đ§đ˝ââď¸How to Persist
Or: how you can find yourself almost a decade into something you never imagined ever wanting to do, let alone actually doing.
Persistence is a critical factor in most successes, but particularly in start-ups.
âIf you can just avoid dying, you get rich.â is one of my favourite expressions of the idea. There are many examples to prove this point - from Twitch to Airbnb to Canva to Pinterst - really more the rule than the exception of the Instagrams.
Itâs easier said than done. I am increasingly asked - what makes you persist? After all, itâs been nearly 9 years on this crusade to use technology to make the every day experience of parenting today easier.
Having considered it, Iâd say itâs 3 things:
1. I see my work as a scientist, not as a business person. My job is to âimagine and future and build whatâs missing.â That sounds awfully like: have an overarching theory and test individual hypothesis until you can figure out if the theory holds or not. Itâs why I donât see Poppy as a failure - sure, in start-up terms it failed. But in scientific terms it was a tremendous success - the number of variables and hypotheses tested have led to not only insight in the critical sector of childcare, but in shedding light on the next problem to work on which doesnât even have a category. It pushed me to a frontier I couldnât previous see, standing in the distance. Success in science is measured in advancing the frontier of knowledge and understanding, not in the outcome of any one experiment. Getting something for 0-1 (eg until there is a viable business to grow), the work is more of science than business.
2. Obsess about rate, not time. Most ambitious projects - whether in films and books or satellites and medicine - take years if not decades to come to successful fruition. There is a false expectation that start-ups should be measured in months. The true question to ask is not one of time but rate. What distance is being covered over a given unit of time? If that rate is reasonable, then the matter of time is simply a by-product of the work. Each year over the past 9 years I have personally experienced a higher learning curve than my previous years and Iâve created valuable insights in the category in which I work. As long as weâre achieving progress, earned by serving our users and held to the discipline of runway, itâs quite easy to watch years slip by, working on something endlessly fascinating and impactful.
3. Persistence chooses you. Itâs so much easier to keep going on something that you find endlessly fascinating and can keep finding threads to pull on. But the surprising thing is how often people are surprised by what that thing ends up being. Many founders, artists, scientists will say âitâs a callingâ - as if the topic of study or work wasnât really a choice but a call to answer. Similarly, I never imagined becoming obsessed with matters of care and the work of the home, especially when so much of my interests lay in other places. And yet - itâs the only thing that has ever held my attention past a year.
Know when to hold and when to fold.
Still, there is a difference between persisting in promise vs in vain. In any arduous hike, you need to make sure youâre persisting in the right direction - blindly walking in the wrong direction out of stubbornness is not persistence, itâs a waste and worse, can kill you.
The easiest way to know the difference is to:
Have the right core metric and focus on it relentlessly. The only way to know youâre on the right path is to have the one core metric that tells you your hypotheses is bearing out. If you have the right metric and you can grow it consistently 10% week on week, then persistence is just a matter of time and compounding doing its thing. If you canât get it to grow consistently by that much, ask the question: what is single thing keeping me from growing that number by that much. Then go solve for that. Over and over. Said best in the The Martian: âYou just begin. You do the math. You solve one problem... and you solve the next one... and then the next. And If you solve enough problems, you get to come home.â Persistence lies in the blinders of solving what lies in front of you.
Know what are unbreakable walls or immovable hurdles. In some categories, there are factors that will lead to failure no matter the resolve or even the money. Youâll start to get a sense of them when the growth rate of your core metric doesnât budge no matter the focus on controllable levers. For Poppy, it was the fact that childcare is in many cases is a broken market and trying to apply market principles was destined to fail. There wasnât enough money in the system to make it work sustainably. Quality workers didnât get paid enough, parents couldnât afford more and there wasnât enough for the intermediary in the middle (us) to uphold the necessary level of quality and trust. Moreover, costs like taxes pushed any scale solution out of the possible to the improbable. Realizing it was a math problem would require me to: 1. lower quality 2. turn a blind eye to laws (paying taxes) or 3. entirely change the product into something that didnât solve the problem. Instead, I had to acknowledge this wall I couldnât bust through and I chose to move on from the conclusion of this hypothesis.
Have a board of reality mirrors. Founders have to believe in something so ludicrous that few others attempt to try it. Over the years it becomes a very present version of reality to live in. Every founder needs a small number of individuals who can kindly but firmly hold a âtruth mirrorâ up to them. To ask the questions and hold to timelines. When itâs time to call it, theyâll be the ones sounding the alarm first. And if you donât have the people, you will have the reality check of runway. The money never waffles. But by then, youâll likely be out of options.
And finally, a personal reflection - persistence rarely happens in a vacuum. There is a whole network of support people and circumstances that have to be in place for the will to do its thing. If youâre like me and started doing this with a partner and kids in the picture, that support extends to quite the village of people that have to not only help but be on the ride for the long haul. Too many people donât have access to the kinds of support systems - people, time, money - to even attempt this kind of work.
[One of the most depressing findings of my time has been how women in particular are not systematically enabled to attempt work that requires persistence, especially after they have a family. Matters of care, risk and finances mean that while many men continue to pursue this work with a supporting spouse and society, very rarely is it done the other way around. In my research, itâs not just entrepreneurship but anything that requires this kind of persistence and obsession - composers, artists, chefs, scientists, politicians⌠the frontiers are lined with men (especially with wives that played critical roles as âresearch assistantsâ vs. named collaborators) in good part because the conditions of persistence are not as readily available for women with a family. While the Motherhood Penalty has been well measured (âmothers experience a 60% drop in earnings compared to fathers in the decade following the birth of a first childâ), the effects on the frontiers of disciplines are less discussed.
I attach this insight here because I think itâs just as important to share the behind the scenes factors as much as the more obvious ones. Today I really donât think most people realize just how much supporting conditions have to be right for this kind of work to continue for years and decades and how unevenly distributed those conditions are. So if weâre going to talk about will, weâre going to talk about village.]
In the end, persistence is a measure of progress and time. If you have enough progress, persisting is actually quite easy, spending time on a frontier of your choosing and skills. If you donât have enough progress, then youâll find persistence is actually out of your hands - through runway, will, or mutiny.
Focus on the progress. The persistence will come.