Startup Advice

Constraints breed creativity.

By running your startup with the stated goal of being cashflow positive, you force your team to take ownership of every dollar just a bit more and consider outside-the-box solutions earlier. It also can influence team members to be willing to go beyond their stated areas of ownership to get things done.

Amazon: How do we keep experimenting in superfast delivery? September 19, 2013

Why Are We Surprised That

Startups Are So Freaking Hard?

We think they can be hacked, but the only enduring moat is effort

Reaching the frontier of a field, you will stumble upon something that hasn’t been solved yet, which will make all the difference. Society will reward you for offering something it wants but hasn’t been able to obtain so far.

The way to that point is through trial and error, iterating, and uncovering different truths.

Disruption, as theorized by Clayton Christensen in the early 1990s, is a process by which a startup offers a lower-cost product that performs worse along standard dimensions of performance for a small subset of customers outside of the mainstream. The product gets adoption, though, because it performs better on a new dimension of performance that... See more

Build a cross-company network of change agents.

You need to start by building out a layer of high-performers within your own team. Before you go broad, adapt and iterate on the culture you want to build among that group. Then, just as they are ready to move up in their career ladders, facilitate cross-functional moves into key roles for them. This... See more