Business == Execution
“I’m not a businessman. I’m a business, man.”
Last week, I was featured in the podcast, Innovations @ Research Park (link here). This week, I listened to it; it’s true that hearing your own voice is pretty cringeworthy. The interviewer, Tanmay Shah, recalled that I had said “business is a mindset” in a prior interview. I don’t remember saying that, but it’s actually a great insight. Business is a mindset, it is a process, and it is the journey. It is the process of going from A—>B.
As someone who just graduated from the University of Illinois with a degree in business, I believe my degree to be a waste. None of the things that you learn in a classroom equate to doing business. The reason for that of course is because you are trained to be the employee, not the employer. Not to say I didn’t expect this prior to University. Getting a degree is just what you do as a clone of the Chicago suburbs–it’s an insurance policy against being a failure in the eyes of society. I knew this then, and I know it now. I chose to get a degree that would get me through the process while allowing me to explore my interests. Ultimately, I chose business because I’m not that smart, but I know that I’ve always been the hardest worker in the room. Business seemed straightforward, meritocratic, and a brute-forced path to success. I don’t think my assumptions were too far off.
I believe business == execution.
While founding Y Combinator, Paul Graham wrote in an essay titled Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas (link here),
“There is no such thing as ‘business.’ There's selling, promotion, figuring out what people want, deciding how much to charge, customer support, paying your bills, getting customers to pay you, getting incorporated, raising money, and so on.”
As long as you are above a decent threshold of intelligence, these shouldn’t be intellectually straining. But they need to be done well and quickly to execute.
A business can be thought of as a product that consumers “hire” to solve a problem they experience. First, a business needs to find the problem by speaking with prospective customers and finding their pain points. Second, you create a product. Third, you sell it to the customers. The more I work on my business, the more I understand how simple the process is in theory and how we sometimes trip over the details. Often, any person can do all three of the above. Sometimes, you need a technical co-founder to engineer the product. I’m grateful for Josh for this reason.
Steve Jobs was not technical, but he drove the product. At this point, Elon Musk isn’t solving small engineering problems, but he is driving the product. When driving the product, you are essentially engineering the future. You look at the world that should exist and execute on a vision to actualize that world. Steve was a visionary, he didn’t get caught up in the minutiae of engineering. He developed products that users loved and had engineers back into solving problems to make those products a reality. Through advancements in science and technology, we should assume many problems are solvable. Often, the bottleneck isn’t in the limitations of worldly physics, but rather the lack of talented engineers working to solve that problem.
Steve is also famous for saying,
“Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact. And that is everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it-you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.”
If you truly absorb the reality that the ends are not only possible but inevitable, it is just a matter of mapping out the means. The means in this case is the plan of execution. Google’s current mission statement is “to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.” The software engineering is just the back-end process to create this abstract solution for users to access information.
That isn’t to say it is easy to execute, it isn’t. To be honest, I don’t feel like I’ve learned enough to write about execution in its entirety. What I will say is that the person working 80 hours is working 2x more than the person working 40 hours. I think they’ll get at least 2x as much done.
Startups often execute better than big companies. The reason for this? They are nimble, quick, and good startups evade convention. A question that Sam Altman developed is, “tell me about something that you’ve hacked to your advantage?” (social hacking, not cybercriminal hacking). I think this is also a good heuristic for a founder. The reason is that you have to be so scrappy. There is no simple route. As I recall from my last post, A Year of Startups, it is often a shuffle and step function to reach the next milestone. Often, you just have to figure out a way to point B even if it doesn’t exist. You have to make it exist.
This year, I’ve had remorse that I didn’t study computer science, as it would have given me the tools to solve these problems and build these products. It still would have been more helpful than a business degree, but now I see a lot of value in philosophy. If you understand the bigger picture, you can reverse engineer that vision. Reading would probably be pretty helpful for that as well. I think that’s why a lot of successful tech entrepreneurs read science fiction in their youth. It opened their eyes to amazing things that can be built. Then, they grew up and built them.