😬 Is this the thing that’s going to kill us next?

Contrary to popular belief, start-ups are not the domain of the risk-loving, but rather the risk tolerating and eliminating.

Risk - ah that elusive fear most of us spend our lives running from.

From our early days, we’re taught an intuitive intolerance for risk. I see myself doing it to my own girls: “Be careful” as they scramble up a tree, lest they fall and break an arm. “Focus on the fundamentals”, as they try to muck about on the piano instead of practicing the basics. “Stay close.” I tell them in a crowded museum.

“It’s for my/their / our own good.” I tell myself. Risk is scary. It’s dangerous. It’s … well, risky.

It’s by definition, exposure to “danger, harm or loss”. It’s easy to see why we build our whole lives around avoiding it, minimizing it. And in many cases, it’s for good reason. It’s the instinct, tied to fear, that kept our ancestors alive and not dinner. It’s what prevents grave injury or death. It’s keeps us alive and whole. But what if what keeps our bodies whole makes our minds and our ambitions meek?

It took doing one of the riskiest things I could possibly do with my career to realize our collective understand and approach to risk in our careers is kinda messed up.

Not only did I quit my corporate career, which is risky, I did it in order to start a startup, which is like asking to go do a Masters in risky endeavours.

Only it isn’t.

Many think that founders are highly risk-loving but my experience is quite the opposite.

The best founders I know are masters of managing and mitigating risk, not blithely wallowing in it or racking it up.

The job of a founder is to build a Future that finds product-market fit with the users and market they’re serving. Along the way, there are risks. And really, only one: that your company will die. It will fail one way or another and it will shut down.

That’s it. I mean, it’s not great. I can say that from firsthand experience. But I can also say I survived it, and am so much the wiser on the other side.

Risk is not some demon we have to fear. A shadow that weighs on our every decision and slows our hands when more boldness may make more sense.

Risk is neither a protagonist nor an antagonist in the story. They’re more like a persistent companion in the journey of building new futures. An instructor. A guide, pointing us to the types of hypothesis and iterations and tests we need to focus on, on our path to success.

🦫 Whack-a-mole

Because it turns out that entrepreneurship is a cosmic game of whack-a-mole. A constant and unending stream of ways the company will Die keep popping up in front of you and your job (and increasingly your teams’) is to whack it down.

It’s why, while building Poppy, one of my favourite things to ask the team was: “Is this the thing that’s going to kill us next?”

That question had everyone listing all the risks, all the most immediate causes of death, and ranking them. When you do this, you realize the conversations are really rather simple. And instead of fighting over sprint resources and priorities, the team rallies behind what ends up being the most obvious next risk/barrier/hurdle to tackle.

It isn’t just on the day-to-day. When first starting your venture or pitching endless rounds of funding, it’s helpful to know that investors are evaluating your idea against what the most critical risks the venture is up against and more specifically, which risks will be mitigated with this chunk of capital.

Some of the biggest/most consistent risks are:

👯‍♀️ Team risk - that this collection of people may not be the ones that can crack this opportunity. Either because of their skillsets or because of team (often co-founder) dysfunction.

🛍 Market - that this market doesn’t actually exist or isn’t nearly as big or as lucrative as we thought it would be.

📲 Technology - that we can’t get the tech that’s needed to solve the problem to work in the way we need it to (more prevalent in biotech, hardtech, hardware etc).

💵 Financial - that you’ll run out of money or that it’ll take more capital that you’ll be able to access to actually do this thing.

📄 Legal/regulatory - that either a change in regulation that is creating this opportunity will reverse or legislation will tighten (think cannabis or fintech in many emerging markets)

🔨 Execution - that you won’t be able to pull off the crazy disciplined execution needed to win the market (think Uber in the early days)

In the earliest days of Poppy, the biggest risks for us were team and market. As a solo, non-technical founder building a tech-based 2-sided marketplace, investors wanted to see that we had the team (both operational and technical) to go after this opportunity and that parents and caregivers would actually use this as a solution.

Once we had proven that, the focus shifted to more execution risk - being able to scale a thing that’s as complex as a two sided service marketplace in childcare.

But at all times, the point wasn’t to entertain more risk, but to thoughtfully and deliberately kill it. It was to stare down something scary and render it harmless (for now).

Today, I’ll talk to so many would-be founders - people with incredible insight and vision - who say, I’d love to try, but it’s too risky. It’s true, there are realities to contend with - bills and commitments. But they’re simply some of the earliest moles that need whacking. There are many reasons to not start a startup. But a false sense of risk is not one of them.

I’ll talk to first time founders who are overwhelmed by the sheer multitude of ways their companies might die.

To them I say: “Line ‘em up and knock ‘em down.” Find the one that’s most likely to kill you next. Kill that risk. Then the next. And the next.

Risk is not something to be feared. It’s scary, to be sure, but if you’re serious about this founder journey it’s just one of the many scary things you’ll have to make friends with. Because it’s not going anywhere fast. The prize you’ll get for successfully mitigating one risk is other, more complex ones popping up.

In the eternal words of Mark Watney of The Martian: “If you solve enough problems, you get to come home.” Conquering risk is the privilege and the prize for living to fight and other day.

As one founder friend said “It’s like a pie eating contest, only the prize for winning is more pie.”

Truer words I’ve never heard.

So instead of letting Risk hide at your back and shade everything you do or don’t do, turn around, stare it down and get going.