I watched a Y Combinator video recently about things that kill startups. One of the things was low ambition and that's the one that made me stop and think.
The argument is that a innovation needs to create enough change for people to genuinely care about what it is doing. And (especially) small companies need a surprising number of people to care: customers, employees, partners and investors. People who introduce you to someone. People who take a chance on you. All of these almost invisible hands that help a young company survive and eventually thrive.
If the change you are proposing is only incremental, it can be difficult to generate that kind of energy around it.
What made this slightly uncomfortable for me is that I am naturally a very detail-driven person. I spend a lot of my day deep in the workings of the company, building the product, understanding why something behaves the way it does and working through decisions with the team.
Then there is everything required to actually run a company like contracts, security, privacy, compliance and hiring. The seemingly endless collection of small decisions that eventually determine whether the company actually works.
In those situations, detail is not the enemy, it's the job.
Where the same instinct turns against me
I have realised that there are other moments where the same instinct can work against me.
A product demo is a good example. My instinct is often to explain the machinery of how something works. I think to explain why we built it that way, what the limitations are and what sits behind what the customer is seeing. To me, these are all useful things.
But sometimes that's not what the person in front of me needs first.
Sometimes they need to understand the size of the change. For them, what's important is what become possible and what problem disappears. They might think, what does a world look like if what we are showing actually works?
If I lead with caveats, process, and implementation before I have communicated the outcome, I can make something quite ambitious sound surprisingly incremental or even mundane.
Build mode and belief mode
I think that is the tension I am learning to manage. There is a build mode and there is a belief mode.
In build mode, go deep. Respect the complexity and understand exactly how things work.
In belief mode, zoom out. Lead with the change and give people a reason to care before taking them through all the machinery underneath it.
The details make the ambition credible, but the ambition is what makes all those details worth caring about in the first place.
