Learn and grow faster than your startup needs you to.
Every founder wants to become the best leader for the business they started. How quickly you learn is way more important than how much you know to begin with.
Photo by Shiromani Kant on Unsplash
Startups run at breakneck speeds. Under the twin stressors of expectation and growth, everything breaks or breaks down. Systems. Structures. Tools. And so they should. But all too often, people break as well. Notably, founders who flame out or fall out of favour with their stakeholders.
“Startups are business machines engineered to grow quickly. Once a company hits hyper-growth, the market exerts enormous strain on every aspect of the company. Internal processes and systems break all the time as the company moults into a new skin” - Tomasz Tunguz, RedPoint Ventures
In other words, what got you here, won’t get you there.
Here are some thoughts to help founders stay ahead of the learning and growth curve.
First, give yourself some credit
At a certain point in life, we settle on our go-to values, personality traits, and tastes in fashion, food, music, and haircuts. We even have well known idioms to confirm it: You can’t teach an old dog new tricks. Leopards don’t change their spots. As the saying goes, we get “stuck in our ways”.
For example, as a teenager in the 70s (yes, that old!) I settled on long, shoulder-length hair with a fringe cropped low enough to camouflage my pubescent monobrow.
By the 1980s, quite possibly inspired by the musical majesty of Billy Idol, I’d exchanged rampant tresses for a crew cut and dodgy blonde bleach jobs.
Wait! What?
Yes, my hairstyles, like my values, preferences, personality, musical likes and peeves, professional interests, lifestyle choices, places to call home, relationships, and favourite footwear, have continued to change over time in ways impossible to foresee.
My go-tos have, for the most part, come and gone.
Far from being in a fixed state, I’m in constant flux with a deep-seated tendency to underestimate my appetites and capacities for change. And so are you.
You might be binge-watching Squid Game in the wee hours right now, just like you did with GOT, but you’ll move on soon enough as, yet again, you actively seek out change.
Game of Thrones, The Handmaid’s Tale, The Queen’s Gambit and, now, Squid Game. What’s next?
You could have climbed the corporate ladder, or stayed or on the partner track at McKinsey or Bain, but you didn’t. You could have muddled along with your side hustle or passion project instead of backing yourself as a full-time entrepreneur.
We’re much less “stuck in our ways” and much more creative, dynamic, and adaptive than we give ourselves credit for. You’re actually pretty good at this “change” caper.
You’ll never see this version of you again
Daniel Gilbert, Professor of Psychology at Harvard, has spent a lot of time researching our relationship with change.
Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished. The person you are right now is as transient, as fleeting, and as temporary as all the people you’ve ever been. The one constant in our lives is change." - Daniel Gilbert
Gilbert argues that we are caught in an illusion in which our personal history has just come to an abrupt end, that we have recently become the people we were always meant to be and will be for the rest of our lives. Temporarily stuck in the intoxicating now-ness of our existence, we find it difficult to imagine a future state of being so remarkably different from the present.
According to Gilbert’s research, at every age from 18 to 68, “people vastly underestimate how much change they would experience in the next 10 years.” At every life stage from 18 to 68 the amount of change we predict for the next 10 years falls well short of the lived experience of change we report for the last 10 years.1
According to Gilbert, we all experience the “end of history” illusion. In Gilbert’s research, actual changes in values, as well as personality and preferences - favourite foods, holidays, hobbies and bands - are much greater than we anticipate.
In one experiment, Gilbert and his colleagues ask participants, “How much would you pay to see your favourite musician from 10 years ago perform today? On average, participants answered $80.
They ask a different group of participants, “How much would you pay to see your current favourite musician perform in 10 years?” This time the average response is more than 50% higher - $129!!*
Why? We have a tendency to indulge our current preferences because we overestimate their stability.
Tim Urban, writer of the brilliant blog, Wait But Why, speaks to this same point at scale. Urban’s big idea here is that human progress is exponential. In the present moment, though, it’s hard to recognise or comprehend that the graph is about to go vertical.
