Last weekend I ran my first half marathon! Woot. Here’s how it went:

Training

After my 10k’s at Stanford and Eugene, I backed off a little bit, then started pushing my long runs again, getting to 9.2 miles before winter break. I did my best to stay in shape over the holidays and ran a bit in the chilly New England weather.

I’ve basically had a rough pattern of doing a threshold/faster run of 2.5 to 3 miles during the week (usually on treadmill) and a longer slower run on the weekend (to train farther distances). In between that I do elliptical/bike workouts, interval training, body weight workouts and at least one heavy lifting day (deadlift, bench and squat/leg press/pullups)

I was pleased to complete a 9.8 mile run the week after getting back to San Francisco and planned to do one more big run two weeks before the half. However, that run got cut short by some GI issues and I stopped at 8 miles.

Pre-race troubleshooting

That wasn’t so bad, except that then my foot started bothering me the next day. There was some soreness on the side of my right foot that got more painful as the day went on. By Sunday night (36 hours after the 8 miler) I was hurting pretty bad just walking around.

The pain didn’t go away with ice and ibprofen. After some googling, I figured it was either a stress fracture (BAD!) or an inflamed tendon on the side of my foot. Since I didn’t want to take any chances, I went to see a podiatrist. At this point I figured I was not running the half.

The diagnosis was – “It might be a stress fracture, but it’s more likely tendonitis. Tape your foot up, ice and see how you feel in a few days”. That weekend I tried to say off my feet. Early next week, I was starting to feel pretty good.

Doc says it might be ok to do the race, knowing that I really want to, but first try running a few miles. So I did. Unfortunately the taped up foot and lack of running meant I started feeling hot spots just a mile in. I wasn’t feeling much pain so I bailed on the extra miles, deciding that I knew enough about my foot status to go for it.

The race itself

The race took place in a regional park in Fremont, CA (East Bay). It was a nice day, a little chilly, but by the time the race started, t-shirt and shorts were fine. The route was a big loop plus an out and back.

I was a little nervous. Not only was my foot just getting better but I was worried about getting blisters early in the race. Additionally, I had felt a little sick in the days leading up to the race and didn’t really do of anything activity-wise. But as I’ve heard – better to go into a race under trained than over trained. And I was definitely the latter.

MILES 1 – 6

The race started off well. I tried to get into a good rhythm. They had aid stations set up nicely which was great, and my track selection “Swedish House Mafia 2010 Creamfield Extended Mix” really helped. What was NOT nice was that the Vibram Bikila’s did not do a good job protect me on some of the more gravely areas. Definitely took some pebbles to the foot. But was able to push through.

The first loop went pretty well all things considered. But remember, I had never actually run more than 10 miles so today I was going 30% farther than my max distance. The first loop was a lot of me going - Ok, I feel pretty good now, but can I run what I just ran X more times???

MILES 7 – 9

One thought I kept trying to re-iterate was this: when you think you really can’t go anymore, you’ve got about half left in the tank. This is actually going to be the basis of a whole future blog post but anyway, the point is that I had to keep reminding myself this was something I could complete.

It’s also true that the 2nd time around things go by a little bit faster. But around mile 8 I was starting to drag a little. I lived moment to moment for the next announcement from Runkeeper that I’d gone another half mile. At one point I was starting to run with my eyes closed, until I realized I was going to run off a cliff.

MILES 10 – 12

Around mile 10, I reached an aid station and and ate an energy gel which helped perk me up (though it left my hands pretty sticky). Also, I just read an article on energy gels and apparently half of the effect is just in perking up your brain. Interesting.

Once I got to mile 11 I knew I was almost there. I started to pick up the pace.

Mile 12 came around quick. I had been walking for bit every mile and pushed myself to run the last 2 miles

The loop ends on a pretty brutal hill so that was pretty rough to keep jogging – and there’s also a crazy downhill section with a lot of rocks. I almost crashed sprinting to the finish but luckily I stayed on my feet. Didn’t even really feel out of breath at the end of the race like I usually do – but perhaps the longer distance just affected my body in a different way.

Post-race

After the race I just felt really drained. Not panting but just tired. I sat down for a while and felt a little better. Then I felt A LOT better when I saw what they had for snacks/post race food.

Ice cream sandwiches from Ikes, Apple Pie with whipped cream and other amazing foods. I made myself sick with all of it – and it was glorious.

Debrief

I ran a 2:09.09 (chip time) 2:09:31 (gun time). The average pace was 9:52 but really I was around 9:30 for the first half, and got slower and slower in the 2nd half til I was probably running 10:30s or something.

That put me at 197 for the race (out of 347 racers) and 18th out of 25 males ages 25-29. I’m below the median – but that means there’s more room to go up!

Ultimately, I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. I had some massive blisters on my foot, my tendonitis was flaring up a little bit, but otherwise I made it out alive. My calves have been sore for the past few days but that’s to be accepted. My knee is doing great.

Runkeeper data (it’s a little whack)

Next Race

My next race is going to be a little different: a trialthon! I’m doing the Stanford Treeathlon – a spring distance tri on Feb 25th 2012. I did my first swim workout a few days ago and I think it’s going to be a lot of fun!

Any triathlon readers out there? Would love to hear training advice!

Related Posts:

• Going the Distance – Back-to-Back 10ks in Stanford and Eugene
• What is Strong? [video]
• Why I Run
• Running Through Fire – My First Warrior Dash
• Dealing with Blisters, Avoiding Ankle Pain and Other Lessons From My Second 5k Race

Summary: YC wants to fund great startups. Great startups come from great teams. Great teams are smart, technical, get stuff done, resourceful and tight-knit.

Once I know what type of group I have, I try to figure out how good an instance of that type it is. The most important question for deciding that is

Please tell us in one or two sentences about something impressive that each founder has built or achieved.

To me this is the most important question on the application. It’s deliberately open-ended; there’s no one type of answer we’re looking for. It could be that you did really well in school, or that you wrote a highly-regarded piece of software, or that you paid your own way through college after leaving home at 16. It’s not the type of achievement that matters so much as the magnitude. Succeeding in a startup is, in the most literal sense, extraordinary, so we’re looking for people able to do extraordinary things.

From PG (http://ycombinator.com/howtoapply.html)

PG says hey look for 5 things in founders that they look for in 5 things in founders: Determination, Flexibility, Imagination, Naughtiness, Friendship. But what does this really mean? And how can you showcase these traits on your Y Combinator application?

One more quote:

For most startups at this stage, the best predictor of success is the founders. So, the most important parts of the application for me are the questions about the founders’ backgrounds and the most impressive things they’ve done.   We’re looking for evidence that the founders are smart, effective, and determined.

From Sam Altman (How to Get Into Y Combinator)

From what I understand, most companies that apply Y Combinator historically are pretty early stage. They haven’t raised much capital, they may or may not have a lot of users/revenue and they are probably under a year old. There are exceptions to this rule now that there’s the Start Fund / SV Angel $150k in funding. These days, more later stage startups are applying to, and getting accepted into YC.

My point being though, that the primary factor that determines the success of an early stage startup is the team. Your product can change, your market can change, but your team is not really going to change (unless someone leaves, which is usually bad or at least disruptive). So YC really spends a lot of time evaluating the team when reading applications.

