Renaissance (wo)men build startups

I’ve now stumbled through three startups as a founder from scratch to a decent scale and hired people at all stages from 0 to 500 employees. Smarts and strong work ethic form a good foundation to succeed at any scale, but the skills needed at various stages are quite different. This is one of the reasons not all fantastic people can scale with a fast growing company. However, there’s one superpower that I’ve found to be absolutely necessary in the early 1-to-100 people startup and very helpful at any stage. I call them the renaissance (wo)men.

Whether you’re in sales, marketing, operations, product, engineering or customer service, to have impact and move the ball forward in a meaningful way, it typically takes at least three steps:

1. Make right decisions
2. Build or set-up the (software) systems needed to get the work done
3. Do the actual work i.e. execute

In most very large companies, you’re expected to do only ONE of these tasks. And if you’re a manager, you can be very successful by only doing the first and never even think about the latter two. In fact, most people are unfortunately incapable of doing more than one of these three. I define the renaissance (wo)men by their ability and desire to do all these three things rather than relying two other people to move the ball forward.

The renaissance wo(men) can instantly become 10X performers in a startup:

1. Execution speed: The time that it takes to communicate requests, ask for clarifications and correct mistakes between three people is massive. If all this happens in a single brain, it makes a huge difference. It’s not atypical that if you ask someone to do something on Monday, it may be finished on Tuesday, so that the person responsible for the hands-on work can get to it on Wednesday (or next week or next month). Alternatively, this all could happen early Monday morning by you, the renaissance person. This is one of the many reasons why well run startups move 100X faster than large companies despite their 100X resource advantage.
2. Pace of learning and iteration: By definition, there is no blueprint for success for the innovator creating a new market. Therefore, I believe the pace of learning and iteration is the ultimate competitive advantage for almost all startups. To improve product, marketing, sales and even company strategy, you have to test and iterate as fast as possible. If this learning and iteration is dependent on a three person chain for every step, so much is lost in translation and ability to quickly react to new information.
3. Better use of capital: It’s obvious that hiring 1 vs. 3 people is much more capital efficient, but the bigger cost is opportunity cost of time in a rapidly changing environment.

The ultimate renaissance (wo)man is a founder who can do all these three things in the very early stages of the founding process, which accelerates finding the critical product-market fit. But this discovery process is equally critical in all functions from operations to marketing to sales to further product iteration. Therefore, these renaissance skills are absolutely necessary to succeed in a startup. And even later, in most roles, the ability to be a renaissance wo(man) gives you a huge edge to perform. However, once a company scales past 100 people, renaissance people — especially those higher up in the org — need to de-emphasize the tendency to be hands-on in everything, since you can generate much more leverage by hiring and delegating both execution and decision making.

What if you aren’t a software engineer and want to 10X performance and become a true renaissance (wo)man in your function? The good news is, you don’t have to be fluent in Python or C++ to do that. These days, there is a software tool for everything and with some investment into learning script languages or SQL you can develop the skills sufficient for most roles to be able to make decisions, setup the tools and execute without asking help from anyone else. That’s how you get the job done Monday morning before your colleague even wakes up.

So whether you’re looking to hire the right folks or get ready for a startup job, make sure to find or become a renaissance (wo)man to succeed in a startup.

As always, I’m looking for more renaissance talent to join my team.