Re:The Scarcest Resource at Startups is Management Bandwidth
by wpietri on Saturday April 28, 2012 @11:30PM
(#3904993)
For what it's worth, I've seen plenty of failures of other sorts. One of the most common is the "field of dreams" failure mode, where you focus on building your vision, rather than on understanding your customers and building what they actually need in a sustainable fashion.
The canonical example is Webvan: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webvan
They were focused to a fault.
Re:The Scarcest Resource at Startups is Management Bandwidth
by SoftwareMaven on Saturday April 28, 2012 @07:25PM
(#3904481)
Yes, but too single-minded of a focus can lead to opportunity blindness. Daily pivots are bad. Never pivoting is bad. Building a successful startup is highly nuanced.
Re:The Scarcest Resource at Startups is Management Bandwidth
by rwallace on Sunday April 29, 2012 @03:36AM
(#3905407)
Doesn't pivot usually mean "our original plan X doesn't work, let's ditch it and do Y _instead_"? That's a different thing from what the article is talking about, "our plan is still X, but let's do Y _at the same time_, it won't cost that much".
Re:The Scarcest Resource at Startups is Management Bandwidth
by wisty on Sunday April 29, 2012 @03:48AM
(#3905432)
Correlation != causation. Having a bad goal can be a cause of a lack of focus, as everyone will try to rescue the company from itself (which just ends up as the clusterfuck you describe).
Re:The Scarcest Resource at Startups is Management Bandwidth
by Dylanlacey on Sunday April 29, 2012 @10:57PM
(#3907848)
I guess that doesn't bode well for people with attentional problems. Or, from another perspective, if you have ADHD you need to be really fanatical about solving your core problem so you hyperfocus on it, otherwise you're going to be ruined by your own brain. For yet another thing.
Every failed company that I have founded, worked at, worked with, or heard of, has ultimately failed because they could not focus on a single goal, and instead pursued multiple, divergent plans... all at the same time.
Not 'some failed companies', or even 'many failed companies'.
Every company that I have seen fail, has failed because they could not focus.
It's amazing how easy it is to be distracted, as well. Lots of shiny new opportunities to expand. There's new features that will give you a share of some marginally-related market, or new alliances that will only cost 'a little engineering time'.
It's amazing how expensive those 'little' things really end up being.