“Getting out of the building” means something deeper than many realize. Mike Maples Jr explores why in this key lesson of greatness.
Steve Blank:
Founders are closer to artists than any other profession. And what I mean by that is that artists see things that other people don't, may hear things that other people don't. You and I will look at a blank canvas, and Van Gogh painted Starry Night. Or you and I will look at a blank score, and Beethoven, who was deaf, gave us the Ninth Symphony. And what's really interesting is that's what founders do.
Mike Maples:
One of my favorite Steve blank-isms is that great entrepreneurs are more like artists than normal business people. Let's talk about why.
Mike Maples:
Steve Blank tells us that great founders start out more like artists than business people. And I wholeheartedly agree. Why is that?
Well, first off, artists have a special sensitivity. They creatively and uniquely notice things at a deep level.
Second, true artists are original. They seek to create things that change the rules rather than follow the rules.
And third, and probably most important, artists express their visions in ways that move people so deeply that they abandon their logic.
Keep in mind a key theme of Starting Greatness is that a startup is not yet a company. As a result, a startup founder has a surprisingly different job than a typical company CEO. Every startup starts out dead and has to prove it's alive. It has to come up with a compelling and unconventional insight. Then it has to hack value by building something unique that people are truly desperate for. Later, it has to hack growth, and only then does it become a company.
Achieving this crazy string of miracles depends on the founders and startup teams' artistry more than anything else. Let's drill down on the elements of this.
First, I said that great founders have heightened sensitivity. Like artists, great founders understand and empathize. They don't just analyze or sell. That's the reason that getting out of the building and noticing everything about your customer's life as he or she experiences it is so important.
Getting out of the building isn't just a literal statement, though. If all you do is take a meeting or do a survey or fill out a checklist with potential customers, you'll miss out on all the details that the customer truly shares. You won't tune in to the real signals. Getting out of the building is not just about getting data, it's about informing your artistic intuition. Steve Blank wasn't joking when he said, "Are the customer's pupils dilated?"
That's a sign, just like the items on their desk, or the logo on their coffee mug, or their body language when you walk through your idea or ask questions, or seemingly unrelated anecdotes about their professional experiences, or maybe even their family life. Empathizing with these signals and noticing where the pain or desperation may lie is core to founder artistry. You cannot delegate this.
So let's talk about how artists are original. If you've ever been to a jazz club in New Orleans, you've probably seen how the leader can improvise, and the rest of the band just picks up cues on the fly and just goes with the flow. Great startup teams are similar. Their creations are original and based on insight and improvisation. When that New Orleans jazz band improvises, the outcome is singular. That specific tune will never be played that way ever again. Similarly, all great startup teams create singular events.
The improv jazz band analogy also describes early startup employees. The early startup employees are the talented and flexible jazz musicians in the band who responded to that improvisational riff, rather than just playing back notes on a sheet of paper. It's a whole new skill beyond science, engineering or management.
Now let's get to the most important reason that startup founders are like artists. They compel people to do things that are seemingly not logical. To realize their vision, founders have to attract other world class performers as well as visionary customers. They have to captivate their audience. Early customers and early employees have to be moved by the founder as they begin to create a literal movement.
Have you ever been moved by a piece of art in a way that surprised you?
I still remember my first time. I was 22 years old and backpacking through Europe and went to see St. Peter's cathedral. And immediately to my right was Michelangelo's statue, the Pieta.
I was so moved by it, I was speechless. I couldn't even process my thoughts clearly to understand why. I just stood in the silent stillness, just taking it in. I felt a powerful feeling that was subtle and magical and unexplainable all at the same time. If you've ever had that experience with a work of art, I bet you're remembering it right now.
Great founders also move people beyond their logic. People who decide to work with startups as early employees or customers aren't negotiating for the best deal. Nobody does it because it's the pragmatic choice. They're joining a crazy adventure, which is initiated by an artist with a vision that is too beautiful and compelling to ignore. They do it because they believe.
Now, here's the part that some might find unsettling. Just like there wasn't a class to teach Van Gogh how to paint the Starry night or Beethoven to compose his magical symphonies, nobody has found a way to apply the scientific method to turn someone into an artist. It's true that a piano player will get better with practice or classes on music theory, but no amount of education or good tools can turn someone into the composer of Beethoven's Fifth. You can help an artistic startup team win, by using science or perspectives of greatness to make better decisions and avoid avoidable mistakes. But no book, theory, class or podcast can turn someone into an artistic entrepreneur. The artistry comes from within.
So what does that mean for you?
First, if you're going to be an entrepreneur who achieves greatness, I believe you must have the innate artistic skills of the composer. Successful business best practices are different from startup artistry, and the art of the job matters most in the startup days.
Second, be careful not to hire early employees that can succeed in a company, but lack the artistic temperament for startup success.
If your startup employees want clear performance guidelines or to implement the, quote unquote, best practices from the last big tech company they worked at, you've probably enlisted the wrong people. Founders and startup employees are people who prefer to operate in a chaotic environment with multiple unknowns. They sense the general direction they're headed in, so they're okay with uncertainty and surprises. For these people, improvising is a feature, not a bug. These types of people are rare, unique, and the right kind of crazy, just like a lot of real life artists. But it doesn't stop there. When a startup team succeeds and creates an actual company, it will face a gut wrenching choice. How to shift from being an improv jazz band to a marching band. Marching band needs highly choreographed and synchronized steps, along with a perfectly timed and executed musical score. In the end, most people are not artists. Artists in startup life, just like in other fields of art, are extremely rare.
Scalable startups have become very romanticized in today's world. The stories you hear sound great in a magazine or on TV, but it's important to be real about what it really takes. So if you're thinking about being a startup founder, I'm rooting for you, but I also believe in telling the truth with no tricks. And artistry is core to the job. So if you're wondering whether that job is something you want to sign up for, consider this your Rorschach test.