Three Lessons from the Startup Journey
Last week, I had the opportunity to speak with the YPO Next Generation (YNG) Atlanta chapter about startups and entrepreneurship. YNG is a Young Presidents’ Organization program for members’ children between the ages of 18 and 30. Like the broader YPO community, the group regularly comes together through programs, retreats, and small-group forums to learn, share, and grow.
My talk focused on three themes.
The first was the unpredictability of life’s journey. I shared stories about startups I’ve been involved with and how often we began with one idea, worked hard at it, and then discovered a better direction. Almost every successful company I’ve helped build started by doing something other than what ultimately made it successful.
Pardot, for example, began by generating leads on behalf of B2B technology companies. We later pivoted to marketing automation, supplying those companies with the tools to manage their own lead generation and nurturing. We started in a promising area, but our first product wasn’t the one that worked.
The second theme was the human side of entrepreneurship. The familiar adage still holds: If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together.
In the startup world, as in nearly everything else, success comes down to people and teams. I shared stories about our focus on building a culture of positive, self-starting, and supportive people, as well as the two overarching mantras that guided us: Be the best place to work and the best place to be a customer.
This human-centered approach influences everything. When you talk with someone at a startup, or any company, you quickly get a sense of how they operate. Are they easygoing or cutthroat? Are they interested in a transactional relationship, or do they want to build trust for the long term? When something goes wrong, as it inevitably will, do they acknowledge it? How do they make it right?
The people side of business is, and always will be, one of the most important.
The third theme was market timing and the importance of following emerging trends. When something is white-hot and everyone is talking about it, it’s often too late. Ideally, you want to be three to five years early, early enough to build a working product, assemble a strong team, and establish a solid foundation.
Being a little early, but not too early, puts you in a powerful position. When the market arrives, you have the opportunity to grow even faster than the rapidly expanding market around you.
I enjoyed sharing these stories with the YNG group. If I had to distill the talk into three lessons, they would be these: Your original idea will often be wrong, people are at the center of everything, and in the startup world, it pays to be a little early when the next big trend arrives.
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