Fighting Chaos

I first learned about entropy from my old physics teacher. Ice melts. Iron rusts. Things fall apart.

Your startup faces the same fate. Every day is a fight against chaos. But here are some tools I like to use to make the fight a bit more skewed to my favour.

Sequencing

Most founders try to hold back chaos on all fronts at once. This doesn’t work. While you can and should make sure that every part of the company holds together, you need to do it in sequence and focus on getting the sequencing tighter.

Let’s do a little exercise to illustrate this! Grab a pen and paper and place all the things in your startup that require your attention in a large circle. Finance, documentation, marketing etc. Everything goes!

Now use your pen to visualise you moving from one to the next inside the circle of words. When you reach your starting word you turn in slightly before starting the next lap. Every lap inside the next making a spiral pattern.

The spiral is you running from one thing to the next to keep entropy at bay. But with every lap you improve one thing to make the next time a little bit faster.

How many times you need to go around the circle before you can stand still in the middle depends on how complex you make your startup. So remember to keep things simple, even as you grow.

Build Strong Walls

Chaos seeps in through tiny cracks. Each small choice sets the tone.

The best defence comes from strong habits built into your daily work. Another word for this is culture. It’s what people do when you’re not around.

This of course starts with leading by example. If you want your employees to care about the customer you need to make them see how YOU care about the customer. Get into the trenches with customer support and give them stories to tell about how your company cares about the customer. One brick for the wall.

Bricks are not enough though. You also need mortar. This is created by telling the stories over and over again. As your startup grows you’ll get more stories to tell. That's good. But don’t forget the stories that make up the foundation.

The Morning Choice

Each day brings fresh crises. (If it doesn’t then maybe you’re not moving fast enough) This means that you need to prioritise and pick your fight for the day. This means that some fights need to be ignored. This is fine. Let some things burn to the ground.

Most things are not very important. A few things are extremely important. Your job as a founder is to determine which fights have to be fought and won by you, which should be fought by people better equipped for this particular fight and which fights you don’t care about.

As you get more experienced and as your startup grows, the fights you fight personally will be fewer and fewer. This might feel like you’re not doing anything anymore. But remember this: the impact of your wins will increase exponentially!

Wrap up

The most important thing to remember when building your startup is this:

The never ending battle against chaos is not a thing that gets in the way of you doing the work. It is The Work! How well you endure the daily grind against entropy is what will determine if you succeed or not.

Everything else is just an implementation detail.