Startups fall into three types: venture-backed, bootstrapped, and lifestyle-oriented hybrids. Execution matters, but only if it points toward the right goals. Without a clear vision early on, raising money and hiring shrinks your options until you're locked into decisions you didn't mean to make.
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So you have venture-backed startups, bootstrap startups, and then I feel like there's a very common middle ground where they might be venture-backed, they might be bootstrapped, but really they almost act like a lifestyle business of, well, if it meets my needs, then that's good enough. And then it seems like they're almost shooting themselves in the foot because they're not executing the right way regardless of how they're going to build it.
I think that, you know, there is a, you know, if you talk to a lot of investors, a lot of people in the startup ecosystem, and I don't disagree with this holistically, but they'll say, oh, it's all about execution. It's all about if you can't execute, you can't make anything happen. And that's true. You have to know how to execute, but what are you executing on in the first place? Right? There's a difference between doing things right and doing the right thing. And executing, like people, like I was talking about earlier, people will say, oh, I'm super busy. I'm, there's a lot of activity. We are crushing it. But is that out? Is that activity producing an outcome is the question. Same thing on the other side, right? Like having a tremendous amount of priorities and no plan doesn't mean that your priorities are the right priorities in the first place because you don't have a plan to base them off of. So if you start a business without doing the lifecycle, without doing the vision phase in particular, what happens is that as you're raising money and as you're building products and all, as your business starts to move down the lifecycle, the walls, they start closing in, right? Meaning your optionality starts to go away. Like you're starting out and you're like, oh, I can do anything. I can build whatever I can. You know, target my customers. I mean, you know, outside of your general idea, you know, your wings can spread as far as you want. You raise money and now there's people watching. You get customers and now there's people watching. You get partners, you get marketing people, you get people on the team and people start to fall into positions. You lose that optionality. So if you got it wrong, you're done. That's another reason why you gotta start with the end in mind because of that losing optionality because of the idea of the walls closing in on you as you move down the journey. If you don't, if you're not on the right path in the first place, you're going to get lost and lost companies don't survive.
