Three Rules of Entrepreneurship

Most people only ever remember 3 things. So I put these 3 things that are the 3 most important rules of entrepreneurship at the beginning of the book because I'm like, well, people are going to read 3 pages, they'll get that, and then if they put it down, that's OK. So I'm going to share it with you here. The first one is— these are rules that I try and live by as much as I can. The first one is time is your most precious asset. I mean, there is every day that goes by, you need to think very carefully as a leader, as an entrepreneur, what should I be working on? What are the most important things I need to be working on? There's a lot of ways that you can prioritize your time. One I like to use is something called the Eisenhower Matrix that was named after Dwight D. Eisenhower, where it's basically a 2x2 matrix, very simple, and you only do the things that are important and urgent. Things that are important but not urgent, you schedule. Things that are urgent but not important, you delegate. And if they're not important and they're not urgent, you're just not going to do them. You just delete them. And so just find ways to prioritize what you should be doing, because when you build companies or organizations of any kind or as any kind of leader or manager, a lot's coming at you all the time. And email is a perfect example. I like to think about email as those are things that other people want you to do. They're not things that you should be doing. So in a perfect world— and I'm not perfect at this, but I try really hard— I put email away. Now with multiple screens on our laptops, you can actually put email on one screen and slide away to it and work in another screen. And go back and look at email like every 2 hours or 4 hours or 10 hours or whatever you want. But if you sit in front of email— and you know what happens when you send an email? You respond to an email? You get more email. It's even better. So you really have to come up with the ways of making sure that you are focused and prioritizing what is important to you. Because if you raise venture capital or you raise any other kind of capital, there's usually a fuse on that money. And you're going to run out of time. And so you really need to think hard about how you're spending your time. Number 2 is keep the main thing the main thing. OK, there's going to be a lot coming at you. People are going to ask you all sorts of questions. You're probably going to hire some amazing people. They're going to have all sorts of ideas. And they're all really good ideas. But like at the beginning, and even now, we have 6,000 people at Okta. And I'm like, we need— there's all sorts of things that we can do, but we shouldn't do. We need to really stay focused. And you're like, that's crazy. You have 6,000 people. Trust me, I know. You need to stay focused. So keep the main thing the main thing. And this is true for a project. It's true for leadership. It's true for your own schedules. Like if you're trying to hire someone and it's someone important in your company, you should have an hour blocked away every single morning. What are you doing about hiring? What are you doing about pipeline? What are you doing about interviewing? What are you doing about all the things? Because otherwise it's going to be 90 days later, you haven't made any progress, and you're like, oh man, I was distracted because I was trying to figure out how to hire an employee in Canada. That's probably important, but someone else can do that. So make sure that you are focused on the main thing. I only bring that up because an entrepreneur this morning asked me, how do I hire someone in Canada? And I was like, is that the most important thing you should be doing right now? And finally, nothing happens until somebody sells something. The point of for-profit companies is to build and sell other products to other people. Now I know there's a lot of engineers in this room. I'm a reformed engineer myself. I know the interest a lot of times can be like, let's build something cool. I'm all about it. But just realize at the end of the day— and there's all sorts of— in a consumer world, there's subscription, there's prosumer models, there's upsells, there's— In enterprise software, we could talk about that as well. Same is true for biotech. Same is true for any industry. So just remember that if you're not comfortable with sales and you want to be CEO founder, you need to change that. You need to learn how to reach out to people. Don't hide behind email. You need to learn how to pick up the phone, how to go visit people in person. I know it's very hard, but the number one hardest thing in business is separating someone from their wallet. And the earlier you learn how to do that as a CEO, the better off you'll be.