From going through YC, talking to partners/founders and reading YC material, here’s how I think that breaks down:

1) Smart

Great teams are smart. So show YC your team is smart – meaning you are knowledgeable in the relevant fields of your industry and of starting a startup, can learn new things quickly, can process information and make smart decisions. Sam Altman calls the application’s questions about the business as “largely an intelligence test“.

I do think pedigrees matter – I’ve noticed a noticeably higher number of top 15 schools, as well as people who have worked at well known technology companies, or done Math Olympiad/won Putnams/finished college at 16 etc so don’t be afraid to flaunt those things.

But at the same time, they have also demonstrated willingness to fund younger, “unproven” folks, folks without pedigrees etc – they just have some other way of demonstrating how smart they are (ie: past projects or other notable accomplishments)

In our case, two of us went to Stanford, the other Cal and all three of us had worked at VC-backed startups.

Relevant questions on app: Background, most impressive thing you’ve done, real world hacks, what do you understand about the market that others don’t

2) Technical

You are presumably starting a company that leverages (and most likely produces) technology in some way. Teams that are knowledgeable about how technology works are “technical”.

The assumption is that there is at least one person on your team who is pretty technical (can code / build most of the core product). As time has gone on, more people without much technical backgrounds have been applying. I think it’s much harder to get in without a strong technical background but it’s not impossible. Do whatever you can to emphasize how you’re addressing this area – preferably by showing a barebones demo that you yourself built. Don’t make it seem like you are waiting for a “technical cofounder” to save the day.

It does seem like that if you’re building a “regular” web / mobile app (ie not something that requires crazy new tech), they will not really dive into your technical chops if you have a cofounder with a CS degree or real engineering experience. But if you are shaky in this area, that is not a good sign.

On a personal note, I truly understand how difficult it is to do a startup without programming experience. I have done a fair amount of “cofounder dating” and have struggled through learning bits of Ruby on Rails without much success.

I can only say that I was really really lucky to find myself with two friends and roommates who were excellent programmers and had the startup itch. It can happen, but it’s not easy. Then again, no one said starting a startup was a walk in the park.

Relevant questions on app: Background, most impressive thing, hack, projects worked on together

3) Gets stuff done

Great startup teams have high output. They create things from nothing, and overcome hurdles to achieve their objectives. You need to show the YC partners that you guys will get stuff done, and ideally have experience getting stuff done together in the past.

PG has said that a really bad sign for a startup would be they meet him at office hours, discuss a bunch of issues / questions etc, and 10 days later meet again and PG had the feeling they were discussing the same things as if basically nothing really had happened in between that time. It means the founders were not getting stuff done. Very bad.

Personal story: my cofounder Kalvin and I had started and built a nonprofit together in college way before deciding to team up for Ridejoy which was the basis for his “most impressive thing”. We also discussed our rather ridiculous startup roommate finding project that all three of us worked on.

Relevant questions on app: Most impressive thing, hack, projects worked on together,

4) Resourceful

Kind of like being smart and get things done, but also something else. Clever comes to mind. As does “naughty”. Willing to break the rules, find loopholes / tricks. You can’t always power through stuff, so YC founders want to see that you can find the back door and you’re wiling to maybe get in a little trouble to do something.

I’ve written a lot more about being relentlessly resourceful elsewhere on the blog.

Relevant quotes from PG:

“In any interesting domain, the difficulties will be novel. Which means you can’t simply plow through them, because you don’t know initially how hard they are; you don’t know whether you’re about to plow through a block of foam or granite. So you have to be resourceful. You have to keep trying new things.” – Relentlessly Resourceful

“Though the most successful founders are usually good people, they tend to have a piratical gleam in their eye. They’re not Goody Two-Shoes type good. Morally, they care about getting the big questions right, but not about observing proprieties. That’s why I’d use the word naughty rather than evil. They delight in breaking rules, but not rules that matter.” — What We Look for in Founders

5) Tight-knit

People say that having cofounders is like being married with kids minus the sex. Your cofounders and you have this intimate connection, your baby, the startup, and you are pretty much willing to share your entire lives and your efforts are devoted to raising that kid/company.

YC really wants to see founding teams who have known each other for a long time, worked together and have a good fit. One thing that hurts startups is when cofounders bicker constantly. This is highly unproductive. Even worse is when they split entirely. And this happens not infrequently, both to YC and non YC companies. This can tank the company completely.

PG lists “Fights Between Founders” as number 17 in Mistakes that Kill Startups and says that 20% of the startups YC funds has a founder leave. 1 in 5!

Do your best to show why you and your cofounders are going to make it. Why are you a match made in heaven? Will you stick it through thick and thin even when the going gets rough and you’re pissed at your cofounder and you don’t have enough sleep etc.

“Startups do to the relationship between the founders what a dog does to a sock: if it can be pulled apart, it will be.” – PG

Relevant questions: How long have you know each other, projects worked on

Personal story – I lived with my cofounders for a year before we decided to do YC. We already knew each others personality quirks. We had argued about stuff, dealt with money things, and coordinated parties / hunted for new roommates etc together. And we said all those things are in our app.

We knew what we were getting into, and we liked each other a lot. Now not every team has the good fortune of so much history and connection / synergy, but the more you can convey how tight your team is and how your tendencies complement one another, the better.

photo credit: ‘PixelPlacebo’ via photopin cc

Links in this Post

• How To Apply to Y Combinator [PG]
• How To Get Into Y Combinator [Sam Altman]
• Relentlessly Resourceful [PG]
• How to Be Relentlessly Resourceful [Jason Shen]
• What We Look for in Founders [PG]
• The Anatomy of Determination [PG]
• 18 Mistakes that Kill Startups [PG]

Related Posts:

• How to be Relentlessly Resourceful [a practical guide]
• How to Build a Viral Microsite
• Great by Choice: the surprising lessons of how tech startups succeed over the long term
• Luck, Skill and Startup Success
• How to Give Your Product Personality

(One of my favorite gymnasts to watch, David Durante (2007 US National Champion & World Championship Team member) on the high bar)

I want to talk today about hero worship and why you shouldn’t do it.

Back when I was training gymnastics seriously, before college even, I was invited several times to the United States Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, CO as part of a week-long training camp.

There I was, along side a bunch of other impressionable teenagers, training with some of the best gymnasts in the country (and the world). I’d seen these guys on TV, when NBC would broadcast the US Championships (where I would later make my brief one-time cameo on national television) and the Olympics. I was ready to be blown away.

But after training with these guys for a week, I realized something:

My heroes weren’t really that special

They still struggled to learn new moves. Messed up and got mad at themselves. Nursed injuries. Argued with their coach. Even slacked off and fooled around sometimes.

Just like I did.

The biggest difference between us was the intensity of their training and their all encompassing dedication to the sport (living and breathing the sport at this training facility in the middle of nowhere for years and years). Of course there were some components of natural ability (a sense of air awareness or an ease with developing great strength) but other than that, my heros were pretty much like me and every other gymnast I knew.

I’ve taken that lesson to other areas in my life.

We got to meet and talk to some amazing founders in going through Y Combinator – which is awesome, but not something to get too hung up about it. I learn what I can from them and move on. There’s no need to assign them some mythical wisdom or god-like abilities that you can never reach.

