Tennis, Chess and War (and Startups)

One of my father’s favorite sayings is “Tennis, chess and war are lost through one’s own mistakes” (translated from German).  Growing up, I used to really dislike this saying, in retrospect mostly because I lost against my Dad at tennis for a long time excactly because of my own mistakes.  Yesterday afternoon, I took the kids to the US Open to see some of the first and second round matches on the side courts where you can sit right up close.  All afternoon there was only one instance of a player being dominated by their opponent with winners.  All the other matches were lost primarily due to unforced errors or strategic mistakes.

Based on my experience, I believe my dad’s saying applies even more strongly to startups.  It is very rare to see a startup fail because it is being targeted specifically by another startup or an incumbent with the goal of putting it unders (although it does happen, more about that another time).  Roger Ehrenberg’s recent post-mortem on Monitor110 provides a great example.  It was not that Bloomberg or Reuters or anyone else went after Monitor110.  It was a string of self inflicted mistakes that caused the startup to fail.

While you can’t ignore your competitors entirely (that might cause a strategy error), time is generally much better spent figuring out how to improve your own service, generate revenue, acquire customers, etc.  The hard part of course is getting enough distance from what you are doing at the time (rather than post-mortem) to objectively evaluate what you are doing and how to improve it.  In tennis, chess and war there are usually no coaches during the engagement, but in a startup that should be the role of your board.