There is no recipe
I replaced all the exclamation marks at the end of my sentences with question marks.
A lot of people ask me why I don’t share about Wilco anymore, and it’s a question I find a bit hard to answer.
There are the obvious reasons, which I learned the hard way:
- The bigger a company gets, the slower things move, so not much changes.
- We’re not alone anymore. There’s a team, investors and customers, so you have to censor yourself more.
- When there are fewer successes, there’s less to share.
But I want to write about the fourth reason.
The programmer’s way
The hardest part for me, as a programmer entering the world of entrepreneurship, was that there was no “recipe” I could follow.
As a programmer, when I hit a problem I go do research. I read books, talk to my network, learn from past cases. After collecting data you quickly start seeing patterns. The solution space turns out to be pretty closed, and you understand the pros and cons of each alternative.
That’s how I thought it would be when we started thinking about raising money. We weren’t sure at all when the right time was, or how much. So I started asking a lot of entrepreneurs who’d been there, experienced people I hold in high regard, some of whom had built big companies.
To my surprise, I simply got a huge and contradictory amount of opinions:
- Stay at your job as long as possible so you can work with a clear head. Leave as soon as possible, because it looks bad to investors and you have to give 200%.
- Take a few months to work on a product and then raise. Don’t build anything, it’s easier to raise on just an idea.
- Raise the bare minimum so you come into the next round strong. Don’t you dare raise small, funds love a clean cap table.
- Hire an advisor to take care of it. Don’t you dare bring in someone who’ll take a percentage.
- Bring as many customers as you can, even for free. Free customers aren’t interesting, one paying customer beats ten free ones.
- Emphasize the solution. The solution doesn’t matter, emphasize the problem. Emphasize the team, everything’s going to change later anyway.
- Don’t talk to funds at all. Don’t talk to angels at all. Start spreading the word.
The peak was when a very close mentor warmly suggested we close a customer from abroad, to show how strong we are for bringing in a customer from outside our network. We managed to close one. A few weeks later we presented to one of the strongest people in Israeli high tech, and he simply scolded us for looking for customers abroad, because it actually showed how weak our network was.
I walked out of that conversation in shock. Then I remembered a tip I got from Ron Gura and Nimrod Priell, on two separate occasions: you can read and learn until tomorrow, but in entrepreneurship you just have to try and develop instincts. It’s a muscle you have to train.
So we started letting go, trusting ourselves more, and gave ourselves permission to be wrong.
I was an idiot
When I started this journey two years ago (it feels like a decade), I had a very well-formed idea of how a startup should be run. I’d read all the books and listened to all the podcasts. I’d even been in a company or two from the very beginning. I thought I was coming with a recipe and just had to execute it.
I was an idiot.
I don’t think there’s a single thing I once believed to be true about entrepreneurship that I haven’t changed my mind about. The path to growth, how to build a team, what to do to bring in customers, how to build the product. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, mostly in the last year, it’s that I don’t know anything. A great lesson in humility, delivered by a flying kick.
Since then I walk around the world not believing anything professional, from anyone. If someone speaks with confidence, I scorn them. My whole foundation was shaken. As far as I’m concerned, every piece of advice I read was written by ChatGPT with a hallucination.
Obviously that’s an exaggeration too, but I sit at meetups where founders recite mantras and I want to stand up and say, “Glad it worked for you in 2017. I tried what you said, I suggest nobody does it, it doesn’t work, gentlemen.”
I was so captive to the concept that I convinced myself there was a direct link between what we did and the outcome, when in practice things bigger than us plus luck played a much bigger role. As a deterministic person, that’s discouraging. It’s like looking at an A/B test with two opposite results. It makes you lose faith in the method.
Back to natural size
So this past year has mostly made me lower my voice. I don’t have the privilege of speaking unequivocally. I replaced all the exclamation marks at the end of my sentences with question marks. When people come to me for advice I hedge, and when an issue comes up I analyze it, but I always understand that a lot of it doesn’t depend on what I do.
At the end of the day it brings you down to your natural size, and it makes me, at least, focus on just doing. And then doing more and more and more, until at some point something hits, and I won’t know why. So I’ll just keep going, and focus more on doing and less on talking.