Desperation-Induced Focus

Startups benefit from starving. Starving creates hunger, which drives people to solve problems with resourcefulness and urgency. When exploring new products in a big company with excessive resources, you need to create scarcity to emulate this startup starvation. This generally means operating as a small, scrappy, siloed team.

Those who really win (an industry, or in a career) did so by delaying gratification. One of the greatest competitive advantages in a startup team — or any bold new project or turnaround — is simply sticking together long enough to figure it out. This is hard because our natural human tendency is to crave short-term rewards and seek short-cuts to sa... See more

Take, for example, the ambition to “make your venture-backed startup profitable”: to develop, market, and distribute a product or service that’s never existed before, in a form that’s valuable and accessible enough for large numbers of people to want to pay you for it, in sufficient quantity that your revenue consistently exceeds your costs.

If you... See more