Startup hyenas vs company dogs!

The skill set it takes to run a startup and the one it takes to run a company are very different.

To run a company you mostly need educated people that understand processes and procedures very well. People that have been educated in all the paper work and accounting numbers. The keyword there is processes.

These people don’t like change. In fact, they have been trained to mostly resist it. Processes, that’s exactly what school teaches. A certain formalized and standardized way to do things in order to avoid wrecks.

The accounting system must be done in a certain way, the organisational structure must follow a certain pattern. No changes needed.

If you are thinking this does not work, no, it works! It works because a company is an institution that has found a repeatable and scalable business model. They no longer want things to break.

“Ok, we’ve found xyz way to make money and that’s it. No more changes! You try any monkey moves, you get fired straight up.”

But in startups, the ball game is entirely different. They have not found a repeatable and scalable business model, and that’s a time bomb.

Every startup is 95% likely to fail. Everyday they wake up unsuccessful, that chance gets worse.

Every startup has less than 5% chance of success. As you can see, this is not the type of organisation that professor G.A. Process and Procedure can thrive.

He will be largely unproductive and even counter productive.

Sometimes, hiring a person that has worked in a big company to come work in a startup can be likened to throwing a domestic dog into a pack of hyenas. It could mean trouble if the dog doesn’t adapt fast.

Dogs are used to having their meals ready at specific times, having specific names they are called and getting cuddled in between meals.

But hyenas, they don’t even know where the next salary is going to come from. So they’ve got to hunt at night too and even eat leftover dead animals.

Titles and names are useless, team is key. They understand that they cant survive alone out there. The intern calls the CEO by his first name, no titles, no time.

If professor process doesn’t adapt on time, he will either distract the hyenas by introducing new and impractical dog titles and dog chains or he will get eaten one hungry night by them vicious hyenas.

A startup is constantly searching, everyday they don’t find it, they have to change everything they did that day.

A cofounder can walk to the white board and draw a new business model and by evening, the tech team already has the prototype. The next day, the sales team is there testing.

Anybody can walk up to the CEO if they have a vital information, zero administrative bottle neck.

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The reason is simple, everyone in a startup is in trouble by default. No job security. The startup has already failed by default, they are just trying to prove otherwise and time is running out.

Desperate times, everyone has to be radical in approach. Everything is constantly changing.

The profile of a startup founder is that of a radical , non-risk-averse crack head. With or without experience, with or without age on their side, with or without education. They take risk everyday like its doctor’s prescription. If the risks are not calculated well enough, they all loose in the end. If they are, they all end up as rich porter, young dollar, cash money spray and pray team, paper bois, rolling dollar.

But that’s a 5% chance.

Investors also look out for these skill sets in startup founders when investing.

If the startup is still searching, they’ll leave the crack heads to run it. Once it has found a scalable business model, they’ll fire the crack-heads and install a fresh hot Harvard MBA brain with several years of experience to run it.

Sometimes they just introduce this third person without firing the co-founders. Some other times, they’ll give the co-founders the opportunity to study and learn processes if they show potential.

So every time you hear that the CEO of a startup that is fairly doing well has been asked to step aside, just know that that startup has probably struck gold and is about to turn gold.

The investors probably need a new kind of CEO. They did it to Steve jobs, the Yahoo co-founders and the 2 Google co founders.

Apple brought back Steve Jobs right? Yes, that’s after they realized that the tech industry is constantly changing, so you can’t just bring a dog in and send the hyena away just like that.

Apple failed for 10 years after Steve Jobs left, they then had to bring back Steve Jobs after realizing that the company must continue to run itself with the attitude of a startup but the structure of a company.

Google obviously learnt from Apple’s mistake, all they did was introduce a third person in the mix.

Yahoo let their co-founders go one after the other, the repercussion was massive.

All in all, the way you run a startup and the way you run a company is different. So you need different kinds of CEOs for each.

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