It’s been a while since I have written a post in my Scylla and Charybdis series. As a quick refresher, the basic premise of the series is that startups are hard because on pretty much anything you can do too much or too little and the path to success thus requires navigating a narrow straight with deadly obstacles on both sides.
Today’s post is about listening. As an entrepreneur you can do too much or too little listening. How can you do too much listening you may ask? Well, by listening here I don’t mean the time spent having sound waves hit your ears but rather how much you change what you are doing based on feedback. It is very easy to make too many changes and to make them too quickly. As an entrepreneur almost everyone you meet will have an opinion on your startup and what you absolutely should be doing. That will range from someone insisting that you must have a specific feature to wholesale changes in strategy. Of course much of the advice you will receive will be contradictory to each other. And so if you listen too much you will be jerking your company around and building a bloated product.
On the other hand you can also listen too little. We all suffer from confirmation bias and it is easy to ignore feedback that doesn’t fit with our own view of the world. That’s particularly true for entrepreneurs who often don’t realize how hard it is for one of their employees to disagree with them. Feedback from board members is also easily ignored by young entrepreneurs (what do the “old folks” know about the new ways of the world and/or the view that only other entrepreneurs have valid opinions and not investors). Finally, the feedback that’s most ignored is that of the customer – far too few entrepreneurs spend time observing customers first hand (thankfully my friend Mark Hurst has a book forthcoming that addresses this point). It is by listening too little that entrepreneurs wind up running out of money or falling badly behind the competition.
Let me give a sailing analogy to illustrate the challenge. The ideal entrepreneur is like a sailboat captain who has a strong sense of the proper course to steer so as to not be buffeted by every piece of new information and yet capable of listening enough to understand when the ship has gone off course or the wind has changed to make a new course better.