Mark Zuckerberg? Brian Chesky? Drew Houston?

They’re mostly just passionate, hardworking and somewhat nerdy dudes who are very good at certain things and now find themselves leading influential Silicon Valley companies.

My current perspective is that with focused dedication, deliberate practice and good advice/strategy/coaching, you can, over time, get really really good at most skills. Maybe even into the 90th percentile. The last 10% is out of your hands – good genes, an early start, an exceptional mentor. And of course the multiplicative factor of great timing/luck. But again, not something you can control, so why worry about it?

Just focus on what really matters, bust your butt and stop worshipping your heros.

Related Posts:

• The Biggest Dissappointment in My Life: Losing to Oklahoma, Again.
• Being Strategic vs Being Opportunistic
• Contradictory Advice: Push Harder & Leave Some in the Tank
• What I’ve Learned At Age 20
• Life isn’t a Movie, the Camera Keeps Rolling.

Relentlessly resourceful.

This is the essential quality of a good startup founder according to Paul Graham, cofounder of Y Combinator. When asked by Forbes what he looks for in founders, four out of the five elements relate to resourcefulness. He’s written two essays (Relentlessly Resourceful & A Word to the Resourceful) dedicated to the concept.

And yet people don’t seem to really understand what being resourceful means. The top comment on HN from his most recent post posed this question:

Yes, there are certain skills that make it easier to find information on your own. But this is also a function of the problem domain and how well you know it. If you give me a credit card and a problem statement, chances are that I can come up with a working webapp that solves the problem.

But if you give me the name of a VC and tell me to go raise money – where do I start? How do I approach him? What will burn bridges and what won’t? (emphasis added)

Some great HNers jumped in to answer that question, but I thought I’d take a crack a laying out, in full, what I believe being resourceful looks like and how someone can act with more relentless resourcefulness.

Let’s start by talking about the two types of resourcefulness: internal and external.

Internal resourcefulness is really just creativity. It’s figuring out how to fit a cube into a cylinder on Apollo 13 or resolving that nasty bug in your code. You might benefit from the advice or perspective of others, but the resources you need to solve the problem are generally within your grasp (or inside your brain).

External resourcefulness is when you need resources that are outside your control. Things like seed capital for your startup, a liquor license for your bar, a distribution channel for your new product. You will likely need to interact with other people / entities to GET the resources you need to address your problem.

This post focuses more on that external resourcefulness because I think in someways it’s more open ended and confusing and academically/technically intelligent people often struggle to be externally resourceful.

Prerequisites

Before we begin, I think there are fundamental underlying conditions needed before someone can really be relentlessly resourceful.

Willingness to Endure Discomfort

I originally wanted to call this guts or courage but it’s much more than this. It’s being willing to talk to people you feel you have no business saying, ask for more than you feel wise and do work you might not like or feel competent in. If you can’t or are unwilling to endure rejection, embarrassment, uncertainty, fear or failure, just close the window now because it’s not happening.

Communication Skills

You don’t need to be a world-class public speaker or best-selling author to be resourceful, but you need to have some threshold ability to communicate ideas clearly and persuasively to relevant audiences. This is definitely a skill you can develop – start a blog, join toastmasters, study copywriting, learn how to sell. If people struggle to understand you or are never convinced to do something you suggest, it’s going to be really rough going.

Grit/Not Quitting

Researchers at UPenn have found that grit (perseverance and passion for long-term goals) is a better predictor for success over IQ or conscientiousness. What you should draw from this is that you should have long term goals you are really really determined to achieve. Because you will face a lot of setbacks during the journey – so don’t start unless you have the bullheaded tenacity to finish.

The Formula

Alright, now that we’ve gotten that out of the way… here are the 3 things you do to be relentlessly resourceful.

Step 1: Learn enough to get clue

Step 2: Actually take action

Step 3: Repeat until you succeed

That’s it! Now go make it happen. Godspeed.

Damn, you’re still here? What, that wasn’t clear enough? Fine, let’s break it down.

Step 1 – Learn enough to get a clue

Ok, so you have a challenge in front of you. Whether it is getting published as an author, starting a restaurant or destroying all the horcruxes hidden by He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named, you start by getting a lay of the land.

Lucky for us, there is an incredible treasure trove of information on the Internet (barring the passage of SOPA and PIPA) that we can dive through.

Google is your friend. Quora is your friend. Wikipedia, Twitter, Facebook, HN, the blogosphere. I assure that you can find the answer to many of the questions you have using one of these resources.

• Need to get startup capital from a venture capitalist? Mark Suster, a 2x entrepreneur turned VC will tell you how, for free!
• Want to skip the line by bribing the Matire’d? Jonas Luster, a cook and cooking author will tell you how, for free!
• Want to grow your blog audience? Tyler Terooven, a lifestyle blogger who came “out of nowhere” will tell you how, (not free but I bought the guide and it’s worth every penny. This is not an affiliate link).

Now, this is just the starting point. This online research is often enough to get you on the right path. But sometimes you’ve got problems that are more thorny, nuanced and specific. That’s when you have to learn from people.

Unless you live under a rock, there is probably someone in your extended network who has done whatever it is you are trying to do (or something similar). Get in touch with them and ask them for 10 minutes of your time.

Don’t believe me? I dare you to post on Facebook, Twitter and in an email to 10 good friends:

Hey everyone!

I really need your help with something! I’m looking to get in touch with someone who knows a lot about XX (or has done XX or something similar) for an really important project/goal/thing I’m working on.

If you know someone who fits that profile (or know someone who might know) I would really appreciate if you could connect us. All help will be rewarded with cookies made by yours truly.

Thanks so much!

Do that, wait a few days and write back if you don’t at least get SOMETHING. I will send YOU cookies made by me if you draw a total blank.

Ok, fine, so you grew up in Siberia and literally only know 10 people. I bet you still are aware of someone “famous” who has done what you want to do – but they aren’t in your network.

No problem. Let’s go ask them for advice.

From these meetings you will start to get the nuanced, insider knowledge you need to get at whatever resource you want. It might take some time and work to learn what you need to know – but information is almost NEVER the limiting factor in being resourceful.

But what do I mean by “enough to get a clue”? The idea here is that you need to get some perspective. If you truly know nothing about a topic, you need to dive in enough until you understand at least a little bit about what’s going on. Once you “have a clue”, you want to move to Step 2, where you start to really make progress.

It’s important not to get stuck in the learning phase. You can “study” forever and never accomplish anything. In fact, many people do just that – they “study” fitness, or dating techniques or personal finance forever and don’t actually do anything. That, my friend, is death. Don’t get stuck.

Step 2 – Actually take action

Alright, this is the most important step.

You gotta do a bunch of stuff. No way around it.

• If your goal is to raise funds for your startup, the first step might be to put together a deck, find a meetup with real investors attending and ACTUALLY go talk to one of them about your business.
• If your goal is to throw a smashing dinner party but you can’t cook, the first step might be to find a basic recipe online, buy the ingredients from the store and ACTUALLY follow the instructions to make a dish.
• If your goal is to get a girlfriend, the first step might be to throw on some nice clothes, walk over to a bar or lounge and ACTUALLY have a conversation with a girl
• If your goal is to get published as an novelist, the first step might be to map out an outline of the story and ACTUALLY write the first chapter

A rule of thumb is – if you aren’t feeling uncomfortable, then you haven’t gone far enough yet.

