April 6, 2011
I’ve spent the past few months working as an Associate at TechStars NYC and I’ve had the chance to take a front row seat to the development of 11 very different companies. The experience has been amazing and I’ve been lucky enough to meet some really incredible people, make great friends, and learn a ton in the process. By hanging around TechStars for the last several months, and from the culmination of my prior experiences, I’ve begun looking at new startups and ideas from some additional perspectives. Lately I have started to think quite a bit about not just what to build or how to build it, but why a particular product should be built.
Asking entrepreneurs why they started their particular companies tends to produce responses describing the geneses of their ideas. By and large these responses are descriptions of what they’ve built and the market need they’ve filled and really do little in way of answering the original question. Getting down to the deep-rooted purpose of what you are doing is certainly not easy but I think it’s something that all entrepreneurs should pay more attention to. Having an idea for a product you think people will use or seeing an opportunity in the market should not, at least in my opinion, be why you start a company. I’ve certainly been guilty of this myself, and perhaps mine was a worse violation. I started my first company in order to start a company. I wanted to act on a compulsion I felt to be an entrepreneur so I launched a company that I thought was interesting and could make money. This is not a good “why”. Retroactively I tried to find a better reason why I was doing this particular company but I firmly believe that having a solid understanding of the purpose of your company at the outset is critically important. I don’t regret pursuing the idea we tackled though because going through that experience changed me in many ways for the better. However, looking back I don’t think I should have been so impatient when choosing which idea to pursue from among the ones I was thinking about at that time. Bottom line, why pursue this idea at the expense of all the other possibilities is something I’ve been focusing on a lot lately and I hope it is an mentality that more entrepreneurs adopt.
In thinking through the idea of focusing first on “why” instead of “what” when looking at new startup ideas, I realized I needed a thought exercise to help me break my old habits. I needed a framework through which to look at new ideas and force myself to address the why before anything else. So, with Kant’s categorical imperative as a (very) loose guide, I have come up with the following:
If your basic vision of how the world should be was adopted by everyone, what would the world look like? And, would you consider the world to be better overall?
I believe a couple points need to be made to clarify what I’m saying and why I think going through this exercise is critical to the development of a startup.
First, what I’m really trying to get at is what the entrepreneur is really trying to sell. In the beginning the only thing being sold is a vision of how the world should be and an idea of how to get there. I think the fundamental problem is these two things, the vision and the idea, are sometimes reversed and sometimes the vision part gets lost altogether. Beneath every product idea is a vision for how the world should be. It is through the product that the vision is made real. The purpose of the product is to fulfill the vision. To answer the above questions you have to get at the core vision of the world that lead you to the have the idea for a particular product and then extrapolate that vision to its end. To get to this end, or to play a part in its development, is why you start a company.
Second, as entrepreneurs, we have a tremendous ability to affect the direction of society. With this ability comes an important responsibility to take the world in the right direction but I believe this responsibility is too often not adequately considered or addressed. This is why I’ve added the second question about will the world be better off after your vision has been adopted. Consider the breakthroughs in technology, for example, that have changed our lives in significant ways over the last few years. The vast majority have come from entrepreneurs dreaming of how the world could be and testing the boundaries of what’s possible. By and large, big corporations act in order to sustain their existing customers and users and, almost as a necessity, rarely are on the cutting edge of new developments. Entrepreneurs on the other hand, live exclusively on the front lines of innovation. As such, I believe we must take a close look at what we are building and how these products impact the direction of the world. Besides just considering if a company can be successful, we must also consider the direction we will be pushing the world if it does become successful. I think we have a deep responsibility to not just look at what can be built, but if it should be built. What sort of world will we live in if your vision of society is widely adopted?
I believe that my first company, a social media marketing company called imercive, was an example of not thinking about the role my idea played in the development of a better world. I didn’t think much about the type of world we would live in if we were able to turn our vision into reality. I’m not saying that this company was ever going to fundamentally shift the course of history, but even small changes taken together can make a meaningful impact. The ultimate result of being successful (everyone adopting my world view) would be another step in the direction of making advertising more ubiquitous and pervasive. It’s not saying I’m against ad tech but, when starting my company, I never asked myself if getting more advertising in front of more people was the right direction for society, and if I wanted to be part of that process.
Admittedly, not everyone will agree on what it means to build a better world and only time will tell which steps took us towards a better world and which took us in the other direction. This is a very personal decision but I encourage all entrepreneurs to look a bit further down the road and think about where your ideas will be taking us. Is that a place you want to go or that we should be going? Or, are you just thinking about what’s immediately in front of you without considering what may lie around the bend?
One caveat though is that the future importance and impact of new technologies and products may not be obvious in the beginning. Take Twitter as an examples. It’s an understatement to say the service has become completely integrated into the fabric of everyday life. Twitter has become so pervasive that it is now being credited with helping facilitate revolutions. It’s amazing to me that a site which was disparaged for being good only for posing what you had for lunch is now helping launch democracies.
Bottom line, this all comes down to a personal decision on how you want to spend your time. What do you feel is the best use of your time and money? What is the best possible thing you can be working on, both personally and for the world at large? I think this is the way all entrepreneurs must approach launching a company. I think too often though we are not pushing ourselves hard enough. We are letting ourselves off the hook by not deeply understanding why we are doing a particular company and not considering that company’s role in the betterment of the world, or if that is even a possibility. If we look at all the energy, talent, money, and effort being put into launching companies I think we should expect more of an outcome than a bunch of startups scrambling to acquire a few users and get some press. We must think big, we must understand the vision of the world we are selling and we must understand our responsibility to constantly push the world to become better. How this is all done, or if it is done at all, is up to us individually. Only time will tell if becoming shortsighted and uninterested in the connection of our work to the development of society was a mistake. I, for one, don’t want to wait to see.