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'The Struggle' - what is it and how can a Founder avoid or escape it?
138 Plays1 year ago
In this episode of the First-time Founders Podcast, host Rob Liddiard recites 'The Struggle', an iconic chapter from Ben Horowitz's startup leadership classic, The Hard Thing About Hard Things. Rob follows the passage by describing how he escaped The Struggle as founding CEO of Yapster (a UK software company which scaled to 100,000 business users) by leaning on the 6 Key Components of The Entrepreneurial Operating System.
Interested listeners can reach Rob (https://www.linkedin.com/in/robertliddiard/) via Rob@mission-group.co.uk (or to book some free time to learn about EOS, visit https://www.eosworldwide.com/rob-liddiard).
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Transcript
Welcome and Introduction
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello and welcome to another episode of the First Time Founders podcast, the show where we talk about how to start a business from nothing and grow it into something meaningful. I'm Rob Lydiard. I was the co-founding CEO of a software company called Yapster that was acquired in late 2022. I'm now a professional implementer of the entrepreneurial operating system, which basically just means I work with entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial leadership teams to help them get more of what they want from their business. Typically aligning around the vision and working out what needs to get done quarter to quarter.
00:00:28
Speaker
then learning to execute with more discipline and accountability and improving overall team health, leadership team level so that that then flows down through the organization. Because we can be a bit chaotic in startup land. There's usually too much or too little tension at leadership team level and then in teams throughout the organization.
Sharing Founder Experiences
00:00:46
Speaker
So that's what I do for a day job, but in my spare time, I love talking about the first time founder experience, the bruises and knocks that we take when we try and create something from nothing from the first time and hopefully pay for some of that wisdom forward so that other folks coming through and onto the entrepreneurial path now can avoid some of my and my friend's mistakes and make your own mistakes as you go forward on that great adventure that is building a business.
Understanding 'The Struggle'
00:01:11
Speaker
Today, rather than bringing a guest on, I'm going to spend a few minutes talking about something known as the struggle in entrepreneurial circles. It was a term that comes from a book called The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz, who's now a really distinguished venture capitalist in San Francisco. But before becoming a VC, he was the founding CEO of a business called LoudCloud or Opsware.
00:01:35
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raised loads of money in the dot com crisis, made pretty much every mistake one can make as a first time founder CEO, but ultimately had a happy ending. He sold the business for nearly a billion dollars. But what makes Ben special is in his book, and generally, he's really open about his mistakes and the struggle that he went through as a founder, so that his portfolio companies and the wider entrepreneurial world
00:01:57
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can hopefully be more successful and learn from his experiences. So let's get into the struggle. So I'm going to read the struggle passage from the hard thing about hard things to kick us off. Every entrepreneur starts her company with a clear vision for success. You will create an amazing environment and hire the smartest people to join you. Together you will build a beautiful product that delights customers and makes the world just a little better. It's going to be absolutely awesome.
00:02:25
Speaker
Then, after working night and day to make your vision reality, you wake up to find that things did not go as planned. Your company did not unfold like the Jack Dorsey keynote that you listened to when you started. Your product has issues that will be very hard to fix. The market isn't quite where it was supposed to be. Your employees are losing confidence and some of them have quit.
00:02:46
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Some of the ones that quit were quite smart and have the remaining ones wondering if staying makes sense. Your running low on cash and your venture capitalist tells you that it will be difficult to raise money given the impending European catastrophe. You lose a competitive battle. You lose a loyal customer. You lose a great employee. The walls start closing in. Where did you go wrong? Why didn't your company perform as envisaged? Are you good enough to do this?
00:03:14
Speaker
As your dreams turn into nightmares, you find yourself in the struggle. About the struggle. The struggle is when you wonder why you started the company in the first place. The struggle is when people ask you why you don't quit and you don't know the answer. The struggle is when your employees think you're lying and you think they might be right. The struggle is when food loses its taste.
