A short coaching-style monologue by Michelle Zatlyn directed at startup founders emphasizing consistent founder presence, accepting team turnover during growth, and the importance of building product faster than large competitors to maintain momentum (cites ~16 months as a typical big-company product cycle).
Chapters
You know, as a founder, you're showing up every single day trying to gain ground against your idea. And it's just so important over the course of the history of the journey of your company to keep showing up for work, to keep staying in the game, staying on the field. Because what happens is as you progress, sometimes you're like, oh, wow, I'm hiring people who know things more than me. Do you still need me? Am I of value? And what can sometimes happen is founders stop showing up for work or they stop going to meetings as they get further and further away from the business. Well, that starts a really negative loop. And so it's much more important to show up for work, stay in the game on the field. Because I know one thing for certain founders who care about what they're doing, who continue to do the growth and the work, and if you get to the other side of success as your company, you are in such a better position as a company that's not founder led. One of the hardest lessons I've learned as a founder is it's a journey. And not everyone is starting and ending the journey at the same time. So these people that you start the company with that matter so much, they end up leaving before you or others or sometimes before you even want them to. And it's a really hard lesson to keep learning. But then what ends up happening is other great people join the journey and then they get off at the next step. And so I think the faster you realize that people on your team are going to start in the journey at different times and different rates as you is okay. That is a natural, normal course of building your company. As a startup founder, I go back to those early days. Gaining ground every single day is so important. You want to bring the ball down the field. You need to gain traction against what you're working on. So momentum is your best friend as an early stage company. And what do I mean by momentum of a company? The average product development cycle time at a big company is about 16 months. You have to build your product in less time than that so that you're gaining ground against whoever you're competing with in the market for your customers. And that momentum will carry you forward and something that you will be able to build off of.
