“If a startup can't do more faster, it usually just gets dead faster.”
(David Cohen, Co-founder Techstars)
Efficiency in a startup is about doing more, faster, better and cheaper. In other words, it’s getting the right things done. In next class we will dig deeper into the definition of efficiency. For this first class, we will focus on explaining why it matters for you and your startup to be efficient.
1. Focus is a condition to survive
Startups have little resources, human and financial. Therefore, they have to monetize and grow fast to survive.
Time is money and money is what keeps you alive. You will have to give up on many ideas to move on and monetize before you run out of cash. You have to FOCUS and Get Things Done with Efficiency.
It’s a question of intensity (we will explain this in the class key concepts and misconceptions). Indeed, startups live in highly dynamic and challenging environments. They have to do more with less. Therefore, the best entrepreneurs are those who can manage the chaos, focus on what's important, and find a way to execute efficiently.
2. Focus is a Competitive Advantage
If you and your team master at getting the right things done, it can become a strong competitive advantage in front of your other startup competitors but not only.
Corporate and traditional companies have paradoxically too much money and people to get shit done fast and smart. They are involved in long processes, bureaucratic conflicts and hours of strategy to define how to spend the money. Their team players are employees, which means they go to work to get salary and a kind of work/life balance (meaning they are not here to go extra miles in their thoughts). They define growth opportunities as the ability to scale in the hierarchy, not necessarily to learn.
With your small team of passionate team players, you have a pool of talents that join first of all because they believe in you and the vision.They evaluate the opportunity cost of joining a startup is worth it. This means, they don’t mind giving up on a high salary, position prestige and stability of working in corporations (cost) for joining the chaotic environment of a startup and therefore learn with a certain freedom of action (opportunity). They are hungry to grow!
The Art of Focusing, Doing faster, is one competitive advantage that startups have in front of big companies. Leverage it!
Finally, take note that when you are fundraising, investors will pay attention to your level of focus. This skill is so important to succeed that different investors and VCs have made it a criteria of rejection in their investment funnel (David Cohen and Brad Feld, “Do More Faster”, Techstar Lessons to accelerate your startup, 2011).
3. Focus is a skill to learn faster
Being efficient and moving the needle is also related to executing smart. It follows the startup's golden principles such as Keep It Simple, Keep It Lean (KISKIL), Done Better than Perfect, In Experiment We Trust.
This course gives you hints and tactics to implement and improve your focus and skills to get the right things done. But if you don’t test those tactics in real life, if you don’t start experimenting, if you are stuck making decisions fearing to do the right one, you will not learn properly.
If you can’t learn, then you can’t iterate fast, and if you can’t iterate fast, you take the risk to put yourself in a situation where pivoting is no longer an option and die.
Focus is a mindset you need to embrace to learn:
- Push yourself and your team to have an opinion that can be defended by facts and data.
- Test those assumptions and measures the outcomes.
- Make fast decisions based on the results.
- Have the courage to admit your failures.
- Learn, iterate and improve till it works.
You can be the smartest founder in your niche, have the best strategy, the most bullish vision or the best access to capital, if you don’t DO, you won’t win the game in the end.
Summary
In this first class, we have discussed why it is important to be focused within a startup organization. Here are the key points, you need to keep in mind:
- Focus is a condition to survive as your resources are limited.
- Focus is a competitive advantage to move ahead in front of your competition.
- Focus is a catalyst to learn to run your startups toward sustainable growth.
In the next class, we will take the time to share some background around the art of focusing and getting shit done. We discuss the most common misconceptions. Finally, we come up with a definition of what is focusing in a startup context.
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