Even In The Quietest Moments (it’s lonely at the top)

by | Mar 26, 2012 | CEO Succession, early stage, founder, Launch, Scalability, startup, startup CEO, Tom Nora, venture

“Even in the quietest moments, I wish I knew what I had to do”   – Supertramp

[This is about the loneliness of the CEO in a startup. A real startup, that has employees and funding and a going operation.]

 

It’s late on a Sunday night and you’re sitting alone preparing for the week ahead. It will include travel, employee issues, hiring, firing, product design, cash burn, a new facility, the next funding round and some client and partner visits. You have a great team for your little startup, in management and elsewhere. You have a few “startup whisperers” who advise you from afar, your parents are very supportive. Your spouse shows incredible patience and listens to your war stories every day. It’s not that you don’t love this, you do.

But in the end it’s all down to you. No matter how many people surround you, no matter who great your ecosystem is, being the CEO of a going startup is often a lonely job. By definition, in the final step of making many decisions is you alone making them.

  • Others depend on you to do this.
  • You have more information than anyone else in the company.
  • You get more blame and more accolades for results.
  • The outside world looks to you first, wants to talk to you.
  • No one is equal to you inside the company you need to maintain your leadership.

So it really is you alone.

 

How do you improve this situation? Draw from all these resources around you, especially external ones.

  • Pick one or 2 board members to get closer to, (pick the right ones).
  • Don’t ask for advise or what to do, that will confuse you and they contradict each other over time.
  • Find an old college or high school friend who’s disconnected from the business. Or a favorite teacher or professor.
  • Pay attention when outside mentors magically appear in your circle; I’ve met some of the best advisors at meetups and coffee shops.
  • Read voraciously, not just business or CEO books, but history, biographies. etc.
  • Try to mentor a potential replacement even if you’re not looking for that; you’ll learn a lot.
  • Use external consultants – management, executive, legal, recruiters to discuss ideas. Mark Zuckerberg hired an executive coach so he could learn to be a leader. The Google founders surrounded themselves with a dozen moentors and advisors.

I’ve found in my CEO positions that optimizing this thinking process can make the difference between success and failure, usually does. Please reach out to me if you want to discuss any of this with me. I’m @tomnora on twitter.

d e s i g n

by | Jan 10, 2012 | Business Development, early stage, founder, photography, startup, startup CEO

The other day I met with a startup in Santa Monica, and noticed a giant etch of the word d e s i g n on the ceo’s glass office wall. Their company isn’t about design per say, but it was refreshing to see the discipline given such prominence. The word design is being kicked around in the startup world a lot more these days, and I think this is a good thing.

Design is the exercise of creating or adding elements of appearance to something. It is defined as “The shape or appearance given to an object, especially one that is intended to make it more attractive”. In the startup world it can make the difference between success or failure if combined properly with great business strategies. There are many examples of great design alone in a failing startup, but great design plus great engineering and business strategies often win. Also, many startups with bad/weak design but great strategies and engineering have been winners. But that seems to be changing.

To say that someone is a visual person is a little silly – everyone is visual. Colors and Shapes and beautiful Movement attract any human, often on a subconscious level. A simple attractive Design for a website or product will change its fate from yet another to the best in a category.

Beautiful design exudes success and confidence, care about details. And most importantly – originality. great design comes from within a person or organization, not copied from outside and implemented. It’s more difficult, but imperative for long term success. Simple beautiful design is proliferating on the web – lots of white space, a small number of large font words, big open boxes for interactivity, cool icons. All of these things enhance the user experience and make them want more.

A recent great experience for me was trying out Codecademy. It has quite thoughtful design elements, many of them not actually visible, but so important to its almost seamless usability.

Style, similar but different than design, is more the process of following great designs, using existing aesthetics. Sometimes this works fine, but it’s not the same as amazing original design. Just look at the continuous march of Apple over the past 34 years. Great design plus engineering plus strategy. Accessibility, simplicity, completeness. They created the template for many other products’ style and design.

UX/IA is also an important part of all digital design now. First introduced in the late 1990s, it’s replaced and expanded on UI as the critical relationship people have when using products. Often it’s a pre-design process, trying to guess how people are going to use things, then use design to optimize the experience.

The new biography on Steve Jobs is a must read for any startup founder. It has the added benefit for readers of discussing in great detail Apple and NeXT design processes, justifications and investments. It also reveals that most of the design ideas were not Steve Jobs, but rather came from several design and marketing gurus he surrounded himself with.

Like I said, it’s great that Design is becoming central to the engineering-heavy world of tech startups, because ugly design sucks. @tomnora