00:03:40
Speaker
The struggle is when you don't believe you should be CEO of your company. The struggle is when you know that you're in over your head and you know that you cannot be replaced. The struggle is when everybody thinks you're an idiot but nobody will fire you. The struggle is where self-doubt becomes self-hatred. The struggle is when you're having a conversation with someone and you can't hear a word that they're saying because all you can hear is the struggle.
00:04:05
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The struggle is when you want the pain to stop. The struggle is unhappiness. The struggle is when you go on vacation to feel better and you feel worse. The struggle is when you surround yourself by, you're surrounded by people and you're all alone. The struggle has no mercy.
00:04:21
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The struggle is the land of broken promises and crushed dreams. The struggle is a cold sweat. The struggle is when your guts boil so much that you feel like you're going to spit blood. The struggle's not failure, but it causes failure. Especially if you're weak. Always if you're weak.
00:04:38
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Most people are not strong enough. Every great entrepreneur from Steve Jobs to Mark Zuckerberg went through the struggle, and struggle they did, so you're not alone. But that does not mean you will make it. You may not make it. That is why it's the struggle. The struggle is where greatness comes from. Some stuff that may or may not help.
Overcoming 'The Struggle'
00:05:01
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There's no answer to the struggle, but here are some things that helped me.
00:05:05
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Don't put it all on your shoulders. It's easy to think that the things that bother you will upset your people more. That's not true. The opposite is true. Nobody takes the losses harder than the person most responsible. Nobody feels it more than you. You won't be able to share every burden, but share every burden that you can. Get the maximum number of brains on the problem, even if the problems represent existential threats.
00:05:28
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When I, Ben, ran Opsware and we were losing too many competitive deals, I called in all hands and told the whole company that we were getting our arses kicked and if we didn't stop the bleeding, we were going to die. Nobody blinked. The team rallied, built a winning product and saved my sorry arse. This is not checkers. This is motherfucking chess. Technology businesses tend to be extremely complex. The underlying technology moves, the competition moves, the market moves.
00:05:55
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The people move. As a result, like playing three-dimensional chess on Star Trek, there's always a move. You think you have no moves? How about taking your company public with $2 million in training revenue and 340 employees with a plan to do $75 million in revenue the next year? I made that move. I made it in 2001, widely regarded as the worst time ever for a technology company to go public. I made it with six weeks of cash left. There's always a move.
00:06:22
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Focus on the road. When they teach you how to drive a race car, they tell you to focus on the road when you go around a turn. They tell you that because if you focus on the wall, then you'll drive straight into the wall. If you focus on how you might fail, then you will fail. Even if you only have one bullet left in the gun and you have to hit the target, focus on the target. You might not hit it, but you definitely won't hit it if you focus on other things.
00:06:47
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Play long enough and you might just get lucky. In the technology game, tomorrow looks nothing like today. If you survive long enough to see tomorrow, it may bring you the answer that seems so impossible today. Don't take it personally. The predicament that you are in is probably all your fault. You hide the people, you made the decisions. But you knew the job was dangerous when you took it. Everybody makes mistakes. Every CEO makes thousands of mistakes. Evaluating yourself and giving yourself an F doesn't help.
00:07:16
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Remember that this is what separates the women from the girls. If you want to be great, this is the challenge. If you don't want to be great, then you never should have started a company. The end. When you're in the struggle, nothing is easy and nothing feels right. You've dropped into the abyss and you may never get out. In my own experience, but for some expected luck and help, I would have been lost. So to all of you in it, may you find strength and may you find peace.
00:07:46
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It's a pretty deep piece. If you've ever been in the struggle and many of my founder friends have, when we read that, we almost get a little mini knot tie up in our stomach because we remember some of those feelings. You know, not everybody operates at the level that Ben Horowitz did with the high-powering venture capitalists and all of the money at stake. But even if you've only played at a much smaller level, let's say angel backed, if it hasn't all gone perfectly and your growth graph isn't just up and to the right seamlessly, then you may have felt some depth of struggle.
