Carlos Watson: Essential But Unsung Skills

A lot of times when you hear startup, we talk about the creativity that's involved, we talk about the energy, sometimes we talk about the all nighters, we talk about the push, we talk about can you find terrific investors. I would say that one of the skills that I think is absolutely critical and that at least I didn't hear anyone talking about was the importance of being incredibly organized. It's funny, I think a lot of us think about startup and we think chaos and I think the reality is it's hard to get stuff done amidst chaos. And yet those places I think that are better organized, that actually follow through, that get things done, that as simple as this sound, have agendas and have follow up items and actually tick those things off, I think often disproportionately, those are the ones that end up winning. I remember years ago talking to a guy named Bill Campbell. I don't know, did Bill ever come and speak here as well? Bill, who was advisor to a lot of terrific CEOs from Mark Zuckerberg and Larry Page to Jeff Bezos, used to say that the biggest transformation he had seen in the last 25 years of advising CEOs was the number of visionaries who had become superior operators. That as he said, they came to realize that no matter how big and cool their idea was, if they couldn't actually implement it, if they weren't really organize it on top of it and the kind of person who could bring it to life, that it wouldn't come to life, that they couldn't simply hope that someone else was going to do it. And so I would say that would been the second thing that I would have emphasized. And it's not a skill that you hear talked about as much, but I would say that probably was a second surprise.