Knowing when to fold the Right It

I suggest you take a few minutes to read Ben Cohen's "Business Lessons From the World’s Best Quitters," Wall Street Journal, Oct 1, 2022.

It relates why founders of some successful startups have shut them down, along with some fascinating bits about the psychology of professional poker players.

It immediately reminded me of Alberto Savioa's Pretotyping strategy to validate a startup vision – in effect, the precursor to folding one. Alberto shows concretely how founders can discover the "Right It" and then thread that vision through the needle of success.?More importantly, it also shows how to learn when you don't have a snowflake's chance in hell of doing that. I certainly wish I'd had this criteria to apply when I launched my start up.

After two years of US government funded R&D, we went to market with a commercialized product. I pitched about 100 VCs to fund our roadmap. Although I got close with a few, they all passed. I seriously considered shutting down mVerify at that point. But, I decided to push on for several reasons, including that I saw quitting as a personal and shameful failure of character.

Of course, I now know it would have been exactly the opposite.

So, these two points of view — getting to the "right it" before you make a leap and then knowing if and when to pull the plug should you succeed — offer bookends for the startup life cycle. They are similar in that both require a kind of Stoicism that is anathema to the entrepreneurial sprit, yet needed to survive places it leads one to.

One thing jumped out at me in the WSJ story is that pro poker players fold their hands twice as often as amateurs.

These two perspectives suggest the kind of changes founders need to keep their head in the game, and that it isn't anything like the obstinate hoping, groping, and gloating satirized in HBO's "Silicon Valley".

#pretotyping #founders #startup