When you’re starting something, you have a lot of decisions that can sink your operation. What do I write? What is important? Once I have something in someone’s hands, I can figure out a lot easier what to do, but it’s all imagination in the beginning.

Some people want to make that easier by building a minimal viable product—only it’s not that, it’s a Minimal Viable Product. It’s capital, see, the real deal, something official, like that’s a real thing.

And it is real, it’s what we do, but it doesn’t take the risk away—does what I’m building matter? So we blog and we talk to real people and we have conversations with each other, but we don’t know until we know.

This isn’t a theoretic conversation. I’ve done this more than anyone I know personally. I’ve been there at the starting line for more startups than anyone I know, more than 20 times. I lost count. Some of them did well, they went public or they made it to Y Combinator or they look like they’re going to the moon. A lot of them flopped too—bad ideas, too few resources, once embezzlement. Things happen.

The thing is, I couldn’t tell which ideas had wings. They all looked great to me. Some of them probably should have gone further. I wish I had more to give for at least two of them, I would have liked to see at least those two in the winner’s column.

But here’s the deal, I didn’t know what was going to work until it did or didn’t. I didn’t know, despite my best intentions and hardest work. Maybe the Minimal Viable Product has some real merit. Build it and see if they come.

Keith Rabois says that’s horse shit, but he’s more polite than that. He says a leader should lead, because you don’t do big things with cowardly steps. He’s got a point. Do something big, go all in, but get people to buy in along the way. If they think this is important, have them give you some time, money, or reputation. Put their money where there mouth is. He calls it tenacity. Paul Graham calls it relentless resourcefulness. Rabois knows what he’s talking about: Square, LinkedIn, PayPal, and Yelp are among his projects.

I’m building something right now. This project has me doing some machine learning and working with some interesting large-data technologies. I’m into the JavaScript too, making this work in the browser and the phone.

If this one has wings, if it takes off like it should it’s up to me to deliver not only the technology, but the organization that builds and grows the thing. That means I’m taking lunch with smart people, my dream list of collaborators. I’m preparing talks to discuss machine learning at meet ups and how to turn a hobby activity into a data lab. I’ll be talking about software practices too. It’s a way to shake hands with new people, find more people that care about their craft, that want to do bigger things, and get them to put their time and reputation into my organization.

Generically, we can call this enrollment. I’m going this way, whose with me? If you want to inspire confidence, be confident. If you want to inspire brilliance, be brilliant. It’s not as shallow as it seems when I put it that way. Brilliance is something I can do. We all have dunder moments. I can be the biggest dunderhead of them all. But I keep injecting awareness and functionality into what I’m doing. I keep asking questions, so I can see things, and fixing what didn’t work so well. Brilliant.

And that’s the formula—for the software, for the data models, for the organization: keep injecting brilliance into the system and enroll people into that future. That’s the future where we take it on together and do something remarkable. Because this is also true of these 20-odd companies I’ve been a part of: whatever I did or didn’t do, whatever happened to things, I’m glad I was there.

Reference

Mehta, K. (2019, September 25). Finding Genius: Keith Rabois, Founders Fund. Retrieved September 25, 2019, from Medium website: https://medium.com/@kmehta107/finding-genius-keith-rabois-founders-fund-d0a69b1f9e95