Resourceful people take action. It’s not that they don’t think, plan, study, strategize or prepare. They do all those things too. But what separates people who really “make things happen” and analysts is action.

Think about your favorite hero. Ender Wiggin. Harry Potter. Lisbeth Salandar. Bruce Wayne. The reason why we love these characters is because they face up to enormous odds and they win through their resourcefulness and courage. They don’t cower in the face of a challenge, they take action and make things happen.

Because I know what you’re thinking, I’ve prepared a handy FAQ:

Step 3: Repeat Until You Succeed

So you did some real stuff. Some of it worked, much of it didn’t. Now what?

Time to learn again. What lessons can you draw from your experience to inform your next try? What can you do differently? Do better?

Ok, now go do that. How did it go? Any surprises? What new angle can you try? What worked that you can double down on? How can you avoid making that mistake next time. Ok, now try again.

Are you noticing the pattern?

The magic of the doing-learning loop is that momentum builds upon itself. The first time you ski you fall a ton. But as you start to figure out what’s going on, you fall less and less until you’re flying down the mountain. But it’s through DOING that you figure out what NOT to do next time.

This is a virtuous cycle that keeps repeating.

So if the first five investors turn you down, tweak your pitch and try again. If that doesn’t work, maybe you need to get more traction. Maybe you need to get a warm intro. Maybe you need to use AngelList. Maybe you need to go through YC. May you need to get on Techcrunch. Maybe you need to do some consulting and bootstrap. Maybe you need do a Kickstarter.

Keep trying stuff, tweaking, asking questions, getting advice/ideas, experimenting and pushing forward you find something that works. Then build on that and add fuel to the fire. Don’t take no for an answer, ever.

Paul Graham described being a good running back as a great metaphor for relentlessly resourceful founders because “a good running back is not merely determined, but flexible as well. They want to get downfield, but they adapt their plans on the fly.”

This is not actually a video of a running back, but I gotta rep my home team Stanford and this phenomenal play by quarterback Andrew Luck. It starts off with him getting the snap and preparing to run his play, but then he sees the blitz, realizes he won’t be able to execute the original play and starts moving forward. He dodges numerous players, absorbs a big hit and keeps going, turning a potentially bad situation (blitz) into a good one (58 yard gain).

That is a physical representation of relentless resourcefulness. Get a clue, take action, repeat.

Epilogue

The tough truth is, if you were truly relentlessly resourceful, you wouldn’t need to read this post, except to remind yourself of what you need to do. There’s no magic formula or silver bullet. It’s more of a mindset than anything else – and sometimes that can be the hardest thing to adopt.

I hope this post helped you understand what being relentlessly resourceful looks like. I try to live this way as much as possible. I know I get lazy and complain and act hapless sometimes. But then I slap myself in the face and get back in the game.

Living with the mindset that any challenge is surmountable given enough time and effort is a very empowering feeling. And it’s one that I hope you get a chance to experience.

The good news is that no great person knew what they were doing on day one. Everyone – Richard Branson, Michael Jordan, Warren Buffet, Mark Zuckerberg, Malcom Gladwell – they all had to figure it out along the way. They achieved what they did because they kept experimenting, learning, trying and pushing forward. They were relentlessly resourceful.

Now that you’ve read this post, you’ve got everything you need to make things happen. Which is a great thing. But it’s also bad because if you choose to keep being hapless and passive – you really have no excuses.

Good luck.

Bonus Content

Just to add even more to this already long post, I figured I’d link you to some great stories of relentless resourcefulness. Sometimes what you need is a story to help you understand.

• Vinicius Vacanti – The Long Grind Before You Become an Overnight Success
• Susan Lacke – From Couch Potato to Ironman – in 20 Months (really good!)
• Joe Gebbia (via Venturebeat) – How Airbnb failed its way through “the trough of sorrow” to a $1B  valuation

Finally, if you feel like I missed something, or you’d like to share your own story of relentless resourcefulness, please do in the comments!

There is a great discussion on this post at Hacker News.

Related Posts:

• How Y Combinator Evaluates Teams (an alum’s perspective)
• How to Build a Viral Microsite
• Great by Choice: the surprising lessons of how tech startups succeed over the long term
• Luck, Skill and Startup Success
• How to Give Your Product Personality

Quick definition from Ryan: a viral microsite typically has 1) a dedicated URL 2) a narrowly defined message/purpose and 3) that purpose/message is expressed through a single webpage.

Rather than give an academic treatment (which Ryan’s thesis does superbly) I want to discuss some of the characteristics of popular microsites that I’ve come across over the years (and see if I can maybe apply them!)

Clean, Focused Layout

I think the primary element of great microsites are their focus. You need to immediately grasp the purpose of the site when it loads or else you’re gone. Great sites that do this:

CAPS, Gigantic Font and Profanity

You’ll notice that a lot of the more popular sites a mix of large font, caps lock and profanity to state their messages. It sort of feels like the site is shouting at you. Yet somehow, this makes the site more appealing. There’s a feeling of naughtiness as you share the site on your social networks. Certain sites that do this:

Interactive

Some of these sites have no interactivity but I think the ones with legs do allow you to do some limited action.

Humor / Snarkiness

Easy to Share

Most of these sites have a simple way to share it with your friends. It looks like Twitter is the number one way to share, followed by Facebook. This may be in part because you can share something multiple times on Twitter, whereas you can only like something once. Most people show the number of shares.

Timely / Targeted

Some, but not all of these sites are riding a trend. Certainly the Obama site, the reasons tumblr went down, the san francisco snow site were time sensitive. Additionally, many of these sites were targeted to a certain demographic – Star Wars lovers, jaded Silicon Valley folks, designers, etc. This probably made it easier to spread at first, but also tends to limit the overall reach. I mean the Do Nothing site is not really targeted at all but hit 2.6M stumbles (!!) On the other hand, how do you seed a site like that?

Applying What I’ve Learned

Well this post wouldn’t be complete without something personal. My startup Ridejoy recently launched a microsite called -

isitsnowingintahoeyet.com

- partly for fun and partly to raise awareness for our SF to Tahoe ridesharing route. Go take a look.

I’d love to get feedback from you on this post as well as on how we could improve our own viral microsite. Did I take my own advice? Let me know in the comments.

Related Posts:

• How to Give Your Product Personality
• How Y Combinator Evaluates Teams (an alum’s perspective)
• How to be Relentlessly Resourceful [a practical guide]
• Great by Choice: the surprising lessons of how tech startups succeed over the long term
• I’ve Heard Great Things About You – A nondouchey guide to personal branding and self promotion

This is a post about why new years resolutions matter. But it begins on a seemingly unrelated topic: death.

Death is not an easy subject for discussion. Given how much violence we encounter in movies, television, video games and other mass media, you’d think our society would be open to more frank conversations on death. And yet try to begin a serious conversation with someone about the fact that all of us will one day no longer be alive and you’ll quickly encounter resistance:

“Let’s discuss something a little more light hearted,” or maybe, “Geez, do you have to be so morbid?”

