Execution is easy

most people are stuck in a have idea, do nothing loop. wondering “what if” was the easy part, making it real is difficult. or expensive. or impossible for x-y-z reasons. we call these people consumers.

a much smaller group exhibits the same behavior, then pauses and says “not me, i make things happen.” we owe everything to this group. they are called founders.

yet building is not enough. even with precision, speed, timing, good connections, happy customers… none of it is sufficient for success. why? how can the restaurant with a million dollar renovation fail, while the chicken shack succeeds?

we study the guts of winning enterprises to see what “stuff” they’re made of. James Collins became famous by pattern matching these observations. but what if the secret of great companies is found inside outside?

if a business is special knowledge with a price tag, the “outside” part is whatever compelled the business into existence. we refer to this as the origin story; the why; the idea.

analog to set the mood

startup founders are trained to believe “ideas are (cheap | useless | easy), execution is everything.”

but in other industries, execution specialists are a dime a dozen. take the session guitarist. although paid well to strum chords on Taylor Swift’s new album, they won’t be remembered. they won’t be on stage. they won’t get a royalty check. they don’t really make a difference.

upon consideration that we, too, might be session guitarists, our skill gaps in starting a successful business expose themselves. it is only then that we can transition from consumer to founder.

the problem with engineering

i’m not an engineer but according to literature these people are trained to solve problems. they bend matter to fit their will. in software this means telling a computer what to do.

after hiring dozens of engineers, here is how i evaluate their talent.

• give them an easy problem. if they enjoy it, they are a bad engineer
• give them a medium problem. if they hate it, they are a bad engineer
• give them a hard problem. if they enjoy it, they are a good engineer
• given them any problem. if they ask “why,” they are a great engineer

asking “why” a problem should be solved is the most important skill. coming in at 2nd place is having the judgment to know whether to respect or question the “why” once it’s understood.

great engineers ask “why” all the way down. since most people are not great, they solve the wrong problems. they may be adept at bending matter — a necessary part of the equation — but matter cannot tell you if it was bent for a good reason. it merely submits to stronger forces.

bad engineers mistake obedience as a side effect of a good idea.

location, location, location

in my small town there’s an ice vending machine outside the gas station. a typical refrigerator does this already, and some people don’t eat ice, while others prefer re-usable trays. so i think their target audience is boat owners headed to the nearby lake.

now put this same vending machine in the desert. suddenly it’s a lot more interesting. the business hasn’t changed… same technology, same product, same execution. but results will likely differ.

each external aspect of your business is part of its location.

ideas are dangerous

ideas are fabricated in seconds. they might require a lifetime of synthesizing, reading, writing, thinking, talking to smart people… but when we “get” an idea it practically manifests instantly.

isn’t it strange that our next step is to drop everything and spend years on something that bubbled up in the shower? even if we get buy-in from friends, investors, social media followers… how many upvotes ought to be required to change the trajectory of our life?

Seth Godin has a term for this stage of value creation: thrashing. i haven’t read the book in years but his argument goes: the more effort you invest up front, the less effort you waste later.

with 77 years in the chamber we probably cannot start more than 5-10 companies. so yes, it’s worth double checking idea-math before making each one happen.

but there is another angle to this. since “thrashing” is already taken i’ll use the term inevitability.

discovery vs invention

Guru A says “focus on where the puck is going.” Guru B says “focus on the things that don’t change.” Naval reminds us “all advice averages out to zero.”

one way we can combine these paradigms is to ask whether an idea seems inevitable.

on cars and driving, it seems inevitable that in the future, nobody will control their own steering wheel. on cooking at home, it seems inevitable that robots will do more of the prep work. on the legal system, that AI will research precedent to decide case outcomes.

these are not my personal wishes. they are obvious conclusions. if i was a futurist, becoming a middle man to these outcomes would consume me. instead i like to wonder: how will human nature react to what’s coming? this lets us apply things that don’t change (caveman instincts) with things that do (Overton Window).

dumb execution = smart idea

to let rest the abstractions i’ll provide examples from my own founder journey.

in October 2023 while taking a shower an idea popped in my head: Bloomberg terminal for anything. it seemed obvious that a physical companion to software (beyond the financial trading niche) could be useful.

knowing nothing about hardware i bought a Raspberry Pi and Waveshare e-ink display. i wrote 10 lines of Ruby that slept for 60 seconds and woke up to fetch an image from my localhost address. this was as far as i could go.

the Raspberry Pi relied on my server to generate graphics because i wasn’t sure how to convert images in Python or C++. the board slept and woke up because i didn’t know how to maintain a persistent connection to my website. the web server had no ability to ping the device because i wasn’t sure how to do that securely.

thus became the core architecture of TRMNL… a simple procedural script. and then a sense of inevitability emerged. not based on what’s next or what has been, but on what is (human nature).

• people hate charging gadgets (maintenance) => sleep/wake strategy maximizes battery life
• people hate creepy spy tech (privacy) => one-way server communication makes devices secure
• people are afraid of black boxes (the unknown) => off the shelf logic is easy to open source

following launch, tastemakers dubbed this tech “ambient information displays.”

(which reminds me of progressives who recently began questioning polygamy, inventing the term ‘radical monogamy’ to maintain hip-ness while just being normal)

tolerance for error

a quick way to evaluate an idea’s quality is to ask how much wrongdoing its execution can withstand.

restaurants that taste great but charge too much, or not enough, go bust. meanwhile a guy named Craig made a website that’s looked the same for 30 years and stands tall against 100s of millions in VC-funded competition. his website is not better; his location (1995) is.

Twitter’s “fail whale” iconography was so common it became a meme. not because people tolerate server crashes, but because human nature tolerates friction in exchange for connection.

as founders we should always be sharpening our judgment. just also remember that we make too many decisions to not be wrong frequently. a good idea brushes off these mistakes. bad ideas are crushed by them.

removing ego

let’s revisit our music analog. the term “one-hit wonder” is a pejorative used to describe an act who got famous for a song, then never achieved notoriety again.

with rare exceptions (Rick Astley) this path is looked down upon. ask a musician their greatest fears, one will be not making it. the other is being a one-hit wonder.

in entrepreneurship however, we should intend to be a one-hit wonder. we should be so dialed-in on a problem that we are incapable of solving anything else. before starting a company, well roundedness helps us find inevitable conclusions. but in manifesting those conclusions we ought to become spiky. after moving to my home in 2022 i began building immediately and have not yet learned to use my dishwasher or laundry machine.

the more an idea feels like it is “yours,” the less likely it can tolerate mistakes and align with human nature. the more you fall in love with solutions (engineering), the less likely you are to pick the right problem.

once you synchronize your dream clock with “helpful at scale” you can afford to be so-so at execution because your conclusions will align with the universe. put another way: would you rather re-write a backend or convince people they’re wrong?

ideas matter

it’s OK to be a consumer. fifteen years ago i would have dropped everything to be Blink 182’s session guitarist. but if you do choose to build, over-index on picking the right thing. the rest will figure itself out.