🔥 Hot Take Alert #4: Annual Planning Is a Colossal Waste of Time

Everything is changing all the time in the world of startups. That’s OK as long as you acknowledge that in your planning process. Your plan should help you adapt to the ever changing landscape vs. getting fixated on “the plan.” Plans should identify opportunities and problems to solve but be flexible on the details—timing, resourcing, and goals.

Companies get into serious trouble when they take a purely tops-down approach to producing a revenue target during annual planning and then try to back into the work that will get them there bottoms-up. They end up both overestimating the probability of success (most bets won’t pay off) and then baking them into their financial plan as a sure thing... See more

When you’re early on in company building you have a lot of uncertainty which you chip away at by learning and iterating.