/Work: Entrepreneurialitis and Start-Up Fever

Working with a client recently, an executive said something along these lines:

We don’t need to do the right thing, because we can do the wrong thing really well.

This has got to be one of the most dangerous sorts of thinking in start-ups, which I believe are all psychological reactions to stress, leading to ‘entrepreneurialitis’. Here’s others that I worry about whenever I hear them:

1. We don’t need to do the right thing, because we can do the wrong thing really well. [means: we don’t have to adapt to the world, the world will have to adapt to us.]
2. Yes, that feature is important, but we’ll put it into a later release. [means: I don’t want to decide what’s important, so we will defer.]
3. We don’t need to test the business model: it’s obvious! [means: I don’t know how to test the business model.]
4. We don’t need to bring in outside experts, and we don’t have time to assimilate that many viewpoints, anyway. [We know everything, and who the hell are you, wise guy?]
5. People believe that building successful applications is hard, but it’s easy if you just [fill in pet obsession here]. [means: it better be simple, because that’s all I am prepared for.]
6. I know what to do: God told me. [This actually happened to me, I am not kidding.]

These range from the mildly out of touch to the paranoid and delusional, but they all are dangerous. Anything short of painful openness to the complexities and subtleties of building successful apps, any retreat from trying to learn from others successes and failures, can lead to complacency, insider thinking, convergent mindsets, and eventually doom for the company. I plan a long post on ‘start-up fever’ — where the team gets so infected with the ‘get it out the door meme’ that they lose all perspective about the other things that need to be done, so that anything that might slow release is branded as evil.

But can start small, with one baby step into nutty thinking, and then, a few months later, somehow your whole project drifted off the rails into la-la-land.