Rule #24: You Won’t Have All the Answers
Always having the answers. All of those answers and opinions that we’re supposed to have as first-time founders when we actually have no idea what the heck we’re talking about. It truly can be the bane of our existence. As much planning as we’ve done, as much crafting of our vision, we rapidly reach a point when a never-ending series of questions start coming our way, many of them so far outside of our realms of knowledge that it can be tempting to think, “Maybe I’m just not cut out for this.”
And then we look at all of those entrepreneurs who have come before us and start comparing ourselves to them — which always goes well — those icons of entrepreneurship like Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg. Surely they had an omniscience gene added at conception or were blessed by some mythical entrepreneurial god. After all, these guys went on to found mega brands, largely on their first attempts, and those comparisons keep coming.
Newsflash: the feeling that you don’t have all of the answers but feel that you should? Completely normal. Let’s do a bit of unpacking.
When we start off in our journey of entrepreneurship, we have visions of what the company will look like; we have clear pictures of what the product will look like, how the website will look and who our customers will be. And we start building as that visionary. Our talents and skills may lie in areas like software engineering, apparel design or just someone who’s a really good thinker. So we hit the ground running and then, things slow down; things start popping up that weren’t included in that picture that we had painted. Employees or contractors start asking you about finer details of product presentation, pricing strategy or the dimensions of a hang tag for apparel. And, if we’re not marketing, sales or design professionals, there’s a wall that’s just begging for us to run into it.
Initially, our job is pretty simple. Sure, there are challenges and things we learn, but the lanes that we’re in largely line up with our expertise. Once those decisions start being made though, we’re forced to drive outside of our lanes and morph into ops people, heads of HR and CFOs. These are roles that we’re very much NOT familiar with, and expecting that we’ll have all of the answers to questions that we didn’t even imagine were a thing is entirely unreasonable.
Think about a founder like Mark Zuckerberg. He was someone who knew code really well and enjoyed building things that people could use. One of his most famous moments for not having a clue? Vesting schedules.
As Peter Thiel was considering a $500k investment (in 2004 dollars, almost $900k today) in Facebook, he required the founders to be on a vesting schedule. Zuckerberg had never heard of a vesting schedule. Imagine the mental conversation, “Uhmmmm, vesting schedule?” “Don’t know what those are, Mark? Too bad, we still need your position on this.”
Recall that one of Facebook’s early sayings was “Move fast and break things.” Zuckerberg understood that nobody’s going to have all of the answers, but that shouldn’t stand in the way of movement. And it didn’t. And look where Facebook is today…
The moral of the story is that we’re not going to have the answers anywhere near 100% of the time. Newsflash: nobody does, and it’s unreasonable to expect that we should. In fact, it would be concerning if you felt that you actually did have all of the answers. I believe we refer to that as narcissism?
But we still need to move forward, to do those things now, even in our uncertainty. How to do that though? I actually love that Facebook saying, “Move fast and break things.” Given the amount of things that I break? If I can only master the “move fast” part? I’ll be an entrepreneurial god!
Keep grinding.