What Part of the Alphabet Are You?
The different stages of a firm’s life cycle require different leadership.
Start-up, growth, maturity, and decline require (crudely speaking) an
entrepreneur, visionary, operator, and pragmatist, respectively.
Surprisingly, the hardest to find are the pragmatists. The entrepreneur
is the storyteller/salesperson who convinces people to join or invest in
a company before it really exists. At the outset, no company makes
sense, or it would already exist. The visionary does the same thing with
the company’s first, unproven, products or services—even though
there is no evidence the company will survive long enough to support
those products.
I’ve started several firms. That makes me, in Silicon Valley’s terms,
a serial entrepreneur. Serial entrepreneurs share three qualities:
a higher tolerance for risk
can sell
too stupid to know they are going to failRinse and repeat, over and over again.
Highly rational and intelligent people are usually not good
entrepreneurs, especially serial entrepreneurs, as they can clearly see
the risks.
Once a firm has momentum and access to capital, it is better
served by a visionary who can turn this momentum into a somewhat
dumbed-down, scalable, and repeatable process and gain access to
cheaper and cheaper capital. Entrepreneurs are usually enamored with
the preciousness of their product vs. something that can scale. Like the
entrepreneur, the visionary needs to sell the story, but it’s now a
narrative a few chapters in. A visionary may not have the crazy genius
of the entrepreneur, but they make up for it with a feel for the
organization, specifically the hard work of building an organization
that can scale the idea. Once we get to a hundred people, I’ve always
brought in an “organizational” person, as I don’t have these skills.