Perhaps the only times when discussing death is not frowned upon is at funerals and intensive care units, where its presence is so strong and near that it becomes impossible to ignore.

Why should this be so? After all, if you going were on a trip, wouldn’t you talk about the final stop with the other passengers? Our lives’ ultimate destination is death – it is the inevitability we all share.

Everyone you know – your friends, family, coworkers, customers will eventually die. Like candles, they will burn through their wick and their flames will be extinguished. Some will die by accidents, others by illness, most simply by old age. But eventually, all will be taken.

[This is going somewhere, I promise.]

The practice of pledging to change behavior during a new year is an old one. Historians believe civilizations as ancient as the Babylonians in 2000 BC began reforming their lives by returning borrowed goods and paying back debts. In Roman times, citizens would make promises of good conduct to the God of Janus (where January gets its namesake). Today, somewhere between 40%-50% of Americans say they will be making a new years resolution.

Why has the human race fixated so much on resolving to change their behavior at the start of a new year? This Saturday or 2 weeks from today seem like equally arbitrary yet viable dates to quit smoking or start keeping a budget or go to church more regularly.

Because a new year reminds us that death is coming.

Days pass, weeks pass, months pass and we can ignore them. Like eating little mini candies when you’re on a diet – we can pretend it doesn’t count. On a moment by moment basis, it feels like nothing is changing and everything will stay the same forever. But when a calendar year turns over, we are forced to face the irresistible passing of time.

I believe that the recognition that death is one step closer causes us to reflect on our lives more closely. (Incidentally, this is also why major birthday milestones sometimes trigger life changes). The new year reminds us that our time on earth is short and that we’ve been given a precious gift : life! We begin asking ourselves tough questions:

Are we happy with how our lives are progressing? Are we satisfied with our physical health? Our finances? Our social and emotional wellbeing?

In answering these questions, we start to uncover our dissatisfactions, our yearnings, our desire for progress. We recognize the gap between where we are and where we want to be, and often stirrings of change and self-improvement bubble to the surface.

This is why new years resolutions matter. They represent an opportunity to make the most out of our lives, a chance to try again and re-commit ourselves towards progress and growth.

So as 2012 begins, let us reflect on the joy of being alive and remind ourselves that our time on earth is limited. Let us visualize the life we wish to lead and determine the course we must take to reach it. Perhaps setting a new years resolution would give our journey the boost it needs. Perhaps not.

Either way, the new years matters. Your life matters. After all, this year, this day, this moment – is the beginning of the rest of our lives. So let’s go out and take it.

photo credit: adventurerob via photopin cc

PS – If you decide that a new years resolution IS what you need, check out my post on scientifically proven ways to set great new years resolutions.

Related Posts:

• How to Set Great New Year’s Resolutions (Backed by Scientific Research!)
• How Y Combinator Evaluates Teams (an alum’s perspective)
• Why You Shouldn’t Worship Your Heroes
• How to be Relentlessly Resourceful [a practical guide]
• How to Build a Viral Microsite

Henry Miller, The Books in My Life

Related Posts:

• Don’t Read Too Closely into Success Stories (quote)
• Meaning is something you build into your life (quote)
• Why You Shouldn’t Worship Your Heroes
• Being Strategic vs Being Opportunistic
• The Unreasonable Man [quote]

2012 has begun and I thought it’d be a good time to reflect on how the site has done. I’ll start with top posts, dive into some analytics and finish with reflections and thoughts for next year.

Top Posts of 2011

(* denotes it was one of the top 10 most read posts of 2011)

Entrepreneurship/Startups/Ridejoy

The biggest thing for me in 2011 was founding a company called Ridejoy and going through Y Combinator. Based on the survey I took a few months ago, this is one of the topics my readers are most interested in reading more about.

• A business cofounder’s dilemma: learn to code, outsource it, find a cofounder.
• How to Make a Great Startup Product Video
• Startup Career Advice for Recent Grads & Corporate Staffers
• Questions to Help You Come Up With Your Startup Idea
• How to Give Your Product Personality *
• Introducing Ridejoy
• Great by Choice: the surprising lessons of how tech startups succeed over the long term *

Related Posts:

• 9 Lessons From a Full Year of “Real” Blogging
• How Blogging Can Increase Your Luck Surface Area
• Who Did You Learn From in 2010?
• Why You Shouldn’t Worship Your Heroes
• Great by Choice: the surprising lessons of how tech startups succeed over the long term

I wanted to share with you a guest post from Aaron Tucker, one of the guys on Sebastian Marshall’s One Week Book Project team. In this post he shares some valuable insights into how you ought to think about your ideas and separating your beliefs from your identity.

The book itself, Ikagi, is phenomenal. I bought it, read it and have great things to say (amazon review). 4.5 stars from 24 people means I’m not the only one who thinks so.

Hope you enjoy the guest post!

Jason

Treat Your Ideas as Tools

I’m Aaron Tucker, and I just led the project management on The One Week Book Project.

This started with Sebastian Marshall putting together a team to take a principled stand against badness in publishing. It was my idea to do it only one week to show publishing what’s possible in the modern age.

We put together a kick ass team, collaborated intimately, and we produced a work that people are calling “life changing” in just a single week.

The title is IKIGAI, the Japanese word for “all-consuming passion, raison d’etre.” You should get a copy, it might change your life:

I’m here to talk about what I learned, so you can learn from it.

The hardest part wasn’t any of the actual work – picking the right posts, curating them, editing them, collaborating with the team, sometimes staying up late at night on Skype – all of that was fun.

The hardest part was owning up to the fact that I chose content for the book. Sebastian makes controversial points, and I worried that I’d be taking a path where people would eventually disagree with me.

It’s like the awkward pause in a dinner conversation, or the moment when you’re not sure if you’re about to put your foot in your mouth. You don’t want to say something that looks stupid, or reflects badly on you.

When a request does get rejected, it hurts. When something you care about gets rejected, it’s even worse.

Ideas are closer to our identities than simple requests. Our ideas are close to what we want to be. They’re close to who we are.

Like everyone, I reflexively protect my identity. If someone turns me down, it hurts. If someone says what I stand for is wrong, it sucks.

I think this is the same for everyone.

You know your friend who’s really interesting and engaging when he’s comfortable, but totally shuts down when he’s around new people, or his parents or something?

He’s probably worried about people disliking his ideas. And maybe disliking him as a person too.

Yet, you can’t take a stand if you never say what you think.

It’s hard to do big things if you don’t speak your mind for real.

If you hide your thoughts and reasons from people, you never get express who you are.

Winning isn’t normal, so you shouldn’t expect normal opinions to win.

So how to start speaking your mind, and start winning?

For me, I stopped assaults on my ideas as assaults on my identity.

Things got much easier.

How do you do this?

Figure out what you actually care about, and then use your other ideas as tools to accomplish those things that you want.

Trim down your identity to the things you actually need in your life.

Go to a cafe or something with your laptop or paper and a pen, and think about your goals:

• What do you want out of your life?
• What you want to have happen most?
• What would you die for?

Core principles are more important than any individual fact about the world.

If you actually know what you care about, it’s easier to separate your ideas from your identity.

For instance, I’d want to take care of people I love. Believing I’m right and failing the people I love isn’t the answer to that.

