Stay focused on the big picture

Stay focused on the big picture as things get complicated.

Maybe you think entrepreneurship sounds OK so far. You start a company with your best friend, get some money from Aunt Karen, eat a bunch of ramen, and the next thing you know you’re Elon Musk.

That’s simply not how it works. Entrepreneurship is far harder than it is easy. It’s unnatural for most people. But there’s one point at which it’s harder than all the others: when investors aren’t calling you back and no one is buying your product. When the uncertainty just gets to be too much. This is what Y Combinator cofounder Paul Graham calls the trough of sorrow. Most entrepreneurs don’t make it through.

The trick is simple: just keep going. Zoom out from the minutiae of your startup’s problems, and look at the big picture. You have to keep hoping that one last push will get you through to the other side.

For many startup founders, the way out of the trough of sorrow is investment. In fact, many think of investment as an endgame – the point at which they can finally sit back and take a reasonable salary for the first time in years. But the money comes at a great cost: venture capitalists exist to take as much of your precious company as they can. It’s their sole job. And signing a term sheet is only the beginning of your relationship with a VC.

But just because you get VC money doesn’t mean you’re home free. And not getting attention from VCs doesn’t mean your business is bad or doomed. VCs know money, but they don’t know your business better than you do, and sometimes they don’t even know your industry. Your job is to build a great product and sell it to customers. If you do that well enough, the money will come.

Staying focused on your product doesn't mean putting on blinders. You also have to be open and realistic about the opportunities around you, like Stacy Madison and her then-boyfriend Mark Andrus. They were running a successful sandwich-cart business in Boston, passing out baked pita chips to people waiting in line. People went wild over the chips, so in 1998 the couple pivoted to focus on chips instead of sandwiches. By 2006, Stacy’s was doing $65 million in revenue, and was subsequently acquired by PepsiCo.

Giving up on your original idea takes humility. As we’ll see in the next blink, humility is also key when managing a crisis.