Startups that do well often follow a set of common principles. These principles influence how they develop products, build teams, raise money, and get customers. The most successful startups, though, are exceptional and often seem to go against these principles in various ways. For founders looking to learn from the experiences and paths of other startups, this can cause confusion and lead to bad decisions.

I think this happens because of how hard it is for outside observers to understand the full context of why given decisions are made in other organizations. It is also nearly impossible to separate causation and correlation, even with perfect understanding of the rationale behind a decision. I've spoken with many founders who point to outcomes at other companies as justification for decisions that they are making with their own companies. These founders rarely give enough weight to to factors like timing, luck, and the impact of particularly skilled employees or founders in producing those outcomes.

That creates a paradox. One of the best ways to learn how to succeed is to follow good examples set by others. At the same time, following those examples can often lead to very bad decisions that harm companies. Figuring out which examples to follow, and how to follow them seems hard.

There is, however, a clear framework for figuring out what to do. First, don't do anything just because you see someone else doing it. For instance, there are many successful jerks, but that doesn't mean you should be a jerk. Some companies succeed while spending huge amounts of money, but you should probably spend as little money as possible to achieve your goals.

Second, when you see a successful company doing things that appear to break from sound principles, look at those examples through the lens of your own company and circumstance. If you take the set of things that exceptional companies do, and overlay it on the set of things that make sense for your business and team, you'll end up with the set of things you can learn from exceptional companies and mimic. You can do this even without perfect knowledge of causation, because simply knowing that something is possible is often enough, given the right people, to achieve it.

You can also look at your existing practices and plans to discover whether or not you have to change them. First is to look at the decisions you are making at your company and ask whether or not you've derived them from the logic of your own business, or if you're doing them only because you saw a successful company do something similar. If it's the latter, you then have to figure out if those decisions make sense in the context of your business without the benefit of outside examples. This is especially hard to do because you can't use your own exceptionalism as a reason for doing something. People and companies aren't exceptional because they say they are. They are exceptional because evidence shows them to be so.

What's really happening when you run this exercise is that you're deriving decisions for your company from first principles. Things other companies do may provide some ideas, but the best decisions come from focusing on what will help your company succeed on its own terms.

As your company grows, you may realize that many of the things you do don't line up with the principles you initially thought would govern your company. That's a good thing, because it means that you've figured out the pieces of your business that are exceptional. While you can't copy exceptionalism, proof that it is possible is everywhere. You can use examples of that proof to help make decisions, but ultimately, you'll have to create it yourself. And if you can create it, you have a good shot at building a great startup.

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Thanks, Geoff Ralston, for your help writing this.

A few months ago, I wrote about things that look like work, but aren't. As I paid more attention to founders doing these things, I started thinking about why they were happening. I realized that the behaviors were largely a function of bad goal setting.

When founders choose bad goals, they create bad metrics around them and try to hit those metrics. This means that those founders are optimizing for things that look like progress, but aren't. This is dangerous for startups because founders that aim for bad goals warp everything they do towards measures of progress that don't help the business grow and succeed.

If you find yourself thinking that these things are progress, you need to examine what you're aiming for.

Things that look like progress but aren't:

• Conversations with large enterprises - This is a big one for companies that rely on enterprise sales. Usually, these "conversations" are non-binding, low level, and scattered. They rarely lead anywhere. There is a type of conversation that is actually progress, but it is generally paired with a clear sales plan, a list of stakeholders, and clear asks met along the way.
• Press mentions - This feels so good, which is why it is tricky. External validation is awesome! But it isn't as awesome as engaged users or paying customers. If you're looking to get press as a means of building SEO, then press mentions can constitute progress. That only makes sense if SEO is part of your strategy and you're measuring things properly. Russ D'Souza talked abut how they do this so well at Seatgeek: http://chairnerd.seatgeek.com/how-seatgeek-measures-pr-coverage/.
• Winning awards - This is another one of those pieces of external validation. Certainly helpful when proving to your mother that you're not wasting your time, but not material to the success of your company. Awards may recognize either the progress you've made, or how good you are at PR. Focus on making progress.
• Getting retweeted by someone famous - This is similar to press mentions, but even worse. When a founder is trying to do this, they're usually working on their personal brand at the expense of their startup. That's definitely the wrong thing to do.
• Meeting someone famous - Famous people are really interested in startups these days. It feels good/cool to say you met someone famous. Don't underestimate the value of having great experiences, but don't mistake it for a sign of success.
• "Getting into" elite conferences, like Davos - This is some strange combination of awards and meeting famous people.
• Eyeballs - Had to include this because it's part of what drove valuations in the tech bubble. Turned out this wasn't progress. There's a corollary today: uniques. That can be a good measure of progress if you're a media site generating revenue off of impressions, but in almost all other cases, it's a vanity metric.
• Cumulative registrations - The cousin of eyeballs. People who register for your company but don't use it aren't actually helpful. In fact, this is probably a bad sign because it means that people don't actually want to use your service. (Suggested by Geoff Ralston)
• Hiring - When you hire for the sake of a world class team, that isn't progress. If you're hiring because you can't handle the load on your service or product, then it probably is a good sign and it is progress. (Suggested by Paul Buchheit)
• Fundraising - So many founders confuse raising money with success. That's how the press views it, but it's one of the worst things that founders can tell themselves. Fundraising is just a tool to accomplish your real goals, not a goal in and of itself.
• Getting into an accelerator, even YC - This is a corollary of fundraising and awards. At YC, we'll do our best to help you figure out what your goals are (if you don't already know), and work with you to achieve them, but it's what happens after you get in that counts, not getting in. YC is neither necessary nor sufficient for success.

