Business discovery is uncomfortable

It’s more comfortable to scale to big business than stay in the customer discovery cycle until there’s a repeatable, scalable business model.

The majority of the world’s business people know how to operate an established business. Everyone can give a summary of departmental structure (Marketing, Sales, Product Development). The language is the same, the tasks are similar.

Now take a startup. Depending on the market it’s attempting to reach, the structure of the company may be entirely different. In the name of agility and low-cost iteration, there may be no Marketing or Sales department. It’s work is not measured in profit, it’s measured in progressive learning towards a viable business model. For the common employee or manager, this is uncomfortable territory. As a result, there is a strong push to blow past this stage to the familiar structures and metrics. This was the case of Webvan, whose senior leadership felt that the solution to its startup chaos was to grow rapidly (Blank, pg. 13).

Blank’s concept of startup activity could be interpreted by a business person as wasted time. Little to no revenue? Regular mistakes and modifications necessary? No possible hope of forecasting? Ends when the money dries up? It’s enough that the entrepreneur’s idea may be ridiculed, but to remain in laborious discovery until a sound business model has been proven is incredibly uncomfortable. To have the best chance of success; however, the entrepreneur must remain in customer discovery until he has proven his vision is both repeatable and scalable; i.e. can it last and will it grow.

For an entrepreneur to stay in customer discovery, he will need to hire people who understand the startup mentality. They must be:

The entrepreneur must resonate with these characteristics, and he must surround himself with others who do.

It’s an exciting discovery that a person who could excel in a startup may not necessarily be the best business leader. In fact, a seasoned CEO may be the worst person to join a startup. The rules are not the same, the metrics don’t tell the same story, and the description of success is drastically different from an established business. Now it makes sense that some could be considered serial entrepreneurs - they excel at the iteration towards a business model and have no desire to oversee day-to-day operations.

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