A chase

Oftentimes, when talking about ventures, or work effort in general, we can hear statements like “It's not a sprint, it's a marathon”. Experience shows, though, it can actually be both, in different periods of time, depending, to name a few, on the market conditions, the competitive landscape, the opportunity window. In either case, both a sprint or a marathon would fail if we stop. We simply need the momentum that keeps us going.

I find ‘a chase’ being somehow better analogy. It requires a constant commitment, but also bursts of activity to take/catch an opportunity. Being a vegetarian since 2009, I'm not a huge fan of hunting, however ‘a hunt’ is also a good analogy, even with some elements of an 'ambush' if you will. In any case it might be a bit naive to think that keeping a steady 'marathon' pace is all we need to build a globally successful venture. And we don't ever need to get out of the comfort zone this constant pace grants us. If we stay there, it means somebody else needs to absorb the demand for such bursts all by themselves or we, as a team, would keep accumulating lag.

Similar exclusive aphorism is “work smarter, not harder”. In a startup world where we need to summon value almost out of thin air, against the inertia of the status quo, it might not be very wise to allow ourselves the comfort not to be both smarter and harder workers. In some case the experience might even be as extreme as a warfare, not necessarily against the competition, but against the status quo in first place, including the state of our own current experience and network (and lack thereof).

This naturally requires us to be 'universal soldiers', wearing many hats in the first years of the venture, including the hats of both 'the sprint runner' and 'the marathon runner'. It’s a ‘world championship training camp' that requires our wholehearted dedication and 'constant' adaptiveness.

The Venture Contemplations is a newsletter where I share my daily reflections on topics moving me as an entrepreneur and lessons learned the hard way, on a dusty but rewarding 15+ year long journey towards making positive impact with Imagga and more recently - Kelvin Health .