Starting a company is, in large part, an act of ego. When that business is a startup, the ego component is even larger. This is a good thing.

Ego is what gives the founder the confidence to create something new. Ego powers the belief that the new thing the founder creates will be good enough to change the way that tens, thousands, even millions of people live their lives. Maybe we don’t always call this ego -- maybe we call it vision, or confidence, or passion -- but the idea is the same.

But as important as ego is to the founding of a company, it is also corrosive to the creation of a good culture. Unbridled ego becomes arrogance. It doesn’t allow for other people to achieve and contribute. Founders who do not keep their egos in check are unwilling to acknowledge the help given to them by others, and have a hard time building and retaining great teams.

To start a company founders need ego, but to build a great company, founders need to be modest. Modesty is what allows founders to see all the things that contribute to their success, especially the things over which they have no control. With modesty, founders can see the important role of luck in their success. They can recognize, acknowledge, and reward the part played by cofounders, employees, and customers. They’re resilient when things go wrong because they can see beyond themselves.

The interplay between ego and modesty is obvious when you hear founders talk about their companies. As a company grows, the best founders increasingly talk about “We” and not just “I.” Every discussion about the achievements of the company is a chance to highlight the contributions of other people and of the organization overall.

This isn’t to say that the best founders disappear into the background of their own companies. The “I” still plays a strong part. It remains the founder’s job to consistently set the vision and the example for every employee. When that goes away, a company risks moving into stasis or decline.

Perhaps the most important place to use “I” over the life of a company is when things go wrong. When figuring out what happened, and who bears responsibility for fixing a problem, “We” is insufficient and even dangerous. In that case, modesty doesn’t drive the use of “We,” arrogance does. Arrogance won’t allow a founder to admit that he was wrong, so he slides to “We” to cover for it, to blame the organization. But diffuse blame means that no one figures out what actually happened and how to fix it. Do that often enough, and the badness grows until it kills the company.

It’s tough to balance “I” and “We” and it gets harder as a company grows and becomes more successful. As a company does better, the easiest stories for the press to write are those about the genius of the founders. At the same time, as more and more things happen at a company that the founders don’t directly touch, founders may start to feel disconnected from the thing that they created. This is a hard thing to face, and some founders respond to it by claiming sole credit for successes that are the work of many people. From the other side, as the company grows, some founders fade into the background and stop providing the singular vision and leadership that the company needs to succeed.

There doesn’t seem to be an easy answer as to how to strike the right balance, nor is there a single paradigm for what works best. What does seem clear, though, is that founders need to keep these questions in mind, and, if they find themselves only using “I” or only using “We,” to think long and hard about what they might be missing.

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Thank you, Colleen Taylor, for your edits.

I've noticed a common bias that shows up in some founders: they believe that their competitors are stupid or uncreative. They'll look at other businesses and identify inefficiencies or bad systems, and decide that those conditions exist because of dumb decisions on the part of founders or employees. 

This is a bad belief to hold. In truth, competitors in the market are usually founded and run by intelligent people making smart and logical decisions. That doesn't mean that all the decisions they make are necessarily the right ones, but they're rarely a function of outright stupidity.

Where companies do things that diverge from what seems smart from the outside, it's a much better idea to ask why those companies are doing things from the presumption of intelligence and logic rather than the presumption of stupidity. If you don't ask these questions, you might find yourself making the same decisions, or ending up in the same place with your own set of rationalizations. I see this all the time.

In fact, we made this mistake when we started Tutorspree. We looked at all the local agencies and the way that they acquired customers and charged for packages of lessons. We assumed they asked for so much money up front because they were greedy and not smart enough to figure out a better system. It turned out that packages of lessons were a logical outgrowth of high upfront acquisition costs and the long term dynamic of tutor/student relationships. A large enough subset of customers appreciated the breaks on pricing and commitment created by booking multiple lessons up front that it made sense to model the business that way. It took longer than it should have to realize this because of our bias.

If, instead, you presume intelligence and analyze the reasons a business looks the way it does, you will often see the challenges you might face ahead of time and, as a result, design a solution that is actually better, as opposed to simply looking new. It is a lot harder to think this way because it means that you can't just dismiss the things other people do and assume you'll be better. You actually have to prove that you know how to be better. That can be really scary because, much of the time, you might not be able to figure out how to be better. Everything you think of might lead you to the same place you see your competitors.

