Startup leadership is about saying no to good ideas
Today, most startup leaders take strategy seriously and understand their role in saying yes, and no, to the right things to create focus and direction for their team. They often get one very important thing wrong, though: Startup leaders often think of good strategy as saying yes to the good ideas, and no to the bad ideas. If everything you build is a good idea, assuming your team can execute, you’ll succeed, right?
Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. Startups are idea rich and resource poor. In fact, startups are good idea rich. This means, even if you cut out all the bad ideas, you’ll still end up with way more than you can execute.
Great startup leadership is about saying no to the bad ideas, sure. But mostly, great startup leadership is about saying no to most of the good ideas too. The decisions that make a mediocre startup a generational company are the decisions to not pursue legitimately huge ideas in favour of even better ones.
Clear direction and laser focus is the most important property of a high-velocity venture. Every time you say yes to something new, whether it’s a feature, a sales channel/strategy, a hire, you dilute focus and distort the clarity of your direction. The more you do, the more mediocrely you execute. This is a universal truth.
Behind every great company is a graveyard of fantastic ideas, abandoned, or never even started. Talking to founders, many have a tonne of spare ideas for products, features, and startups they could pursue. This is because they’ve rejected these ideas already. Many regret these decisions: why can’t we just do more? This is why good leadership is difficult. You need to reject independently good ideas for the sake of the bigger picture. If it was just about killing the obviously bad ideas, creating a generational startup would be pretty easy.
If you are the CEO or product leader currently stuck in a failing all-in-one strategy: pivot. The good thing about having a broad product is that you should have plenty of insights into what areas have the most opportunity for disruption and innovation. Find an area to double down, and a pathway towards deprecating some of the bloat. You’ll create a much more successful product that way.
Great startup leadership is about saying no to the bad ideas, sure. But mostly, great startup leadership is about saying no to most of the good ideas too. The decisions that make a mediocre startup a generational company are the decisions to not pursue legitimately huge ideas in favour of even better ones.
Working in an early-stage startup is different to working for a larger company: while many people fail to get anywhere in startups, others skip years or decades of career milestones. Granted, every startup is different. However, I have noticed a few common patterns across many startups that describe the most successful talent.
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