When you do this, ideas become tools to accomplish what you care about.

Does eating this way help me accomplish what I want?

Does treating people this way lead to good outcomes, or does this way?

I don’t want to use a hammer on things that require a screwdriver, because that doesn’t put a dresser together. I don’t want to hold onto a political ideology if it doesn’t work to make people’s lives better.

Now, remember that the way the world works is the way the world works. There are laws of physics, lots of things operate by rules, etc. What’s true is already true. Owning up to a fact about how the world works doesn’t change the fact about the world, it just changes your ability to deal with it.

I used to try to time my consumption of sugary foods in order to control my energy level. After doing some research and testing, I found that this would kind of work, but would inevitably lead to crashes, and take a while. So I stopped eating as many sugary foods.

This made me a little sad for a while, but it was worth it. It was worth it because what I was doing was more important to me than eating sweet things.

I mentioned strong opinions earlier. What does that mean?

Simply – when you believe something, act on it.

Tell people about it.

Test it.

Lean on it.

When you act on your beliefs, you find out if they actually hold weight. When you encounter resistance, you see how your ideas hold up.

If you don’t act on something that’s wrong, you’ll never find out that it’s wrong. If you don’t act on something that’s true, then you miss out on trusting it.

Tools are useless if you don’t use them.

One of the earliest things that Sebastian suggested that I do is to more forcefully state my opinions. If I thought something, then I should tell people that I thought that, and what that would imply rather than weakly stating it and mitigating the implications.

Clarifying what we meant could take hours that we didn’t have for everyone to read and respond to the emails, and we couldn’t have finished the book in time without just saying what we meant.

So, hold strong opinions. Act quickly on your opinions.

But why hold them weakly?

Because you need to be able to change your mind when you find out that you’re wrong.

If your ideas don’t work, then now you know, and can change your mind. You now know that something that you thought works didn’t, and now you don’t have to waste time and effort doing things that don’t get you what you want.

If they do work, then claim your due success, and you can use that idea again to get even more of what you want.

But when your ideas don’t work out the way you thought, then quickly fix or abandon them the way you would any tool. If my drill breaks, I don’t keep trying to make holes with it, I either fix it or I get a new drill.

When someone challenges you, think about them challenging your tool.

If the screwdriver works, keep using it.

Or the drill works better? Thank the challenger, and update to using the drill.

One of the best things about working with the IKIGAI team was that every time someone disagreed with me, I could trust that they were doing it graciously.

We all had the same goals and looked out for each other. A disagreement wasn’t an assault on me. It was a chance to check my ideas, my tools, and to do better and win more.

Winning isn’t normal.

Have strong opinions.

Act on them.

Be ready to change them when you find better ones.

Thank you,

Aaron Tucker

Project Manager for IKIGAI, published in one week

Related Posts:

• I’ve written a guest post on Sebastian Marshall’s blog called “Unorthodox Strategies for Winning”
• Take My Readership Survey and Win a Kick-Ass Book!
• Guest Post: Kat Richter of After I Quit My Day Job
• The Power of Having a Mindset of Infinite Opportunity [guest post]
• Further Thoughts on Getting Chewed Out [guest post]

Summary: Great by Choice describes the results of a deep investigation into how young companies can survive and thrive in chaotic, turbulent environments to achieve spectacular results. The book is of great value startups and entrepreneurs seeking to build enduringly great companies. In this blog post, I look at how his concepts of fanatical discipline, productive paranoia, and empirical creativity apply to building a startup that succeeds over the long-term [1].

Introduction

I just finished reading Jim Collins’ new book Great by Choice: Uncertainty Chaos and Luck—Why Some Thrive Despite Them All (GBC from here on out). GBC is the spiritual sequel to a highly-regarded & best-selling book published by Collins in 2001 called Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t. Both are great reads, but I find GBC particularly relevant to technology entrepreneurs (like myself). Why? Two reasons.

The level of research behind the book:

Unlike many business books, this is not just one successful guy waxing philosophical about how he made stuff happen [2]. Jim Collins and his coauthor Morten Hansen had entire teams of research analysts work for 9 (!!) years to complete the book.

They picked industries that were highly volatile and selected young/small companies that did extraordinarily well (beating their industry’s average stock growth by 10x or more for at least 15 years). They found comparison companies that were started off very similar to the “10x companies” but only had average performance, and dissected all the data they could gather on both companies to find the differences. For more, see Appendix A below.

The companies / industries studied:

• Computing/Software: Microsoft vs Apple [3]
• Integrated Circuits: Intel vs AMD
• Biotechnology: Amgen vs Genentech
• Medical Devices: Biomet vs Kirschner
• Surgical Devices: Stryker vs USSC
• Insurance: Progressive vs Safeco
• Airlines: Southwest vs PSA

The companies are relevant and familiar to tech entrepreneurs like me and many of the folks on this blog. My focus in this post is to look at how the conclusions from the research could be applied to early stage startups that WANT to build enduring and spectacularly successful companies. I’m excited to see what we find.

MYTH-BUSTING: It’s not about more vision, creativity, risk-taking or luck

One of the great things about this study is that it’s not just studying winners but looking at the difference between winners and losers. GBC found that the 10x companies were NOT more creative, visionary, ambitious, lucky, hard working, risk-taking, innovative, etc. It’s not that those things weren’t important – I think they were/are. And GBC acknowledges this.

It’s just that both groups had lots of these things. Yet they had different outcomes. So we have to look at what DIFFERED between the 10x and comparison companies. Let’s start by looking at how innovation happens at 10xers.

FIRE BULLETS THEN CANNONBALLS: Another look at launching MVPs

In the startup world, most people are familiar with the concept of the MVP: the minimum viable product. The idea is that before you prep your product for scale, spend lots of money on marketing/advertising or build advanced features — you first need to find that MVP that really delights customers. GBC confirms that within 10x companies were not necessarily characterized by gigantic innovations/breakthroughs, but an intelligent system of “empirical creativity” that they call “Fire bullets, then cannonballs”.

Basically the 10x companies tended to fire more bullets (testing products/services/channels,etc in a limited capacity), did NOT fire more cannonballs (big deals/major efforts/expensive acquisitions)  vs comparison companies in total, but when the 10xers did go all out, their efforts were more likely to result in positive outcomes.

Some examples:

Microsoft In 1987 Microsoft had built Windows to run on the IBM PC based on MS-DOS, which was becoming the industry standard. But IBM was also preparing to release a new set of computers running OS/2 – which Gates himself thought would dominate the industry within 2 years. Microsoft had only IPOed a year ago and still had limited resources. Gates hedged his bets and continued working on Windows development even as he committed tons of resources on developing on top of OS/2 — in the face of strong resistance from some of the people in his own executive team. This turned out to be a really good idea when OS/2 failed to become the market winner. Microsoft was then able to throw the full weight behind Windows and launched Windows 3.1 selling a million copies in 4 months (3x more than OS/2 did in 3 years).