That, though, is no reason to stop working on your company. I think it's actually a reason to keep going, and to keep gathering information and generating new ideas. This is part of what's so cool about starting a company, you get to make up new rules as you go along, and you can toss out old ones as you go along. Two founders looking at the same problem can easily come up with multiple solutions. Each solution might look similar from far away, but the small differences add up. Importantly, if you know that other smart people started in a similar place and ended up with the wrong answer, you'll think a lot more critically about each of your decisions and never get lazy about challenging your own assumptions.

Of course, just because you presume intelligence doesn't mean that every decision made was smart. People and organizations make bad decisions for all kinds of reasons. The thing is, you don't learn much by understanding that a call was bad, you learn by understanding the inputs and the organization that enabled the bad decisions.

Even with this framework, there's no guarantee that you'll end up in the right place, no matter how much you analyze those whose decisions have left you with an opportunity. At the end of the day, there's only so much you can learn from looking at competitors. Truly great businesses aren't built as counterpoints to existing companies. They become great because they meet a deep need that isn't being satisfied. That usually requires the kinds of creative and cognitive leaps that no amount of market analysis could possibly give you.

When infrastructure is built, it usually starts out as a large scale project that can only be accomplished by government. It can be built in undeveloped areas for a fairly large amount of money, or in developed areas with massive amounts of cash and even more political capital. That's hard to do in democracies, though seems to work well in places like China.

This dynamic means that we'd expect infrastructure to fail over time as the inertia arrayed against repairs and new construction grows. That seems to be what's happening in the US.

When infrastructure decays and fails, though, it creates a lot of opportunities. Citizens who were meant to be served by the infrastructure become unhappy and are when that unhappiness is great enough, they will spend their own dollars on alternatives. This is a more direct process  than funding infrastructure through tax dollars, though it can produce different types of outcomes.

In the United States today, these opportunities are being exploited by a range of startups and companies who are essentially building private infrastructure, mainly for the relatively wealthy.

Food

Instacart is building new infrastructure to deliver food to homes. In most early use cases, this looks like pure convenience, however, over the long run it could impact and start to eliminate food deserts. By making food available in more places, Instacart has the power to change where people want to live. That process will reshape how cities grow and, eventually, are built. I'll also say that in a place like NY, where supermarkets are small, crowded, and overpriced, it seems clear that the current system only exists because there's no better alternative. Instacart is that alternative.

Transportation

This process is also starting to play out on our roads. Most of our highway system was created by a single gigantic bill, the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956. It would be hard to imagine today’s Federal government getting its act together or finding enough money to repair roads on a national scale. Harder still would be believing that a place like the Bay Area would figure out a way to install effective and efficient public transportation to ease the stress on our roads and highways which are nearly always gridlocked. Technology is starting to provide ways to bypass those problems by improving throughput on existing systems without changing the physical plant.[1]

Self driving cars are the most extreme example of this trend. If we do actually arrive in a world where self driving cars are ubiquitous and built on the same standard such that they can communicate with one another at long range, congestion gridlock should largely vanish as the cars plan miles ahead and subtly change speeds to clear up slow downs before they start. Even before that future, though, apps like Waze help drivers plan better routes and alleviate some stress on the most crowded points in the system.

Energy

I think the trend is also impacting power generation and consumption in the US. Companies such as  Solar City will install your own power plant on your roof which means you're no longer subject to brownouts or price increases at peak times. In most of the US, this is more of a ‘nice to have’ and cost saving measure, but in the third world, solar power could provide a viable and efficient alternative to the construction of large power plants and electric delivery systems. These systems would be a fraction of the price of the old way of doing things and be significantly more reliable thanks to their distributed architecture.[2]

Private can’t mean wealthy

There is, however, an underlying tension in the rise of this new infrastructure in that the first segments of the population to get it are generally the wealthier ones who can afford to use it. Two tiered systems may be fine when they exist in non-essential parts of our lives. However, when there are two tiers, determined by wealth, for services as basic as energy, we're in a dangerous place.

That's part of why infrastructure exists the way it does. No single piece of the population would spend enough money to build services and systems useful for everyone. I think that's always going to be true for certain projects, such as bridges. But, as technology drops the cost of delivering the types of services we traditionally associate with infrastructure, I think we'll see the market extend its reach farther and farther. There's a huge amount of money to be made by ensuring universal coverage, but it won't be easy to unlock all of it.

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[1] At best, though, this is a partial solution. Throughput is well and good, but if the roads actually start to collapse, we'll need other solutions.

[2] Even though this seems like a good idea, there are still quite a few hurdles, not the least of which would be figuring out the right financing structure to make the installations profitable for the companies doing them. This is harder than it might seem for developing countries without sufficiently developed/ubiquitous banking systems.