My favorite book on training, The Cyclist’s Training Bible, starts with a self-evaluation that identifies your strengths and your limiters. That’s the first time I’d seen weaknesses rephrased in a pragmatic and actionable way.
Limiters
If you’re a scrawny cyclist who routinely leads up the mountains, you’re probably weak at sprinting. But that’s not worth worrying about because sprinting isn’t how you, the scrawny cyclist, win races.
However, if you find yourself breaking away on the uphill and then getting caught as you try to solo time trial to the finish–that’s a limiter. Even if you consider yourself a good time trialer, that’s still the skill that’s preventing you from winning races.
Entrepreneur Types
Starting a new company is a good time for self-reflection. Probably the most useful realization I had was that I was a specific type of entrepreneur and that type came with limiters that I could improve or work around.
I had the realization while advising at Kapor Capital. I got to meet a lot of entrepreneurs there and hit a point with one where I was totally flumoxed.
She had built an amazing technology but was somehow attracted to the tiniest potential application for it. I think at an emotional level, she just wanted people to use the technology and that was clouding her better business judgment.
Half-way through convincing her that there were several ways to create much more impact with her technology, I realized that I get trapped by small market ideas for the exact same reason. I get excited the second I find a few customers. Then my sense of duty kicks in and I get wrapped up in serving their needs and requests.
Ever since that realization, I’ve called myself a Utilitarian entrepreneur, meaning my inclination is to focus on the value I’m providing to the exclusion of almost anything else. I’ve been trying to figure out the strengths of that predilection and the limitations that I should be working on or around.
Partly as a way of comparison and partly as a way to be a better advisor to other entrepreneurs, I’ve noticed that there are two other common types, Technologists and Opportunists.
Technologists
Technologists are attracted to hard problems. Think of Google as a company founded by Technologists–the core idea was a breakthrough insight about search algorithms.
The best case scenario is that you find a clear and profitable application for your technology. Since you’re doing something hard, it’ll also be hard for people to copy you (make sure to tell your VCs about this built in defensibility).
One common pitfall is that you build something impressive that nobody wants. I don’t want to name names, but the examples that come to mind are in search and in databases. I just checked the TechCrunch deadpool and it seems much more common that people build something simple that either nobody wants or that has no way to make money. But there’s at least one example of technologists-gone-wild on the first page of deadpool companies.
The second common pitfall is that you miss obvious and more effective simple solutions because of your focus on over-engineering your dream technology.
A year ago, I heard from several computer-science-smart founders that filtering content was the next major internet challenge that needed to be solved and that advances in machine learning allowed this to be tackled algorithmically.
Fast forward one year. The best new application for filtering your overwhelming stream of information (at least in my opinion) is Stellar.io. Stellar has taken the non-technologist brain-dead solution–it shows you content that’s been liked or starred by people in your social graph. No math required.
Opportunists
Opportunists are like heat seeking missiles. This word has good and bad connotations–which seems right. Larry Ellison and Bill Gates are opportunists who were successful, but who don’t have great reputations.
However, I don’t think raw aggression is the defining characteristic. Rather it’s simply how quickly someone latches on to something that’s working and how quickly they drop something that’s failing. They’re attracted by the scale, magnitude, and potential impact of an idea.
I’ve worked with a very successful and very nice person in this category. It’s impressive to watch him move on to the next idea while I’m still wrapped up in trying to polish the existing idea for our five users.
The biggest gotcha is just to completely overlook the utility or feasibility of an idea because you’re so wrapped up in how awesome it’s going to be once it’s big.
The funny example I give, is a guy who called me up asking if CrowdVine could help him build a social network for everyone who owned a cell phone. That’s a lot of people! But why would the first ten users use it? He, a cell phone kiosk owner, had no answer for that.
The second biggest gotcha in this category is when the hype far outpaces the fundamentals. I have a couple of personal experiences here, but the most clear is Odeo.
In hindsight, the media hype for podcasting in 2005 was probably a reaction to how slow they’d been to recognize the value of blogging. It was easy to get swept up in the idea that we were riding the next big social media wave.
It took a lot of backtracking to realize that while podcasting was an occasionally useful form of social media, it wasn’t on par with blogging or social networking.
Utilitarians
Utilitarians are attracted by, you guessed it, utility–positive feedback from customers about how useful your application is.
From the outside, Joel Spolsky, looks like a Utilitarian. He’s got a nice, medium sized business, providing bug tracking software.
Size is one of the pitfalls (or not, depending on whether you think lifestyle-business is a perjorative). It’s definitely the pitfall I fell into with CrowdVine. I was plenty happy–happier than I’d ever been professionally–to be selling nice-to-have software to a small niche of cash-strapped businesses.
That business satisfied my short-term need to make users happy, but not my long term desire to have a large impact. Because happy users make me so happy, it was hard to realize that CrowdVine was our first product, not our last.
There’s another good product comparison here. Sharepoint, a social network (slash collaboration) product from Microsoft, has every feature that could possibly push someone to buy it. But generally, and I’m basing this on unrelated phone calls where someone spontaneously brought up how much they hate that app, those features are not optimized for usability.
A utilitarian would never do that. The app just won’t make sense to them unless they know that it’s being used and used well. Yammer is the utilitarian counter to Sharepoint. It’s a rapidly growing intranet social network that is useful enough that individual employees deploy it themselves and then spread it to the rest of their organization.
Countering Your Limitations
One Utilitarian entrepreneur that I was working with did back of the envelope business models (a 30 minute exercise in using Excel) and one of the models came out as two orders of magnitude bigger than the others. That’s what she’s working on now.
For me, I went to another successful entrepreneur with all of my side projects and asked for advice. He was completely right about what I should work on–but it was a decision that was hard for me to do because I was so enthralled by other side projects that I was convinced would be useful–but which were also obviously small potatoes.
The advice, “launch early and often,” seems perfect for Opportunists. It flushes out problems with feasibility. Technologists should get out of the building. If you build it, will they buy it? Utilitarians seem to do those two things naturally–what they need is a prioritization filter.
If you feel like you fit into those categories, you probably just need to do one or two similar things in order to counter your limiters. If you don’t fit these categories, I bet there’s still a class of mistakes that you make over and over. That’s your limiter.
* Photo by Leo Reynolds
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Excellent. Knowing yourself is half the battle and the other half is removing your limitations, or partnering with someone who covers that off. Most people aren’t just one thing but it is a good starting point.
(My default seems to be technologist with a hint of utilitarian. Need to refocus on the big goals.)
@Doug: Thanks! I do feel like these are types that could partner well.
Wonderful. More than anything else this post has forced some much needed self-reflection as I’m running my 3rd start-up, it seems I am certainly an opportunist, although most certainly a utilitarian sympathizer. I really like the introspection of looking as weaknesses as limiters, that one is going to stick with me, especially in my upcoming Cat4 races =] thanks.