I graduated from college four years ago, and I have finally unlearned the excellence of my academic experience.
If you work at a
startup, you absolutely must not work with the same ethic most of us had as
students.
As students, we were held to absurdly high and completely impractical standards. For me, anything less than 90% complete (in other words, not an A) was an abomination. 95% complete was good, but I always aimed for 100%.
As students, our score relative to perfection is the only way
in which we are measured.
After I graduated from Cornell, I became a software engineer at Oracle. Being a programmer is a lot like being a student in that the only standard against which code is measured is perfection. Code needs to work 100% of the time – a problem that occurs even 1% of the time is unacceptable.
As an engineer I knew this and always strove for 100%
perfect code. But I often ran into arguments
with senior engineers during the product management and design phase of programming. I often wanted to implement what they
considered only a fraction of the solution. The APIs they had in mind were often substantially more complicated and
only slightly more powerful. The
engineers had confused the need for 100% operational code with the desire for a
100% featured solution.
Looking back now, I realize that this phenomenon drove me away from programming and into marketing. Marketing is all about maximizing return on investment. One of my primary responsibilities at JotSpot is to manage advertising, and that means identifying ad spots, measuring returns, and prioritizing investment.
Marketing suits me well, but the company creation bubble we’re seeing reminds me that everybody in business, especially startups, needs to think this way, not just marketers. Prioritizing by return on investment seems like a simple concept, but in reality it’s incredibly different than how we’re trained to think. We’re trained to complete initiatives until they are 100% done. However, we’re much better off only partially completing several initiatives that matter most. The key is it to determine which initiatives matter -– in other words, which initiatives will return several magnitudes on their investment. Or, phrased differently, which initiatives will bring the most profit.
This concept essentially boils down to one application of
the 80/20 rule, or Pareto’s law. This
law is undeniable in business and in life, and those startups that heed it will grow extremely quickly.
At any given time, a business has a certain amount of profit
potential, and a certain amount of work can be done to fulfill that potential. But at that time, roughly 20% of the possible
work can lead to 80% of the growth.
So what will you do today?
