- Do you ever get a lot of email?
Do you ever wish you could just do this
with all that email?
(bell rings)
(vacuum tube whistles)
(bell rings)
(vacuum tube hisses)
(bell rings)
(vacuum hose pops)
(vacuum hose sucks)
(Sam laughs)
Of course, then this would probably happen.
(dramatic music)
As much as I'd like to hide from email,
I can't hide, and most founders cannot hide either.
The ability to deal with a crazy amount of information
and prioritize it properly feeds into the one trait
that is super important for every founder,
and that is conscientiousness, being able to
do one's work well and quickly, with diligence.
There's an interesting study by Bucknell University
from 2004, that I will link to in the description
below, it's a study of businesses that were able
to survive for eight years,
and it studied founders on five different traits,
agreeableness, extraversion, emotional stability,
openness, and conscientiousness.
Those first three had no affect on the outcome
of the business after eight years,
there was no significant correlation.
Being agreeable or disagreeable?
Maybe it doesn't matter.
However, conscientiousness and openness
we do have to worry about.
Conscientiousness is positively correlated,
the surprising result is that openness
is actually anti-correlated with success
over eight years.
So I think this points to a certain type
of transition that happens in the life
of every startup.
Early on it's incredibly important to be as open
and creative as possible.
Later on, it's incredibly important
to be as conscientiousness as you possibly can be.
Pre-product market fit, you need openness,
you need creativity, you need the ability
to do something that nobody else has done.
You need the chaos of the prototyper,
you needed to try things that other people
have never tried.
You need to be contrarian against the status quo.
But, over the long haul, that switches.
And it's the founder who has to manage
the transition from this open, creative
period, to one of scalability.
Post-product market fit is about execution,
it's about that founder who found product market fit,
giving power and control over to the best
possible people they can possibly hire.
It's about delegation, it's about goal setting,
and then it's about keeping people accountable
to those goals that were set,
and it's a switch that a lot of people fail at.
Here's what it looks like when someone
who has product market fit finds it,
and loses it.
Graph goes up, up, up, to the right,
plateaus, and then starts falling.
Founders who cannot scale, end up
being overwhelmed by email first.
It kind of looks like the scene from the movie
"Brazil" that started this video.
(dramatic music)
You're jammed for time, you become a bottleneck
for the decisions you have to make.
Your decision quality suffers over time,
The fix is straightforward. You must invest
in your skills as a manager,
you must hire people you really trust,
who are excellent, and then you have to
delegate and trust them,
but then verify, you've got to hold them accountable,
and those are all skills that many first time
founders, who start off as incredibly open,
and creative, do not have, but they must either
develop those skills, or hire people under them
who do have those skills.
We have a finite number of hours in the day,
founders need to really manage this transition
well, going from founder to CEO, running a board,
running a team of executives.
You have to be the player-coach, instead
of just the star player.
So this is actually a pretty useful
roadmap for founders, pre-product market fit,
it's about openness, it's about creativity.
Later they need to switch into conscientiousness mode.
They need to take what they've learned,
and then march the whole team in that direction,
and hold that team accountable
the way they would hold themselves accountable.
When a founding team nails the first,
and then the second, that's the makings
of something that can truly be great.
(upbeat music)