Growing Up

A startup is like a child. I a sense that there comes the time it grows up. The early days are like childhood. Full of joy, creativity and unconcern.

Childhood is very important. Like Bernoulli, you've discovered an increase in the speed of the air occurs simultaneously with a decrease in pressure. Like the Wright brothers you've built the airplane with wings. And you have the vision how your invention will change the transoceanic travel.

This is when the childhood ends.

Now you have to build airports, introduce safety regulations, debug your prototype, start serial production, setting up the supply chain, employ lots of people, take care of the unions, and do a thousand or more other things before the first airliner with passengers lands safely on the other side of the Planet.

Inventing the wings was just the beginning. It was all you - the inventor. The creator. The visionary.

But building airports, dealing with laws, setting up serial assembly lines, hiring people is not your area of competency. It is very unlikely you are both the innovator and an equally efficient manager. It is also very unlikely a single, even the best talented manager will cope with the task. You will need a number of them. You have to trust them they will do the job better than you.

You have to hand the company over to them. You company. Your child. It is like cutting the virtual umbilical cord, connecting you, the parent and your startup, the child. It is a difficult decision, but very often (almost always) it is a must. At some point in time parents have to admit the child has grown up.

Unfortunately very often this step is not performed. The founders either think they are good managers or they don't want to spend money on professional managers. Or the problem is even deeper: after all they are the founders and inventors, so they know better, no paid manager will be telling them what they should be doing! Sticking to the wheel the founders often steer the company off the road or - at best - drive much slower than professional drivers would.