In this monologue, Brad Feld explains that the focal point of an entrepreneurial opportunity shifts as a company grows. Early assumptions about the market or product are often incorrect, so founders must stay flexible and treat the entire business model as the innovation, not just the product. He contrasts the priorities of a tiny, lean MVP team with those of a large, rapidly scaling organization, emphasizing that the path of a startup is non‑linear and requires continual reassessment of where the real pressure points lie.
Chapters
and I've learned over and over and over again that the pressure point of the opportunity moves around. And that oftentimes your premise, especially very early on in the life of the business, is wrong. And as the business grows and expands or as your product set grows and expands, the thing that is the opportunity changes. And as an entrepreneur, if you're not flexible enough in the context of the thing you're creating, to continue to look at the business as your innovation, not just the product. Remember, you have to focus on that product being outstanding, but you're also creating something that scales up. A 3-person business, a team working on the first version of something that's a 0.1 that's going to be released to the world as a minimum viable product using a lean approach, right? That's very different than what happens when you have 1,000 people grinding away every day, you know, on a business that's growing by 50 people a month. So as the entrepreneur recognizing that it's not a linear path and it's not a path with one pressure point. Now if the person's statement was circumscribed by time, then it's a pretty interesting statement because there's only so many things you can work on at any point in time. So if the statement was put all of your innovation into the thing that you think matters or all of your energy into the thing that you think matters the most at that moment in time, for a period of time until you get to the next level, whatever that is, then that makes sense to me. But the idea that you have it linearly over the life of the business doesn't make any sense.
