Ted Zoller: Execution is Key

You have to be able to execute, and execution is critical. Execution is the function of actually putting your ideas in motion. When you have something so complicated that people don't understand it, you're doing the wrong thing. The best business models are usually the most simple business models. The ones you can communicate, the ones you can actually evangelize. These are the ones that actually can bring people to follow you. Right. So avoid complexity. You have a left brain kind of function. I'm this kind of person. I love to get underneath the. I love to get underneath the, to look underneath the hood. I want to tinker with the engine, Right? Engineers love to tinker with the engine. Am I right? You're the operating guy. You want to figure out how it works. You want to take it apart and make it better, usually, right? Well, there's another kind of entrepreneur. Believe it or not, most of them are sitting over at the business school right now. And I would call them right brain entrepreneurs. These are the people that will say, ted, seriously, you're spending all your time trying to figure this thing out and you're just wasting your time. This isn't worth doing it. Don't do it. Why would you do that? I tend to enjoy this and I always disdain the term vulture capital because it suggests that money is evil. Money is your tool. You should embrace that concept in order to make your ideas available. Right, Right. Make your ideas available. So don't be afraid of money, because money is ultimately the tool. Somebody wrote a piece in the Huffington Post and someone wrote a post responding to it and they said money is like manure. You just spread it around, makes things grow faster. Yeah, it's a point. I can understand that. But I want you to just challenge yourself when you look at that, and I find this with engineers a lot. When you look at that glass, how many of you see a glass half empty? You see the potential of it, but you see it half empty. Can you raise your hand? How many of you see it half empty? How many of you see half full? You're optimistic, right? I would argue when you're building a great venture, you want to take advantage of the people who are both optimists and pessimists, individuals who can ask all the right questions. So the people that raise their hand saying, I see it as a glass half empty, they're the ones that are well of knowledge of what are the barriers you need to overcome to make it successful. If you want a game changing solution, find that opportunity. So discover that business model. Allow you to soar over some of the key challenges, some of the key barriers, and vet that opportunity. Okay, so you bring your business model together, you balance it with your financial model on top of your business model, your strategy. You would track leadership, the people that you would implement with your business model, the financial model. You bring the tools of implementation, all the assets you need to build your venture. Right. Guess what else is at that intersection? I bet you can guess. It's a value prop, right? That's a function of execution. These are the things you do after you're in motion, after innovation, the market comes together. So let's try to understand this as a system. It also occurs to me that entrepreneurs don't think, as we've learned from Sara Sarasvathi, strategically, they're very opportunistic. They start with an insight, they add to it an understanding of a customer. They try to understand how you can bring other people into the equation by assembling people around the idea with leadership. And they see all the assets and bring it together again, informed by the value prop. Right. That's how the entrepreneur usually starts. They don't think top down, they think bottom up. So let's bring it all together. You have the market, innovation on top of the market, the beachhead on top of the innovation, the insight, you have the business model, financial model. Add to it leadership. Add to the financial model, your implementation, all structured around the guiding principle of the value prop yen. Back up in the 80s, back in the 80s, I used to have a shirt that looked just like that. I'm surprised they're not wearing it still today. But that's the way I look at entrepreneurship in many ways, that this model actually captures many of the ways people approach entrepreneurship. And you have to integrate these elements into your thinking. Not everyone on your team, by the way, has everything on this picture. You have to build a team that fills out the full equation.