Nikhil Kapur
Photo credit: Pixabay.
The words I most dread in the boardroom lately have been “We’ll do both.” Conversations with founders usually start like this:
“We are doing A but are finding some difficulties. It seems it might be better to do B because X, Y, and Z did or said so. We’ll start experimenting with B because A and B have underlying synergies and 1 + 1 might just become three.”
As I see it, in such cases, 1 + 1 is unlikely to become three or even two. It’s likely to sum up to zero or at most one. A startups’ resources, especially in the early stages, are limited. There is only one CEO, one COO, and one CTO. There are a few techies building a product the way the founders tell them to, and the marketing team is trying its best to eke out every single dollar return from a penny spent.
Does anyone really think this looks like a company or team that can afford to start doing two things at the same time?
Chasing shiny objects
Keeping our portfolio companies focused on doing a few things right is a big challenge. And I see myself spending a lot of time doing this more and more often these days. Entrepreneurs have a tendency to chase shiny objects, born out of their innately curious and dreamer minds. Even investors—myself included—are likely to fall in a trap, where a new stream of business looks too lucrative to pass up. We start drooling, then mindlessly start steering the boat in two different, if not opposite, directions at the same time.
It doesn’t take a genius to figure out where the boat will go if the left oars paddle one way and the right oars paddle the other.
