Avertro just turned 5. Here are the five most important things I’ve learned.
- No one cares about what you’re doing. Your job is to convince them to. The more you can convince others over time, the more successful you will be. It takes more than an idea to engage people, whether it is team members, customer, partners, or your family and friends. They need to believe that is it possible, that you are the right person or team to do it, and that you have proven to some degree that you can do it.
- Most people don’t know how to get anything done; it’s critical to find people than can. In other words, hire based on someone’s adaptability and ability to get things done, not the logos on their CV. Our brains like shortcuts, so people often just look at the pedigree of past employers. The more recognisable the logo, the better. While past employers should be taken into consideration, what’s more important is to determine whether people can do what they say they are going to do. I’ve found most people are great at talking and “strategising”, but terrible at execution.
- Don’t listen to anyone that hasn’t been in your shoes. The world is filled with people who think they know what’s right and are more than happy to try to give the “struggling founder” advice about how to do things right. Unfortunately, every discipline in the world happens slightly differently in a startup. For example, someone who is a great salesperson in a corporate environment and has only ever existed in that context cannot understand the constraints and scrappiness required of a startup. So, while they mean well, just politely listen, take what you need from said advice, and move on. Don’t shift everything you’ve been doing based on advice from someone who has never stood in your shoes. More commonly, you will likely encounter a 20-something year old who is fresh out of university with their shiny MBA (or a big strategic consulting firm like McKinsey, or Bain) and works for a VC trying to tell you how to run your company. Unfortunately, everything they know about business is from their books. They’ve never ever run a team, let alone a company.
- The most important thing in business is sales. The second most important thing in business is also sales. The third most important thing in business is, you guessed it, sales. It helps to have a product that works, but if you can’t sell it, nothing matters. There are countless case studies (e.g. Microsoft vs. Novell) about companies winning time and time again because they’ve simply beat their competitors with their sales and marketing efforts despite having an inferior (or no) product.
- The startup game is rigged. Unless you’re on the inside and have the cheat code, you have to work 10 times harder. This is going to take a lot longer to unpack, so I won’t in this article. Like most things in life, there is a club. And just like “Fight Club”, you don’t talk about it outside of those private conversations and meeting rooms. Most of what happens in the startup ecosystem will never be revealed in public. All the stuff you see on socials and in the media is mostly for show. If you’re not in any club, things just take a lot longer, and they may never happen. For example, all the “overnight successes” that exit (i.e. get acquired) within 3 years? Most of them are in the club. There are bunch of things that happen right for them that take a long longer for everyone else because the club makes it so. Most “overnight successes” in business take 10 years. You just don’t hear about them until their 9th year, which is why it feels like they came out of nowhere.
Ian Yip is the founder and CEO of Avertro, a venture-backed cybersecurity software company.