As Urban explains it, “You have to remember something about what it’s like to stand on a time graph: you can’t see what’s to your right.” It’s possible to look backwards with relative certainty; it’s impossible to look forward with any certainty, particularly when progress itself is increasing at an increasing pace.
What Urban sees in aggregate as “progress” Gilbert sees disaggregated in individuals as “change”, but the phenomenon is the same one. It’s much easier to remember than it is to imagine. Hindsight offers 20/20 vision, while foresight has glaucoma.
Start me up
These observations stake out a tricky landscape for startup founders. Nothing stays still for you, not your values, your personality, your relationships, or your preferences. And all these dynamics are playing out on top of the dizzying changes, challenges and shapeshifting that come with running a startup.
“Your startup is going to grow and change in so many different ways that it requires leaders who can learn and grow faster than the business needs them to. They need to have a steep slope, a fast learning curve. If they have a good y-intercept, but not great slope, the demands of the business will outstrip their ability to perform well” - Tomasz Tunguz, RedPoint Ventures.
As Tunguz explains2, this idea of y-intercept and slope comes from Stanford Professor John Ousterhout, who says, “you shouldn’t be afraid to try new things even if you’re completely clueless about the area you’re going into. No need to be afraid about that. As long as you learn fast you’ll catch up and you’ll be fine.”3
“How fast you learn is a lot more important than how much you know to begin with. So in general, I say that people emphasise too much how much they know and not how fast they're learning” - Professor John Ousterhout
Setting your ego, assumptions, and preferences aside in order to learn quickly is not a predisposition; it’s a skill born of self-awareness.
Happily, it’s one we can all learn.
Flip your default
Ask founders what they’re working on, and they’ll probably say, “the business”, which could mean anything from the product roadmap to the next capital raising. Sometimes the answer will be more about “the team” - workforce planning, hiring, culture, feedback loops, remuneration. But rarely does a founder answer, “what are you working on?” with “myself”.
And yet, it’s the founder who must learn and grow into the very best leader for the business at every stage of the journey or risk stifling its potential. It’s the founder who sets the standards and models the values and virtues of the business.
No one holds more sway over the whole shebang than the founder. So when do you get to work on yourself? If you're the most influential person in your company, you’d be wise to make time to optimise yourself.
If you really want to improve your “slope”, think about flipping your default and putting yourself first. It might sound selfish, but it’s just sound strategy.
Founder first
There are inevitabilities baked into any good flywheel.4 When you do one thing, it’s inevitable that the next thing starts happening.
“A flywheel is not, is not, a list of action steps drawn as a circle. No, it has to have an underlying logic so that if you hit component A, you can’t help but get to component B, and if you get component B, you can't help but get to component C, and so on” - Jim Collins
What should a flywheel for a founder look like?
Well, it wouldn’t start with working yourself to a standstill. That’s kinda at odds with the whole idea of a flywheel in the first place.
But how about this? Optimise yourself so that you bring your best to your team so they can do their best work and, in turn, can really start to optimise the business so that you can improve yourself for the next turn of the wheel.
In this model, your learning and development are fully recognised as key drivers of progress and not languishing on the bottom of a to-do list.
Putting yourself first is not about ego. Quite the opposite. It’s about humility, openness, insight, empathy, and fundamentally good strategy. You’ve got an exploding population of stakeholders to serve. It really does all start with you.
We’re all a work in progress.
Upside Founder Programs help founders become the very best leaders for their businesses as they grow from Series A to Series B, and beyond.
Apply now for the 2022 cohort.
Upside Founder Programs are generously supported by KPMG High Growth Ventures.
Ousterhout https://www.businessinsider.com/guideline-for-life-in-one-graph-2014-8?r=AU&IR=T
Collins - Youtube “Turning the Flywheel - Underlying Logic”