an essay for myself and any other future founders/operators
This week someone and I were talking about the process of idea generation, and the execution following taking the form of a side-project or startup. I was compelled to reflect on how to ideate. Most of the ideas I act on came from conversing with friends, family, mentors in specific areas of the world — observing and noticing problems together, hearing what bothers them, and digging into what bothers me.
“It’s not about the idea but the execution” is something I agree wholeheartedly. However, what that leaves out is how the origin of the said idea affects the quality of the execution.
Have you experienced the problem you’re trying to solve directly? Is it a visceral pain or a small, but persistent, annoyance? How much do you want to bring your solution into the world, and for what reason? Who would benefit from it?
I’m not saying that how the team executes isn’t a meaningful factor, because it’s certainly essential, but I think we generally undervalue the origin of an ambitious project. Market conditions, the way the team executes, and what sparked the idea all help determine whether you belong in the land of valuable innovations taken for granted everyday, or the graveyard of dreams that had the potential of a useful product but ultimately failed.
I think if the idea stems from the collective intellect of several people, then you must make it your own by making it meaningful to you. This is less of a vision statement, and more of a justification of your intrinsic conviction on why it should exist. And this raison d’être needs to be articulated clearly at every stage as you build, although it can also constantly evolve. Financial returns is often a necessary but insufficient reason for starting something, for you can pursue any of the other ideas in the universe.
Know that the root of your idea is attached closely to your sense of motivation. You return to it time after time to escape the troughs of stagnant energy accompanying the dimming excitement following a launch. You need it to enter flow states even while you’re barricaded by a mountain of problems you’ve never seen before, with many unknowns and moving parts.
So much interest in the press is given to the genius or cleverness of some founder. But I’m more interested in the craft, mindset, and mental frameworks that served as the backdrop, gave rise to the idea, and fuelled the sustained motivation to create an empire.
Assuming you’ve got the sustained motivation that you hope to last at least for the next few decades, you need to be applying the efforts in the right direction. Apart from the obvious goal of growing the project or startup towards a concrete (non-cosmetic) metric, I now ask myself several questions.
- Learning rate: Am I learning too slowly or too quickly? In operating, speed comes at the expense of inevitable burnouts, overlooked opportunities, and creativity. Am I learning to a point where I experience discomfort that I’m willing to shoulder i.e. bearable growing pains?
- Objective function: In the startup, am I optimizing towards the right goals? Am I starting to develop the right skillset that will be needed as we scale and priorities shift?
- Gradient: Does my learning have high magnitude, especially with respect to the behaviour and needs/wants of my customers. Am I doing the highest leverage thing for my future self, the team, as well as the project/company?
These are concepts I continuously track and pay attention to in the highly uncertain environment of building something new.
Sometimes, it might be worth abandoning a project — cutting it off now despite the dreadful sunken cost. Or perhaps you can hire someone who finds the less-satisfying aspects of your work more enjoyable.
In all other cases, it’s worthwhile to persist. This is why the genesis behind the idea is so important to subscribe to almost religiously. You need it to convince your skeptical friends, early investors, first customers — at a time without any physical product or revenue. It’s necessary to generate forward inertia early, so that you can bootstrap growth even before network effects kick in. Of course, you’ll want to make sure that you’re perspective checking with ones around you and continuously reflecting on your approach so that you don’t end up hurtling into the iceberg like the Titanic (and don’t end up creating your own dataset for beginner ML students to analyze).
In Minecraft, you cannot enchant your weapon or level-up if you don’t have enough experience. You gain experience by farming and mining, trudging through terrain, and completing mundane tasks. The only way is to keep going. Similarly, when you progress beyond the thrill of the initial phase of zero to one, happiness always fades. But if you stay in the motion of either solving or attempting to solve hard things, contentment and enchantment are always around the corner.
To connect, email me at alex.ker@pomona.edu, Twitter, and LinkedIn, subscribe to my substack where I published AI/ML thoughts, opportunities, and more essays like this one.
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