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Focus is the most important thing you can have as a startup founder. Every failed company that I have founded, worked at, worked with, or heard of, has ultimat
by donw 15y ago
Focus is the most important thing you can have as a startup founder.
Every failed company that I have founded, worked at, worked with, or heard of, has ultimately failed because they could not focus on a single goal, and instead pursued multiple, divergent plans... all at the same time.
Not 'some failed companies', or even 'many failed companies'.
Every company that I have seen fail, has failed because they could not focus.
It's amazing how easy it is to be distracted, as well. Lots of shiny new opportunities to expand. There's new features that will give you a share of some marginally-related market, or new alliances that will only cost 'a little engineering time'.
It's amazing how expensive those 'little' things really end up being.
- pgsoldyoualie 15y agoSo you're approximately 12 and like to lie on the internet?
- SoftwareMaven 15y agoYes, but too single-minded of a focus can lead to opportunity blindness. Daily pivots are bad. Never pivoting is bad. Building a successful startup is highly nuanced.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- rwallace 15y agoDoesn't pivot usually mean "our original plan X doesn't work, let's ditch it and do Y _instead_"? That's a different thing from what the article is talking about, "our plan is still X, but let's do Y _at the same time_, it won't cost that much".
- wpietri 15y agoFor what it's worth, I've seen plenty of failures of other sorts. One of the most common is the "field of dreams" failure mode, where you focus on building your vision, rather than on understanding your customers and building what they actually need in a sustainable fashion. The canonical example is Webvan: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webvan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webvan They were focused to a fault.
- wisty 15y agoCorrelation != causation. Having a bad goal can be a cause of a lack of focus, as everyone will try to rescue the company from itself (which just ends up as the clusterfuck you describe).
- Dylanlacey 15y agoI guess that doesn't bode well for people with attentional problems. Or, from another perspective, if you have ADHD you need to be really fanatical about solving your core problem so you hyperfocus on it, otherwise you're going to be ruined by your own brain. For yet another thing.