So, you are a founder of a startup, long gone into the process of establishing the organization and relationships to leverage your idea… One of the necessary skills is entrepreneurship-no brainer. You try to learn as much as possible and utilize knowledge as fast as possible - to control or if possible, prevent anticipated risks and execute according to plan. Remember, the longer the better!
From my experience, I tend to recognize 3 major things that are out of control at some point for most founders. Even if they claim full authority over the happenings. I call these silent assassins because there is simply no clear cut preemptive measure you can take. No assessment or survey will help with these slimy little bastards. The only thing you can do is to treat these three very independently with respect, care, and always trying to check the "spiritual" health of your business.
This one is easy and obvious. For example, the team of founders diverting, or the negative impact of an early hire (bad apple).
Even the best relationship can go wrong, no matter how much you work on it. It is crucial; you have to spend hours, days trying to resolve conflicts, figure out the culture, and work on the cooperation between founders. That's what you can do.
What you cannot do and control however is how people will progress or regress moving forward. The faster you grow, the more people need to learn and adapt to new situations. This will require self-reflection and prioritization even in times when you don't have time to solve people-related issues. Typically, founders will treat such challenges differently. This is the point where their relationship as founders can eventually break. Just like in a marriage.
People change and evolve. They need to learn new ways to master new challenges, new methods- if not coordinated, or the speed difference of how fast founders learn which changes the dynamic. Some founders are standing idle waiting for team members to catch up. Some decisions need to be made as a team, and with different levels of understanding comes a different level of argumentation. You can feel left behind, or underutilized depending on where you are in the given situation. There is no magic orb that can tell you how your founding partners will cope with such a situation. Be aware, but don't over plan for this.
Every idea is dependent on market conditions. Market conditions mean parameters and drivers beyond your control. If you see the wave: bad news, you might probably be late already. You can of course still create a great business, but not the home-run you might have been dreaming of. It would be best if you had the sixth sense to hear the wave, feel the wave before it becomes visible. Some people have this vision. Most of us however only gets lucky: Prezi co-founder Peter Halacsy in a public fireside talk mentioned that their timing was just right. Not intentionally, but luckily. Everybody hated Powerpoint and were open to something new. All these fancy programming options were not available; CSS and Javascript weren't that popular in 2009.
Some stick to the vision so long that the time eventually comes. Steve Jobs is an excellent example of this: he needed internet for his vision, and all the mobile and manufacturing revolution to create products of uncompromised quality.
If you are not the Wunderkind, it's just sheer luck if you get the timing right. There is absolutely no problem with that, if you accept.
You might get the first two right, still you'll always have more problems than you can solve. Moreover, it's extremely hard to tell what problems you have to solve right now, and what can be addressed later. In hindsight everything is obvious. Just like the Chinese Plate acrobat, you are spinning too many plates at once. The same applies to your growth efforts. No matter how healthy a pipeline you create (especially in the early stage), the worst happens. With the worst possible timing.
A client vanishes without paying for your product, all of a sudden you have to onboard triple of your capacity, or your payment provider goes down for the weekend. Cash-flow issues, some legal skeleton is showing up at the worst time. It's always something. Moreover, usually, just when you had sorted everything out or had the money to invest in new avenues, that “thing” happens precisely at that moment. You will always overestimate the speed of growth on the short term. Always. Because it's impossible to calculate these risks and their effect on your speed. Eventually, some essential people in your team, the problem solvers will become bottlenecks just because of these issues, and it will hinder growth.
My learnings? Founding teams need similar counselling to marriages: you can never stop working specifically on the relationship itself. Control of timing is just impossible, it is better to let go of such intentions and keep your organisational senses open to jump in when the trigger comes. To reduce impact of the unexpected: always double the estimated time for growth and have your firefighting team ready (if you can afford it).
Running a business is mostly about solving impossible low occurrence problems, at the most inconvenient times. Just get used to it.
