Every founder I know has lost a deal to a decision they never made. And if you’re a founder reading this, you know I’m speaking the truth.
NFX talk at length about this, and they know the game - a startup has one real advantage over everyone else. Speed. You can decide faster and you can stop faster, because there is no compliance committee, no governance layer, no loser who’s been in their job four centuries and cares more about lunch than progress, between you and the decision.
If someone wants to try a channel, try it. Someone wants to test a feature, test it. If it fails, turn it off.
Yeah yeah, we all know this.
BUT founders still slow down anyway, and the reason is loss aversion. We are wired to care more about what we might lose than what we might win, and that imbalance shows up as doubt. Doubt is what stops people jumping out of a plane that is statistically safer than the drive to the airfield*. A small voice says the parachute might not open, or the instructor strapped to your back might not know what they’re doing. They do. The voice is still there.
That voice is a survival instinct. A founder without it would hire and advertise willy nilly and be dead from the smoke inhalation from the money fire inside a year. The problem is what we do with it, we treat doubt as a reason to wait, when the only thing that resolves it is moving.
Not long ago, I was at a startup growing super fast (for those days) on the back of financial services revenue, and for months we debated whether to go after other sectors. We worried it would be a distraction, we worried it would dilute what was working. We argued it in every leadership meeting and resolved nothing. And the problem with smart people, is they are excellent at creating good reasons to NOT do things. Eventually we stopped debating and went after two at once. We won in both. One of those deals was bigger than anything we had closed before, and the sectors we had been nervous about became the ones that pulled the whole business up to the next level. None of it happened while we were still talking about it.
The same thing played out for me personally this year. Everyone tells a founder the capital and the customers are in the US. I knew that. I still spent weeks going round in circles…was it worth the upheaval? Would I be able to sell to American businesses? Would American investors take me seriously? Is my natural inclination to be offensive about everything and deep disdain for open carry laws going to get me murdered? Those are natural insecurities and I would not want to be without them. I would only ever find out whether they were real by going. So I went. Best decision I have made this year.
The rule holds everywhere. Unsure about a hire? Decide.
Unsure a channel is right? Run it.
Worried that switching something off will have consequences? Switch it off.
Worried an investor will ignore a cold email? Send it.
Meta's metaverse was a bad bet. It was also a settled question within two years, which is more than most companies manage with their bad bets.
Here is the test: What are you looking at right now, today, that you could undo within a week? Make the decision. It might be the best one you have ever made. If it turns out to be terrible, it has cost you a week.
If you have an assistant connected to your tools, ask it directly: what am I deliberating over that I could simply decide? You will be surprised by the list.
The worst an investor can say is no. The worst a hire can do is leave. None of that is fatal.
Doubt is.
*this is almost certainly not true, but you get the point
