Control the Controllables
There is so much outside your control in the early stage world.
You might not like it, but you have no control over a vast swathe of things that could impact - or even kill - your company: macroeconomics (GDP growth, inflation, interest rates, household earnings), freak events (Covid, war, natural disasters), competitor launches/funding, customer deaths/bankruptcies, (god forbid) an illness/death/incapacitation of you/a key team member, and so on.
The only thing you can really control are the inputs - the things you are doing within your own sphere of influence to shape the arc of the future in your favour.
That said, it’s helpful to test the edges of where your control starts and finishes.
Here are a few ideas to run through in your head/with your senior leadership team to sanity check you’re finding the right balance:
- Are you operating at a market-leading level of intensity to outrun your competitors?
- Are you resilient to external shocks - or even better, Antifragile? For example, are you and your team set up to move quickly amidst ambiguity, go faster/further than competitors, be resourceful and fight?
- Are you excited and paranoid about the right things as an organisation? In other words, do you have a good grasp of the key things that should be keeping you all up at night - be it with excitement or anxiety?
- Relatedly, what are the “golden gun” (i.e. one shot kill) risks to your business and how can you mitigate them?
- What redundancy have you built into key ops/tech infrastructure? A good example is the SVB fiasco - did you have all your eggs in that basket?
- How concentrated is your revenue and cost base and where/how can you spread/hedge the risk?
- Who are the “key people” and how do you minimise the chances of losing them (incentives, team, etc)?
- Have you recently undertaken a “pre-mortem” to identify why you might fail, and acted on the (controllable) outputs?
If you’ve covered off the above properly, the rest is in the lap of the gods. Control the controllables and enjoy the ride.