My eccentric approach to entrepreneurship currently boils down to the following principles.
- Spread risk through multiple projects and multiple partners. I have my own little VC portfolio going, except that I am a principal in all the startups. I have more work to do, but also have more equity. Needless to say, I have to work smart and efficiently for this principle to even be executable.
Why multiple partners? When I have the same partner on multiple projects, we tend to let all our projects except one fall by the wayside. And different partners bring different skills that are useful for particular projects. - Do as much as possible, myself. I believe this principle is the primary source of my sustainable competitive advantage on competitors. The
more I do myself, the more about my startups is in my mind. When
disparate things are in my mind, it naturally makes connections
between them. (I'm pretty sure yours does too.)
In most companies (yes, even most startups), work gets cut up various ways and assigned to distinct people, or even outsourced. Not so with my projects. I want to be tailing multiple server logs while writing code and thinking about design and marketing, for example. My best ideas have come this way: with lots of seemingly different (but actually related) things in my mind at once. No silos. No black boxes. Even if a partner is primarily responsible for something, I want to know about every detail, so I can feed it into this coalescence engine. - Question everything, all the time. Nothing is off limits from my questioning. All decisions are considered as temporary as they can be. This principle keeps the ideas flowing for me. And in practice, it means a lot of thinking, reading and research in conjunction with endless experiments, revisions and tweaks. I believe this principle is a secondary source of sustainable competitive advantage simply because most people, and in turn, their companies, tend to follow "standard practice" and to freeze decisions once made.
- Only trust data. Just because something is plausible, doesn't make it true or optimal. Additionally, tweaking with no data is just a random walk. Sometimes that is all you can do, however. But as soon as there is data, I analyze it and trust it over non-data or unverifiable data. This process can yield some non-intuitive results, and I believe it is another source of secondary sustainable competitive advantage. It shouldn't be, but the hard truth is most people, and in turn, their companies, trust more than data.
- Don't seek funding unless there is a good reason for doing so. This principle keeps my equity high and my focus on target.
I think a lot of entrepreneurs follow these principles to some extent, at least some of the time. But I take their adherence to the extreme. And I think that is where the sustainable competitive advantage actually arises.
I did not approach entrepreneurship like this initially. I've arrived here after many years. Along the way, I've certainly made a lot of mistakes, as well as gained an appreciation for the potential usefulness and drawbacks of this approach. My (surmised) potential usefulness of this approach is laid out above, albeit tersely. I will attempt to summarize the approaches' drawbacks, lessons learned from past mistakes, and corollary principles in future posts.
Of course, I wholeheartedly realize the real usefulness of this eccentric approach is unclear. I say I only trust real data, and yet I only have one data point. And on that one data point (myself), I only have (at least in my opinion) one major success and one minor one. Yes, that is encouraging, but hardly compelling.
Consequently, I'm interested in more data. Are you following this approach, or a related one? What has your experience been? (I realize it's not "clean" data--more anecdotal--but it's a start...)
Update: additional comments can be found here.