Apple Today, Apple makes boatloads of cash on their 300+ retail stores - earning more per sq ft than Tiffany’s. But it didn’t start that way. Jobs recruited the President of GAP to the Apple Board way back in 1999 and spent a year testing the concept before they launched their first two stores in 2001. Through refining their stores over a decade, Apple now has more people coming through their stores in one quarter than went through all four Disney resorts in 2010. That’s how you go from bullet to cannonball. [4]

What I think this means for startups:

Don’t feel like you have to be THE first company out there, or the first one with a specific feature. Gowalla was founded either one or two years before foursquare (depending on who you ask) but foursquare won. Yes, it’s valuable to be first for many reasons, but it’s not worth being first on something that sucks.

Look at Zynga: criticize them all you want about Farmville being a ripoff and a waste of time. The company has IPOed, which puts them among a very select group when it comes to internet/consumer tech startups. In the games business, you need hits. Zygna uses “ghetto testing”to make sure that they invest their resources in projects that are going to pay off, based on user data. This is what it means to fire bullets then cannonballs as a startup.

On a personal note, when we launched Ridejoy on the West Coast in the fall, we had already tested a lot of elements of our rideshare service from our month long Burning Man rideshare site BurningManRides.com in the summer. And now we’re taking the lessons we’ve learned from the West Coast to our SF <> Tahoe route.

Enjoying this article so far? It took me over 10 hours write it, plus the time I spent reading the book. Please take a few second and scroll up to the top and share this post. It would mean a lot to me. Thanks.

THE 20 MILE MARCH: Great companies are built through fanatic discipline

This concept is about fanatic discipline when it comes to your company’s performance. Specifically, setting high but reachable goals (that are specific to the business and largely within your control) and consistently hitting them, even during bad times, without overreaching or getting greedy during good times. By doing this you build your company’s confidence to perform an adverse conditions, reduce the likelihood of catastrophe when hit with turbulent disruption and helps you exert self control in an out of control environment.

I chose to lead with the empirical creativity section because we’re talking about startups, but the book lead with the 20 Mile March because it was “a distinguishing factor, to an overwhelming degree, between the 10X companies and the comparison companies in our research”. Wow. Discipline is what matters.

Some examples:

The race to the South Pole Jim Collins lives in Colorado and is an lifelong rock climber, so it’s not surprising that he takes inspiration from famous expeditions. One re-occuring example is of the race to the South Pole in 1911: two teams battled to be the first – one lead by Roald Amundsen and another led by Robert Falcon Scott.

Amundsen turned out to be the 10xer of the comparison for many reasons, but for this section we’ll focus on his relentless discipline. Amundsen pushed his team to go 15-20 miles every day despite weather conditions. On good days he would not overextend (even against the wishes of his team) and on bad days he made sure they kept moving forward. In comparison, Scott’s team fluctuated wildly with their march, sometimes traveling a lot and sometimes traveling not at all (with similarly varying weather).

Amundsen hit the South Pole in mid December and arrived back at camp exactly on the day he had scheduled: January 17, 1912. Scott arrived to the South Pole in January, cursed the Amundsen flag, and headed home, ultimately getting stranded in a storm and freezing to death in March, only 10 miles from a supply depot.

Southwest Airlines Southwest had a 20 Mile March of being profitable each year – a demanding task when the US airline industry as a whole turned a profit on only 6 of 14 years (1990-2003). Despite major changes in the industry where big players went bankrupt, Southwest was able to stay profitable for 30 years straight, including in 2001 amidst the 9/11 attacks. It also had the discipline to not grow too quickly even when lots of cities demanded their service, expanding for instance, to 4 new cities in 1996 even as 100 demanded SW. They left growth on the table in order to be more steady.

Stryker (biomed devices) CEO John Brown set a benchmark of 20% net income growth every year in 1977, calling it “the law”. Excuses were not acceptable. Executives behind the 20% mark got the “Snorkel Award” because you were basically going to drown. At regional sales meetings, people who make the 20% sat at the front and the rest sat in the back. The company hit the goal 19 out of 21 years – and also held back, growing more slowly than the comparison company USSC more than half the time.

What I think this means for startups

I think there are two elements to the 20 Mile March: 1) figuring out the fundamentals of your business and 2) sticking with them and making steady, consistent progress.

Most startups are still figuring out the first part, which is why I focused on the empirical creativity section first. You’ve got to figure out a winning formula, but once you do, drive at it hard and consistently, avoiding the overreach but also doing everything in your power to keep forward momentum constant.

It’s difficult to get a current day example of this given how secretive companies are about the way they run, but I’ll point to two examples of companies being relentlessly and consistently focused on acheiving specific metrics:

Facebook: realized that growth was going to the be their path to success and built a growth team designed specifically to work on projects and features (like tweaking the signup flow) to push for growth.[5]

Amazon: in its 1997 letter to shareholders Bezos laid out his plan: win marketshare. [6] Amazon has consistently grown it’s revenues and its share of markets, (like the book and ebook publishing markets) to staggeringly heights. They are always trying to drive down prices and implement programs that make people buy more, even when it doesn’t make sense from a revenue/cost perspective (like Amazon Prime). Some analysts have indicated that Amazon could be running up to 1/3 of all ecommerce and growing.

At Ridejoy, we’re in it for the long haul. I’m very excited about our business but I know it’s going to take hard work, applied consistently over time to make it work. It took Airbnb 1,000 days before they became an “overnight success” and we’re also prepared for a long march.

LEADING ABOVE THE DEATH LINE – Why productive paranoia is critical for surviving and thriving

It turns out that 10x companies are not a cocky bunch. Yes, they work toward their 20 Mile March goals with steadfast resolve and they’re confident, but they’re also hypervigilant and aware of the countless number of things that could weaken or destroy everything they’ve built. Leading above the death line is not about completely avoiding any errors, but about making sure you have what it takes to recover and nothing wipes you out.

Specifically, the research found that:

• Cash buffers: 10X companies held a 3-10X higher than average cash to assets and cash to liabilities ratio, and 80% had higher ratios vs the comparison companies
• Made less risky decisions: 10x companies made fewer small, medium and high risk decisions compared to comparison companies
• Deliberately slow or fast: 10x companies often didn’t make the first move and demonstrated a higher level of internal data gathering/analysis. But when they were sure it was the right move, they usually moved faster than comparison companies.

Some examples:

Microsoft Early on, Bill Gates established a rule that Microsoft should be able to go a full year without any revenue. Even in 2010, they are close: having around $40B in expenses and $36B in cash/cash equivalents. In 1991, MSFT stock dropped 11% when a “Nightmare Memo” written by Gates internally was leaked, listing a series of challenges and threats in competitors, technology, IP and customer support failures that could wallop the business. John Sculley of Apple in comparison, had a good year in 1998, doubling sales and net income in 2 years, so he went on a 9-week sabbatical. Not particularly paranoid.

Intel Andy Grove (former CEO of Intel) is the Godfather of Paranoia, having penned an management book called Only the Paranoid Survive discussing how to respond to “Strategic Inflection Points”. Intel of course famously dropped their memory chip business when it became exceedingly clear, after rigorous analysis, that they would not be able to compete with the Japanese and jumped directly full force into microprocessors.

What I think this means for startups:

This chapter immediately reminded me of Chris Dixon’s article “Always have 18 months of cash in the bank“. In re-reading Dixon’s article, I was struck by this line: “building/marketing/selling technology always takes longer than you think”. Basically, shit happens and you need to build a solid buffer for yourself (if you are running a VC-backed startup) to make sure you don’t have your back against the wall (ie your company’s death line).

