Solve for X.
“All decisions are 50/50 or 80/20, it’s important to identify what type of decision it is, give it a time frame and make the decisions” - Mike Maples (Senior) *paraphrase
No this is not a post about X, the social media website.
Things are happening in startup land. People are making deals, and that’s incredibly exciting.
In our portfolio I have been on 1-2 calls a day where the founders are presented with a situation - Good, Bad, Novel. When you have 1-2 a day, you start to smell the rhythm of them.
In every case, I have found my role to be exactly the same: Solve for X.
In every situation, the founder calls me and presents the situation with the “What do you think we should do?”, and in every case, there is a very large unknown for the decisions to be made, different in every circumstance: How much is the deal for? Do the investors mean well? At what point does this not work? …
In each of these, my advice has been the same, we talk through the situation, and I say “Solve for the unknown. and then make the decision.” I do have an opinion on what they should do, and I try to give them thoughts, but until they have all the IMPORTANT information, there’s no decision to be made.
This has happened enough times in the past few weeks, that I thought I would write a quick post about it. I think there’s a forcing function for decisions to be made right now and people want to do deals - but solve for X, the important thing you need to make the decision.
How you do that, is normally you pick up the phone and call someone. CALL PEOPLE!