinks she should fire somebody. You need to decide whether
or not to launch at TechCrunch50. Somebody asks whether you plan to set
up 401k’s and do contribution matching. I think this paralyzes many
people.
air-jordan-logoI learned quickly that I needed to just do
things. Yet I initially had a team full of people that seemed to
either over analyze things or more likely wait for a higher source
within the company to make the tough decisions for them. You’re sales
person is getting blocked by the CTO who says she shouldn’t go above him
but the CTO isn’t approving the deal. Should she take a chance and
potentially ruffle feathers?
Yes, I know it’s my job as the CEO
to be the coach for people and that’s fine. But if everybody is looking
for me to make their decisions we’ll never get anything done. I felt
like I had done the hard bit and chosen people that I truly respected
and I would rather empower them to make decisions and accept
consequences.
Sometimes you need to break some eggs to get things
done so if that’s what it takes I wanted my team to go for it and I
wanted to symbolize that it was OK with me. I would far rather have
some messes to clean up than to never have them cross the line trying.
So
I took on the motto JFDI to symbolize this. And I think my team did a
great job and rose to the occasion. Maybe it helps that I love
controversy and pushing the boundaries so people felt it was OK for them
to do it as well.
Another side of JFDI is finding ways to get
stuff done that seem impossible. Entrepreneurs have a way of doing
that. Getting suppliers to accept terms that they said they never
normally agree, getting accepted to speak on a panel when the conference
organizer initially said “no,” getting people to moonlight for you
until you have the cash to bring them on board.
A couple of quick stories / examples:
1. Making Things Happen
There’s
a guy in Los Angeles that I met at several tech networking events. He
was a really nice and personable guy who had deep domain knowledge in an
industry that he’d worked in for 10 years that is in need of
technological advancement. He wanted to be the guy who did it. So we
discussed his ideas several times. I usually try to avoid getting stuck
reviewing people’s PowerPoint decks (I get this request too often and
frankly I’m already behind on my own work!) but there are some people
you just take an (extra) liking to and want to help. This was such a
guy.
So over several months I went through a few iterations on
his idea. He was stuck on capital raising. He wanted to know how to
get started and “Could I intro him to a couple of local angels?” One
night after a DealMaker Media event we got 20 minutes together after the
event ended. I was blunt (warning: that sometimes happens with me) and
told him not to bother and that I wasn’t prepared to help with angels.
“Why?”
he asked. I told him he wasn’t a real entrepreneur. He looked
stunned. I said that he had been talking about doing this for too
long. He still had no website and no prototypes. But “he didn’t have
the budget to hire a developer until he had raised money!”
I said
that was my point. “A real entrepreneur would have done it anyway. He
would have found somebody technical and inspired that individual to work
for equity or deferred payment. Real entrepreneurs are contagious.
They are filled with ideas and they get those ideas onto paper. That
paper can be in the form of wireframes or in the form of a PowerPoint
plan. Or worst case your ideas can be conveyed verbally. But they GET
THINGS DONE. You have the skills and knowledge to do that.”
I
walked away kind of feeling bad. I don’t like to intentionally crush
people’s hopes. But I always view my job as being honest so that people
don’t waste time, money or both if their ideas aren’t good or the
positive execution isn’t likely. But then something awesome happened.
He took my comments as a challenge. He went out and found a developer
and built a product. He refined his business plan and he got
commitments for $150-200k but needed some lead angels to commit first.
When he re-approached me he had a much better plan and he had a
prototype! I introduced him to some angels and his round was OVER
SUBSCRIBED!
That is a true story. I don’t know whether the
entrepreneur feels comfortable with my saying who he is so if he does
and he reads this perhaps he’ll put his details in the comments
section. But I bring up this story for a reason.
2. Analysis Paralysis
RodinI
used to sit on the board of a company (for which I DID NOT invest) with
a very smart and very likable CEO. This person was educated at the
best US schools and had worked for a top-tier strategy consulting firm –
one of the big 3. The CEO led every board meeting with vigor and the
board members (sans me) were always wowed. The CEO had 60-page
Powerpoint presentations analyzing every micro detail of the business.
The company had less than $5 million in revenue yet we had a multi-tab
spreadsheet doing activity-based costing on our customer service staff,
operations and technology.
We had every chart every invented by
man (or McKinsey) showing failure rates of our product,
mean-times-to-repair, detailed sales forecast charts, etc. Charts.
What lovely charts! I know they would have been very useful in
dissected the woes of General Motors. I was the only unimpressed board
member. I was the one pointing out that we were behind on our sales
targets and our “Elephant Deal” that had been promised was 6 months
late.
After a few board meetings I finally spoke up. I was a
bull in a china shop. I said (out loud), “I sure wish that some of the
time that went into these PowerPoint slides would have gone into
meetings with the COO, CFO or CMO of [Elephant Customer].” The CEO had
never met with any of them.
With a CEO that likable, smart, educated and accomplished it made board members squirm that I was willing to call bullshit.
I’m
sure you know what happens next. We missed our sales target by more
than 66% for the year but we had great slides explaining why. The next
year we set the sales budget equal to the previous year’s sales budget
that we had missed. We missed the next year by more than 33%. Nobody
seemed shocked. The company has burned through serious cash. I
complained the whole way. It was not fun. No “independent” board
members seemed to care (or even comprehend the lunacy of the whole
situation).
To this day I’m sure they see the situation
differently. Beautiful slides by top-tier consultants have hoodwinked
large companies for years and I can see why. They are intoxicating,
complex, insightful and tell a great story. But in the end they’re
usually just that – a story. Sometimes a fantasy.
I still really
like this CEO and have deep respect for this person outside of the role
of being a CEO. The “Peter Principle” says that “everybody rises to
their level of incompetency.” Read this as some people who are great at
analyzing to not make great doers and therefore do not make great
entrepreneurs. I think many VCs have learned this the hard way when
they step in to temporarily run companies as I have seen happen.
The
problem with the company that I described above was that there was
somebody willing to fund ongoing losses and the board continued to
believe that good times were just around the corner. Maybe they’ll be
proved right some day. I certainly hope so. But in the UK we used to
call this “promising jam tomorrow.” I was tired of jam tomorrow. I
left the board. The company never JFDI.