00:08:16
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Here's what
Key Components for Business Success
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worked for me. The reason that I teach the entrepreneurial operating system is it taught me that all of the 136 issues that we wrestle with as an entrepreneur when we're mired in the struggle can and should be put into six boxes. We call them the six key components of running a great small business.
00:08:34
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Vision, focus on where are we going and how are we actually going to get there? So where are we going on a 10 year basis, broken down through a two page business plan that we call the Vision Traction Organiser down to what are we going to do in the next 90 days and what are we not going to do? That sits on something we call the issues list. People, focus on getting 100% of the right people, folks that fit our values,
00:08:56
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in the right seats for jobs that they're naturally good at doing, that they get, that they want, and they have the capacity to perform. Data, let's look at numbers every week as a leadership team. Let's not abdicate responsibility for numbers to our finance people. Let's make sure that we as a leadership team every week are looking at the leading indicators that ultimately are gonna drive success in our organization so that if we focus on winning the week, the months and the quarters and ultimately the years will take care of themselves.
00:09:24
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So we've got vision, people, data to get transparency into the business. Once we have transparency and we get clarity, all the crap in our organization rises up to the surface. And that brings us onto the fourth key component, the issues component. This is about creating a culture and a systemic approach to identifying the problems and opportunities that if left unaddressed in the business will see us continue to languish in the struggle.
00:09:48
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We need to get great at identifying and then root cause analyzing issues so that we can solve them, make them go away forever and move on to solving a whole new bunch of issues as we continue to avoid or get out of the struggle. Process, how do we do things the right and best way every time? That's the fifth key component of the entrepreneurial operating system.
00:10:06
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We've got to focus on making sure that the business is predictable, reliable, scalable, and profitable. And that means not making everything up as we go along, which most entrepreneurs naturally want to do. And then the final, the six key components, the traction component. This is really just about building rhythm into the organization so that we do a series of things, meetings, weekly, quarterly, annually, so that everybody knows where they are at all times as we march
00:10:35
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relentlessly forward to the delivery of our vision. If we're executing with discipline and accountability, we're ensuring that we get traction week to week, quarter to quarter, year to year, by meeting in an organized way, following the same agendas every time, and making sure that we look at our numbers, record issues as they arrive, and then spend most of our time as a leadership team tackling them, we will enjoy traction and ultimately we see our vision become real. And as Ben Horowitz says in The Struggle, and I'll add this on from an EOS perspective,
00:11:05
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Even if you operate excellently, your business may still not turn out to be everything that you imagined it would be. But you know what? You won't cause your own demise. You won't fail when you had a good idea just because you executed it really badly, because you didn't have alignment around a vision, you didn't execute well, and you didn't focus on building team health so that you could be open and honest with each other and respectfully disagree and then commit to solve your greatest challenges in pursuit of your vision.
00:11:34
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If you do these things, you will at least build the best business that you're capable of building in the market that you chose to win into. Or if you're really lucky and you've got plenty of investor funding and some runway, you'll even have the time to pivot into a market that's got even greater opportunities ahead so that then when you apply your newfound execution skills,
00:11:52
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you will go on to achieve something amazing. And not only will you be out of the struggle, the struggle will be so far behind you or below you that you won't even remember what it felt like.
Further Reading Recommendations
00:12:01
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And you'll have to come back and read the hard thing about hard things to remind yourself of how lucky you are now to be an entrepreneur or even an ex-entrepreneur, no longer mired in the struggle. So if you've never read the hard thing about hard things, I highly recommend buying the book. Whether you have or have not read it, if anything that I said at the beginning feels
00:12:20
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horribly familiar to you at the moment, retraction by Gino Wickman. DM me, we'll talk about the entrepreneurial operating system and how it got me out of the struggle and how I think it can get you out of it too.