It’s important to focus on eliminating risks. That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t take risks. Taking risks is essential to business, and especially startups. But you should only take risks when you have an ability to affect the outcome.
FOCUSING TIME & ENERGY Don’t Get Lost in Lists I used to be an obsessive-compulsive list maker. I had enormous lists, and it gave me a great deal of satisfaction to check items off those lists. Eventually, I realized that I’d been using far too much energy prioritizing negligible tasks. The real goal is to identify the handful of value-drivers in your business and spend most of your day focused on those. Everything else is trivial.
LEADERSHIP Sign Up for a Brutal Experience The idea that everybody can be an entrepreneur and create a startup is simply false. Building a startup is a ton of work. It’s brutal. If you want to do it, sign up for a brutal experience and sign up to be brutal. You need the ability to see the future and manage your way through a crisis. That prospect needs to excite you, to make you jazzed to wake up in the morning. You won’t get that feeling just from reading a book. It’s you and you alone: your wildness, focus, and capabilities; the expertise you bring to the table will drive your success in the marketplace.
MARKET DEVELOPMENT New Technology Takes Twenty Years to Go Mainstream I never thought it would take eighteen years for the digital marketing space to develop. I thought it would happen in two. But when I started, investors who had experience building companies always said that it took twenty years for a new technology to go mainstream. They were right, and I was surprised, but the data supporting their prediction had been there all along.
PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT Build Solutions, Not Features A lot of what you see today in the startup world are little feature sets or vitamin pills for small problems that, when the game is played out, will ultimately become small parts of a much bigger solution. The volume of these types of narrow-focus startups in the marketplace is baffling to me. Over time, all of that stuff will be aggregated and consolidated into the solution people are actually looking for. To achieve a real success, build toward that solution instead of a narrow piece of it.
VISION & MISSION Be Unwavering in Your Purpose To be good at what you do, you have to believe that you’re right. At Razorfish and the Dachis Group, we haven’t wavered one iota from the original whiteboard sketch of where this business was going and where it is today. When I speak to new employees, I pull out that sketch and tell them, “This is what we set out to do, and this is what we’re doing. They’re exactly the same.” The tactics that support my thesis might vary along the way. But until my thesis is proven wrong, we’re going to assume it’s right and run it as hard as we can.
JEFF’S VISION FOR THE FUTURE As Jeff has said, he only tackles very big problems. Today, he is building the Dachis Group with an eye toward leveraging the rapid growth of online engagement. “The generation that’s coming of age today has been acclimated to technology in an unprecedented way. Their degree of connection and engagement is a fundamental change, and it’s not yet being reflected in the business world. With the rapid growth of online networks and the power of mobile computing, companies are going to benefit radically from being more connected and engaged. That thesis is driving my development of a number of business cases as I design a market opportunity that is both current and future-ready. I want to create an offering that meets clients where they are, where they’re going to be, and where they eventually need to be.”