Grandma Is Being Mauled
Imagine grandma is being attacked but you’re stuck in quicksand. Would you have the strength to pull your foot out and save her?
~ Eric Bugenhagen
This is ostensibly an argument for getting extremely strong. I think it might also be one of the better explanations of why being a founder sucks.
You start a company because you want to build something. Presumably you are unusually good at building that thing. Maybe you spent the last ten years becoming good at it. You know the weird little details nobody else knows. You can disappear for 16 hours and come back with something that works.
This feels like work because it is hard. More dangerously, it feels like work because you are good at it.
Grandma gets attacked.
The engine keeps eating turbopumps. The qualification article failed vibration for a reason nobody can reproduce. Your machinist scrapped the one part with a 14-week lead time. The test stand is on fire, metaphorically or otherwise. The launch window is not moving. Your best propulsion engineer is leaving. Someone needs to convince a supplier that your company will still exist in twelve months. Someone else needs to convince the government that your flying pressure vessel full of explosives is actually a good idea. And you need to spend six weeks recruiting someone who will eventually become better than you at building the rocket you started the company to build.
You don’t want to do any of this. There is some beautiful technical problem sitting right there. You know exactly how to solve it. Everyone will praise you when you solve it. Your brain will produce the little chemicals.
Quicksand.
I think this is what Palmer Luckey means when he says that if you want to work on technology, work for somebody else. Starting the company eventually forced him to stop doing the things he liked and start doing the things he was uniquely able to do.
CJ Desai says essentially the same thing from the other direction: make sure the things you do are things only the CEO can do.
This sounds obvious but I suspect it is extremely hard in practice because comparative advantage and absolute advantage are different things.
You might be the best engineer in a 20 person company and still be wasting the company’s best CEO.
The tragedy is that getting better at the thing can make this worse. If you suck at engineering, delegation is easy. If you are genuinely exceptional, every delegation feels locally stupid. You watch someone take three days to do something you could do in three hours.
So you do it yourself.
Congratulations, you saved 21 hours. Meanwhile grandma is being mauled.
There’s probably a general rule here. As you become more capable, the question stops being “what am I good at?” and becomes “what breaks if I don’t do it?” These are not the same question.
A lot of very competent people probably spend their lives optimizing the wrong function because competence is addictive. You find the domain where reality reliably tells you that you’re smart and then you stay there. But eventually the highest leverage use of being good at something is knowing when to stop doing it.
The final boss of competence is voluntarily becoming a beginner again.
Sales calls instead of CAD. Recruiting instead of code. Fundraising instead of physics. Management instead of the thing that made you want to start the company in the first place.
Grandma doesn’t care that you have a 150kg dip if you’re still standing in the quicksand explaining your training program.
Pull your foot out.