Early Startup Founder Fundamentals: Introduction

Start-ups have always been synonymous with some level of scrappiness and doing all things at the same time.

This means that everyone is more or less doing a bit of everything all the time, often to achieve very different goals. Almost like a divide and conquer , except you’re dividing effort and attempting to conquer the startup world.

Embedding lean methodologies early can save time (and money):

The arrival of methodologies like lean have changed that narrative or at least are trying to change that narrative. Not only by injecting structure to startup processes but also agility to large companies.

Here is a summary and introduction to lean product methodologies.

Many assume that the less process oriented approach always wins as founders and early employees look for quick results. This means building features, making a sale, having a call to discuss a sale… building more features.

In so doing, we miss a lot of the softer touches that I believe make for the foundation of a scalable company.

These things are not tangible and many times tedious, but we must remember, whether or not you know it you are implicitly making decisions about the future of your company and it’s propensity to scale.

The lack of doing so often shows when funding is injected into the company and investors expect exponential growth, but often what happens is a period of rapid growth followed by a pulling back, and this is often to put systems in place, define culture, hire the right people; to support growth.

What are these things, I hear you ask?

Culture eats strategy for breakfast (and lunch, and probably dinner too…)

I start with culture because I’m passionate about organisations scaling with people who believe in them but also love what they do and with whom they do it.

We can all agree that written or not there is an ethos you live by, and you only see how great or terrible it is at scale.

Culture has been romanticised, misused and is often misunderstood.

Your culture defines your way of doing things and points to not only defining the kind of leader you want to be and hire, how you want your employees to feel about your company, how you want your customers to feel about you, it also speaks on how you pay your employees, the culture of recognition, the companies view of failure among other things.

This ties into your brand as a company, it ties into your hiring practices, your capacity to retain good talent, I could go on. This is a living breathing document and it’s okay to change, but the lack of self awareness as an organization is not. And it shows.

Some of the more interesting things I’ve read about culture is the infamous quote by Peter Drucker “Culture eats strategy for breakfast”. And in the next series I’d like to highlight some of the misconceptions and truths about culture in an early stage startup.

I’ll leave you with this.

“Now, thanks to the radical transparency made possible by a connected world, your business is a glass box. People can see all the way inside. And that means that now the brand is everything they see. Every person. Every process. Every value. Everything that happens, ever. There’s a single word that sums up what a person sees when they look deep inside your business: they see your culture.”

David Mattin, Head of Trends & Insights, TrendWatching

Process, process, process

For a start-up that is trying to pull all levers and see what sticks, this is potentially the least liked one. But really, the tragedy of a brilliant product not scaling as fast as it could as a result of the lack thereof, is probably even less liked.