My roommate from college called me earlier today to catch up. He graduated from the prestigious Woodrow Wilson school at Princeton with straight A’s. Yet for someone of his accomplishments he took a path far less traveled and enrolled in the Marine officer training school.
Now I’m in NYC starting a company, and he’s leading marines through combat exercises in the woods of Quantico, Virginia. Yet despite our completely different jobs, I was fascinated to discover that we are learning very similar things.
For one, my roommate’s training gives him an intuitive understanding of lean startup principles. The lean startup methodology has only become popularized recently in the startup world. And I think that’s because its principles are very unintuitive. Most startup founders plan everything out years in advance with no expectation for their product or business model to change.
Marines are trained to never plan beyond first encounter with the enemy because “you can never predict in advance how the situation will change.” Instead marines must learn to make quick decisions and become comfortable with uncertainty as the situation changes unpredictably from moment to moment. As my roommate described the process of dealing with enemy combatants, I couldn’t help but think of an entrepreneur performing customer development and pivoting his product and business model around market feedback.
We’ve also experienced similar lessons in leadership and agree that a lot of leadership comes from practice and experience. Effectively leading a platoon of 30-50 marines has a lot to do with the confidence that comes with comfort over time. At first my roommate was very nervous about giving orders to large groups of marines, but over time he started to care less and less. Now he doesn’t bat an eye.
When I was preparing for business plan competitions, I realized the same thing. I was incredibly nervous at the prospect of public speaking. I realized that I just needed to make myself comfortable. So I practiced my pitches hundreds of times until I could visualize all my slides and give the pitch with my eyes closed. I even walked around campus saying my pitch out load to get used to people giving me weird looks or laughing so that audience reactions wouldn’t throw me off on the big day.
This is an interesting post, but I believe it applies to one aspect of startups – the importance of testing. Hypothesize (i.e. have an idea), test, verify (and repeat).
However, it does ignore one aspect of startups and that is the importance of strategic direction, or vision.
As a startup there are always many “opportunities” – I believe that is typical of the startup mentality, the ability to see opportunities where other's don't.
As such it is important to separate the wheat from the chaff and ensure that these experiments on consistent with long-term strategic goals.
I think that is one of the major difficulties of a startup is the ability to try out new things, but cut them when they aren't working. So while I agree with the main thrust of the post… I thought I would comment with this caveat.
That's true, but sometimes long-term goals also change completely
based on your first encounter with the market.
Paypal's vision was initially all about this hardcore PDA to PDA
payment technology. But when they launched the service people kept
using their website until eventually they shut down their PDA to PDA
service and changed the entire focus of their business.
there's nothing like practice and trial runs to smooth the rough edges