The Nomics Update
The Nomics Update
Clay Collins
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The 9 Month Cycle of Founder Failure - (Ep. 0051)
9 minutes Posted Feb 18, 2019 at 7:50 pm.
] they start off doing a pretty good job. They've thought a lot about a given problem, and what they're looking to do when they first start a business, and they spend about three months being pretty good at their job. They know what their responsibilities are, what their duties are.
] their job, if they're having any kind of success, there's getting, traction is developing, then usually the job changes. In any kind of fast evolving situation, a situation with a lot of momentum behind it, I think after the first three months the job generally changes, and often a founder, and this applies to many people in startups. I think anyone who's at an early [00:01:30] stage company might, after the first three months of having a general sense of what needs to be done.
] and usually they learn why, they learn that their job is changing, and how their job is changing, because old things aren't working anymore. They start failing. Maybe at first they were doing a lot of meetings, but then they realized they need to start implementing, and they can't be on all the meetings that they were being ... That they were on before, and execute like they need to execute now that they have a sense of what needs to be done.
] the job has changed, and the nature of the differences that have emerged, and then, I think the last three months of this nine month cycle of founder failure is learning the new job, and what it entails, and what needs to be done to be successful in the new job, so creating the circumstances to be successful again, and then, [00:03:00] once they've learned what their new job is, the cycle starts all over again. To summarize, I think the three months cycle of founder failure, or the three months cycle of founder success, I guess that's a little bit more optimistic is that there's three months at being okay at your job, three months learning that your job has changed, three months learning the new job, and then, of course starting all over, being okay at your job again once you've learned what the new job is.
] I'm certainly right now in the phase where I'm learning my new job. I think, I was really, I think, I was doing a really great job for a while, then hired more people, got more customers, got a lot more traction to the website, and realized that things have started to change. The things that worked when there wasn't as much traction in the business, [00:04:00]
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I think founders for the most part seem to, at least speaking for myself here, I think founders go through roughly a nine month cycle of founder failure that starts up, gets going, and then, repeats itself over, and over, and over again. The cycle's pretty simple. I think most founders when they start a company, if they're experienced, and they know what they're doing, [
They've thought a lot about what needs to be done, and what order it needs to be done in, and all of that. After this first initial three months of being pretty good at [
After those first three months they realize that the job has changed, and often they don't know how it's changed. They just know that the things that they were doing initially weren't working, so after the first three months of doing a pretty good job at their job, I think they spend another three months learning how their job has changed, [
The second three months of the cycle is around learning how [
[
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