🚀 "Why Effective Entrepreneurship is Like Parkour"

Category: Biz & Tech | 🚀 Startups

Podcast’s Essential Bites:

[6:59] “Our vision is a world where organization agility is easy to achieve regardless of the organizational size.”

[8:40] “Whether you believe you can or believe you can’t, you are probably right. To me there is something very true about that. Now, just believing that you can definitely doesn’t mean that you can, but not believing that you can makes it pretty much certain that it’s not gonna happen. In other words, the belief is a necessary though not sufficient condition for success.”

[14:42] “The qualities of leadership that I think are important are entirely independent of the quality of decision making in different domains of the business. And founders like me, who remain the CEO, I think have a huge advantage. We don’t have to be as good as leaders, as like a professional CEO, because we are the founder, because there is something like the soul of the company that is tied up with us. So we have this moral authority which would otherwise be very difficult to cultivate.”

[16:42] “Apparently at Berkshire Hathaway they had a sign […] that said: “Tell us the bad news first, it is only the good news that can wait.” And part of that is creating a culture where people are open about the problems. […] For me listing all the challenges or the problems or things that aren’t going well is an expression of optimism, because I believe that we can do something about them.”

[22:25] “[Don’t] fail fast, because I think that whole thread in Silicon Valley kind of confuses people. But just decide and keep your eyes open and then when you’re wrong, you change things. So I might be wrong […] 70% of the time when it comes to product decisions […], but I just do a lot of them. And therefore end up way further ahead than if you think about them for a long time.”

[22:52] “The biggest waste of time in product organizations is the preparation of slide decks, of static mockups of user interfaces. And then people go to the meeting and they all look at the slides and they give their opinion about whether it’ll work or not. And to me that’s like putting a recipe up on the projector and then asking people what they think of the recipe. How do you know, unless you make it? It’s literally impossible. But people, I guess, believe that they are smart enough to tell whether something is good from just from looking at the recipe and […] they want enough of their peers and colleagues to say “sounds good“, so that if this thing doesn’t work, then the responsibility is very diffused.”

[25:03] “Just do it as quickly as you can, and adjust as you learn. You’ll end up with a better result and I think you’ll end up learning a lot more.”

[26:45] “Being an entrepreneur can be a lot like doing parkour. […] You have to keep moving. You have to keep the momentum. And kind of stalling or hesitating can cause a lot of damage. I like the metaphor of parkour though, because it’s very opportunistic, continually looking around the environment for what can give you the most advantage or the most leverage and then pursuing that at top speed and then going for the next thing. As opposed to a lot of […] hesitation in decision and thinking.”

[30:17] “When it comes to business and product and strategy we’ve come to this weird position that no one could possibly rely on their experience and intuition to make a decision. It has to be something that is tested. And I think that nothing hugely successful has ever come out of that. Anything that has been a real breakthrough has come from experience and intuition.”