Myth: A smooth path

As part of the con­tin­u­ing series on star­tups myth, let me address the idea that the road from idea to mil­lions is a smooth path.

The Hol­ly­wood view

It’s almost become a cliché in any Hol­ly­wood movie: the scene shows the startup co-founders hang­ing out at a rau­cous party in a club. They’re not nec­es­sar­ily out danc­ing but they are sit­ting at a table hav­ing a con­ver­sa­tion about star­tups, or tech­nol­ogy, or other busi­ness related mat­ter. The idea that hol­ly­wood wants to focus you on here is that those peo­ple go to par­ties with gor­geous mod­els, party all night and work all day.

I’ve been to some of those par­ties. They existed back in the 1990s dur­ing the dot­com boom. The thing that few peo­ple would tell you is that the work rythm back then was work 9am to 10pm, then go to one of those par­ties (some­times because the food was free there) and then come back to work around mid­night or 1am, plu­gin another cou­ple of hours of work and then go home to sleep.

The funny thing is that I’ve yet to see a movie scene where the startup founder is sit­ting at his com­puter (or lying in bed with his/her lap­top), exhausted from the pre­vi­ous day’s work but still plug­ging away on work related mat­ters in the mid­dle of the night, long past their sig­nif­i­cant other’s bed­time (if the sig­nif­i­cant other is good enough to not have walked out the door). No, that scene where the founder is chat­ting online with his co-founder, plug­ging away because the work must be done, doesn’t seem to make it past the cut­ting room floor.

Real­ity is different

Any­one that tells you that the birthing of a startup is easy is either some­one who has never built a startup or some­one who has con­ve­niently for­got­ten the hard work that has gone into get­ting to a point of success.

To give you an idea of how un-smooth that road can be, let me give you a quick overview of Keep­skor to date (and I can do this with­out even reveal­ing what the prod­uct is going to be). Keep­skor started out as a rough idea around doing some­thing in the arena of gam­ing for health issues. I had got­ten gravely sick last year (came pretty close to death, actu­ally) and had to com­pletely change my lifestyle, from sleep pat­terns, to diet, to stress man­age­ment. In other words, I had to com­pletely change a large part of myself. In order to do so, I set up mini-games, mainly men­tal ones, that would give me points for good behav­ior and take points away for doing things that were not. The gam­ing part (and its related point sys­tem) are still part of the com­pany but every­thing else in it is rad­i­cally dif­fer­ent. In fact, when the prod­uct comes out, we won’t even have the health com­po­nent as part of our first iteration.

Along the way, as we were refin­ing the mis­sion, my busi­ness part­ner and I went through mul­ti­ple iter­a­tions of the prod­uct, its asso­ci­ated busi­ness model, and its core deliv­ery plat­forms. Last week, I talked about how we were mak­ing some bets on Android, iOS, and the mobile web. In its ini­tial iter­a­tion, Keep­skor did not even have a mobile com­po­nent but now it is one of the most impor­tant channels.

All that to say that we’re prob­a­bly sit­ting at 135 degrees from where we started: not a full 180 but quite a change from the ini­tial idea.

… and this is not so dif­fer­ent from most other com­pa­nies. Pay­pal use to be a com­pany that allowed you to send money from one PDA to another; Google was born as a way to rank research papers; Twit­ter was a ser­vice for send­ing SMS mes­sages to mul­ti­ple peo­ple. Or you can look at older exam­ples: Pixar was a com­pany that made ani­ma­tion soft­ware; Nokia sold plas­tic boots; IBM sold type­writ­ers; WPP (one of the largest adver­tis­ing com­pa­nies in the world) and Vivendi (one of the largest media com­pa­nies in the the world) were both util­i­ties companies.

Star­tups, like any other com­pa­nies pivot and often pivot in fairly dras­tic ways. Along those piv­ots, there is some­times pain as peo­ple who were hired to do a job have to do a dif­fer­ent one and adapt or leave. Ben Horowitz has a great post on the CEO’s psy­chol­ogy when it comes to those hard times but I would ven­ture the advice goes to all startup mem­bers. Life in a startup is not a smooth road but one’s abil­ity to not quit when the going is tough is what makes for a really great team.

Beyond the piv­ots, there will be many times along the way when one looks at the mar­ket and it looks like your com­peti­tors are going to win. They might but only if you let them. Star­tups are like marathons in that sense: you push on, even in the face of doubt. Mark Birch had a great post on that a few month ago that reminded me that it is always dark­est before dawn.

How­ever, as you get to past the first release and on to the next round, the dif­fi­cul­ties of the first round get erased and the story that gets told is one where suc­cess comes eas­ily, with­out much effort.

The les­son here is that what sep­a­rates the true star­tups from the wanna-bes is that abil­ity to con­tinue adapt­ing through chang­ing con­di­tions and keep push­ing through to success.

Note: this is part of a 5-parts series about startup myths. You may want to read all the parts: ideas, path, risk, money, cap­i­tal.