Additionally, the point about the 10xers taking less big risks reminds me of Steve Blank’s point that startups focus on reducing risk wherever possible, whether that be invention or market risk.

Basically – always be thinking about what could kill you, do your best to prepare / build buffers for it and don’t feel obligated to take a risk unless you’re sure it’s the right decision. And always have a plan b.

RETURN ON LUCK: You won’t be lucky, so be good instead

Luck, the dirty word in all success/business/self-improvement literature. Perhaps some people and some companies just get lucky and our ability to draw useful lessons and conclusions from their success is just not possible. Collins and his team anticipated this and devoted an entire chapter to luck.

GBC applied a consistent methodology to both pairs of companies to analyze how luck played a role in their outcomes. About 230 luck events were categorized and studied, each meeting all three criteria of being unpredictable, independent of the actions of key players, and having significant good or bad implications for the business.

Examples of luck events include: Amgen isolating the gene for EPO, which it likened to “finding a sugar cube in a lake a mile wide/long/deep” or the New England Journal of Medicine publishing a paper that challenged the effectiveness of one of Genentech’s major drug products.

What they found: neither 10xers or comparison companies had substantially more good luck or bad luck events, nor did one giant piece of good luck carry a 10x company through all its success. Luck exists but it tends to even out the playing field. What matters is “Return on Luck” or how you take advantage of good luck and avoid choking.

More specific example:

AMD - In the mid 1990′s, AMD had a huge amount of good luck in their direction: computer makers were kind of sick of Intel’s dominance in chip making and wanted an alternative. A federal jury allowed AMD to make Intel chip clones, and thus earned record sales. Then IBM announced they were pulling a bunch of computers because of a flaw in the Pentium chips, forcing Intel through a $475 million recall process.

This is some insane great luck for AMD. People were preordering AMD’s K5 chip like crazy. And what happened?

They blew it. The project slipped months behind schedule and people started moving back to Intel. By the time AMD fixed their problems, Intel had released a new generation of chips, forcing AMD behind again. They weren’t disciplined about their hardware production and failed to build up the buffer to “throw money at the problem” and thus failed to take advantage of the good luck.

What I think this means for startups:

It’s true that many smart people believe luck plays a big role early on, but once you’ve hit some kind of scale, this fact matters a lot less. Yes, luck will play a role in your startup, but luck is not a strategy. Nor is it really something you should spend any time thinking about.

You can’t control luck, so just prepare for the worst by strengthening your team with exercise and strong relationships, and your business with cash, users and a consistently improving product. Then prepare to seize opportunities when they arise and never let go.

Final Thoughts

Steve Blank calls a startup “a temporary organization searching for a repeatable and scalable business model”. Some of the concepts here don’t translate when you’re running an early stage startup. But many of the ambitious entrepreneurs I know want to build their companies into spectacular, enduring businesses and I think it’s good to look down the road and learn what works.

I have a tendency, as I think many entrepreneurs do, of operating on gut instinct, playing things really up near the wire, and switching my focus when I get bored. Like a mosquito trying to score a sting as Paul Graham so eloquently put it in his essay on making wealth. [7]

However, as I consider my goals for Ridejoy – to be as successful as Airbnb/Dropbox/Foursquare and perhaps even Google/Apple/Amazon, I realize that what works when you’re two guys with a prototype does not when you’re hundreds of people with millions of users.

Crazy one-off bold moves, strokes of genius or disproportionately good luck aren’t the secret. Instead, it’s discipline, preparation and intelligent risk-taking. Less sexy perhaps, but backed by empirical data.

I’ll close with the final paragraph of Great by Choice, where Collins describes the moment where we are afraid, exhausted or tempted and have to make a choice:

We are not imprisoned by our circumstances. We are not imprisoned by the luck we get or the inherent unfairness of life. We are not imprisoned by crushing setbacks, self-inflicted mistakes or our past success. We are not imprisoned by the times in which we live, by the number of hours in a day or even the number of hours we’re granted in our very short lives. In the the end we can control only a tiny sliver of what happens to us. But even so, we are free to choose, free to become great.

Many thanks to Vicki Mach and Bilal Mahmood for reading earlier versions of this article.

FOOTNOTES

[1] I think that if you’re trying to found-n-flip a business, most of these lessons do not apply. They’re specifically for founders/leaders who want to be a long lasting business success.

Additionally, I don’t want readers to come away with the idea that these are the *only* ways to become an enduring success. However, we have more evidence to suggest that these ways will work compared to many other approaches.

[2] Those books can be good if they are written by someone with a lot of humility and a great memory, but usually they gloss over the hard stuff / failures and focus too much on the author’s personal traits.

[3] It’s funny because everyone thinks of Apple as a success story, not as a mediocre comparison company. And it’s true, from 1997 to 2011, Apple stock grew nearly 6,700%. But GBC started researching in 2002 and so Apple’s stock was pretty crappy given these were the “lost years” when Jobs was off building NEXT and Pixar. However, Collins acknowledges that in the past decade, Apple is much more a model of a 10xer, and indeed has demonstrated the effectiveness of many of these practices.

[4] “More people now visit Apple’s 326 stores in a single quarter than the 60 million who visited Walt Disney Co.’s four biggest theme parks last year, according to data from Apple and the Themed Entertainment Association.” – Wall Street Journal, Secrets from Apple’s Genius Bar

[5] I tried really hard to find more specifics about Facebook’s growth team be could not – please let me know if you find anything (when it was created, how many people are in it, what they’ve done, etc)

[6] The quote specifically: “We believe that a fundamental measure of our success will be the shareholder value we create over the longterm. This value will be a direct result of our ability to extend and solidify our current market leadership position.The stronger our market leadership, the more powerful our economic model.”

[7] “A startup is like a mosquito. A bear can absorb a hit and a crab is armored against one, but a mosquito is designed for one thing: to score. No energy is wasted on defense. The defense of mosquitos, as a species, is that there are a lot of them, but this is little consolation to the individual mosquito.”

APPENDIX A: Methodology

Collins’s takes business research to the next level. Here’s a breakdown of exactly how Great by Choice was written. Their research question: “Why do some companies thrive in uncertainty, even chaos, and others do not?”. How they answered the question:

• Picked industries that had a high number of random but powerful and dangerous events outside of the control of the companies in the industry.
• Employed a matched-pair comparison in order to contrast what the winners did and the losers didn’t.
• Studied companies that were small or young when they started their success, specifically ones that IPOed between 1971 and 1990.
• Narrowed to companies that beat their industries by at least 10X over a 15 year or more period
• Selected comparison companies that were in the same industry, and similar age/size to the 10X company, but with only average stock performance.
• Poured through press clippings, historical documents, interviews with staff, annual reports, 10k’s etc
• Both authors separately read all documents, each then wrote 70+ pg case reports on each company + matched comparison
• Based on data + analysis, they extracted practices and behaviors that explain what the “10x companies” did that the comparison companies did not

This rigorous nearly decade long research study makes the conclusions of the book far more grounded in reality. While we cannot claim causality, the chances that the following behaviors are random/unrelated to success appear very low, especially when you consider that almost all the winners did them and almost all the losers did not.

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