Those of us who spend a lot of time with startups that the ups and downs, the drama, the almost accidents on the road to success, create a wonderful arc of history.
So it’s no surprise that Rizwan Virk, a serial entrepreneur, investor and founder of the Accelerator Play Labs at MIT, has centered his eBook, Myths and Startup Models: What You Won’t Learn in Business School, around the Joseph Campbell myth. Hero’s journey. In this broader metaphor, Virk identifies and demystifies non-unusual “start-up myths,” not unusual misconceptions about what is needed to lead a successful start-up, in each and every phase of the journey. It’s an insightful e-book that discusses many of the non-unusual misconceptions on vital issues, such as raising funds, hiring the right people, and running for leader.
As an executive coach working with startups and especially startup founders, I sought to tell Virk the concepts he discovered in his own way.
I asked Virk why he wrote the e-book. “I’ve been worried about startups for almost 25 years,” he told me. “People have a lot of misconceptions about startups and I discovered myself by training the same classes over and over again. I wrote the eBook as a way to summarize classes to succeed in more people.
While I was taught control science (“it’s not really a science,” he tells me) at Stanford Business School, Virk learned from classic business control and evaluation models. However, it saw that they did not actually apply to new companies. “In fact, there are these concrete steps,” he says. “Every vacation is very different. I sought to find a way to communicate about it that would capture the art of control while adding a number of practical models.
Below are some concepts and antidotes to the traditional ones we discussed.
You’re destined to be the smartest in the room.
Virk poses the difficulty of locating the correct control monitoring point you want to have on your computer. “There are two myths of mourning,” he says in the book. “Get out of the way and let other people do their jobs,” and the opposite arrangement “I can do it faster myself” are two excessive negotiating tactics.”
There’s a reason. Both styles stand out to marketers looking for a balance between managing others in a highly dynamic environment. When you start your business, you manage everything at a detailed level. By definition, you know everything about the business, you’re probably the highest committed and therefore faster to get things done yourself. The result is that their workers feel powerless, disconnected and are not informed to think for themselves.
The opposite is also true. The explanation for why you rent to other people is that they can do things when you’re not there, which is to evolve. It needs to give freedom to its workers and is probably engrossed in fundraising or relationships with arriving consumers. You’re not there and you’re loose to unleash your workers. The result is that other people don’t get the direction they need.
None of those approaches will help you grow your business on a giant scale. The way to reconcile these two myths is to see when you want to approach, intervene to give a detailed recommendation, or walk away, to get away and let your painters perceive things.
Culture is more than hours satisfied
“There is this stereotype that culture has a beer on Fridays. That’s not the case,” Virk tells me. “Culture is about how painters paint together, how they attack projects, how long they stay in the office, how much they communicate with each other. It’s about the attitude towards consumers: if they are looking to be useful and the challenge of someone or just looking to hang up? “
Virk added that there is also a myth that delighting is the ultimate vital. In fact, he learned, cultural adequacy is more vital than delighting. “I hired a lot of other people who reveled in it and came here from the big companies, and then they started a new company and the idea too chaotic,” he said.
In his first start-up, Virk said his culture “paints all the time.” He thought it was the only way to expand a business until he visited another founder in New York. The other founder built a start-up from 9 to 5. He intended to create a sustainable painting environment. Not by chance, this is not your first startup.
Virk said he didn’t know anything about this when he made his first deal. But when he called a new CEO to run the company, he obviously saw the CEO’s personality permeate culture.
“You’re building a culture, whether you like it or not,” he said. “So you might build it consciously, too.”
Know your motivations and look for your blind spots
It’s vital to know why you’re starting your business and what you expect to get from it,” Virk said. There are many decisions that need to be made along the journey of initiation, many with imperfect information. Self-awareness you make decisions throughout the initial journey.
In his book, Virk includes some questions he uses in his starter accelerator for the founders. It’s about making an inventory of themselves. This includes questions about your motivations, how you think a smart result looks, and whether you’re more interested in creating a product or starting a business. Do you need to start a business or do you need to manage and manage a business? If there are co-founders, do they all have the same motivations? Thinking about these problems in advance will make marketers make more important decisions when choosing their investors, hiring their groups, and creating their trading strategy.
Entrepreneurs have blind spots and don’t realize it. Virk said that to check and succeed in them, they deserve to take a look at what happens to them over and over again to see what their blind spots might be. “In a company I invested in, the founder called a new advisor and told his former advisors that he would no longer pay attention to them, that he would only pay attention to the new advisor. And then, a few months later, I’d take it with another new adviser. Turns out he was doing that to his employees, too.
Sometimes you can’t see your own employers clearly, he said, so you want mentors, counselors and coaches. On the plus side, leadership can be learned. As the legendary venture capitalist Randy Komisar says in the book: “… everyone can adopt their (personal) taste and an effective leader if they perceive their strengths and weaknesses and perceive what a leader wants to do.”
“One thing I’ve learned over the years,” Virk said, “is that it’s vital to help the founders see a broader perspective. This helps them succeed over all those myths and build a successful business.”
I am an executive coach working with CEOs, co-founders and new company control teams. I also paint with giant Fortune 50 corporations to prepare their executives. I’m a
I am an executive coach working with CEOs, co-founders and new company control teams. I also paint with giant Fortune 50 corporations to prepare their executives. I’m an MBA, CPA in recovery and former CFO. I lecture at Harvard and Cornell universities and Naval War College and am the executive coach of the track acceleration program at Cornell NYC Tech. I’m also a member of The Entrepreneurship Advisory Board at Cornell University. Meet me at AlisaCohn.com. You can download enriching “table questions” here to start a discussion with colleagues, friends and family. touch me in [email protected] and stay with me @AlisaCohn.