Desperation-Induced Focus

People ask me about processes all the time. Planning processes, performance review processes, OKRs, et cetera. I think it’s because I was once a COO and people have this vision of COOs as process fiends. People who make the trains run on time. People with lots of Gantt charts all around them.

I have nothing against process.¹ But I think startups generally implement them way too early and way too often.

Every time I’m asked about some newly proposed process, I ask: “Why do you think you need this?” The answer is usually some version of “[Smart Person] said that we need to have a process now that we are getting bigger.” Usually this Smart Person^TM is from a big company.

The lesson, as always: big companies suck.

Don’t get me wrong—they didn’t always suck. At some point they were just like you. A startup fighting for product market fit or creating predictability in go-to-market or expanding geographically or something else that actually matters. They were focused. Focused on hiring trajectory-changing people and giving them more responsibility than they knew what to do with. They were working their a**es off to create something out of nothing. They had desperation-induced focus.

But now they are different. Most big companies aren’t focused on creating things out of nothing. Someone else made the magic money-making machine, and they assume that it will just keep working. With the one thing that actually matters taken care of, they care about luxuries like making sure as high a percentage of the company as possible feels included in the planning process. Or creating performance review frameworks with an ever-increasing number of boxes and categories. Or something else that matters even less than that. This lack of focus is a luxury and a disease.

My advice to people when they are thinking about instituting a new process is to go to a whiteboard² and write down the answer to this question: “If you could only get one thing done this year, what would it be?”. If that answer is “institute some new process”, go for it. But if it’s something like “increase market share from 30% to 60%” or “launch this new product that will 2x our TAM”, don’t waste your time on anything else. Just take your best person (up to and including the CEO), make them responsible for solving that problem, and give them everything and everyone they need to make it happen.

In reality, process is not my problem. It’s what discussions around new processes often preview within a company. Lack of focus. Peacetime thinking. Complacency.

When I think of my time at Instacart, I remember desperation. It was painful. But it was also powerful. Our best moments as a company came when we shared a singular purpose. Our most fun moments as a team came when our backs were against the wall.

In my experience, desperation is the single greatest advantage you have as a startup. It takes you down to the lowest level of detail.³ Desperation inspires creativity and intense focus. It is an essential ingredient to building great products and services.

So, the next time you feel desperate, lean in. Embrace it. Use it as the fuel to create the next founding moment⁴ for your company.

And the next time someone tries to tell you to do something because a big company does it, be suspicious.

Don’t let them infect your company with the thing that is slowly killing theirs.