Pick one giant bottleneck and give it years of extreme focus

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 9:39

   The second thing that's kind of been with me this whole time is I think typically companies are failing because one major problem, you know, I mean, maybe they have two major problems or three, but usually it's like one giant bottleneck. And I think you should at that point identify what that giant bottleneck is and then focus the whole company and you're all. Attention, almost to an extreme, like orders of magnitude of attention and focus should just go to this one issue. And if you overdo it, and you go too extreme overboard on that one issue, that's great. Yeah, the problem is because you know, you most likely won't be able to actually unclog or remove this bottleneck. So you should just turn all your attention to that. So for me, at that time, it was, you know, open source project, check, super successful, you know, tech, super awesome, no commercial success.

2. 10:30

   So put all the attention on figuring out how do we get this, you know, commercial engine humming. So that was like laser attention. I was getting the whole company mobilized. I was talking every all hands about this. I was thinking only about this one issue. And so I think that's a useful way of operating a company. I still operate the company that way. I try to identify what the main bottleneck is at the time.

3. 10:50

   And I try to just focus on unclogging that because there's so much other stuff you have to do every day to hire people. there's drama people are quitting the board this and that legal department customers revenue missing this is like million things coming your way every day you don't have any time to move the needle on anything so focus on that main bottleneck okay and typically so your laser focus on the bottleneck like what is the cycle on that there's one bottleneck a year you're tackling or one every three years or one every three months like kind of what is the cycle yeah it's a longer cycle so like i would say if i would if the answer to that would have been months or week then actually that's what everybody's doing every day i think that's all the ceos like you know because disaster

4. 11:29

   lands in your knees you have to drop everything else you got to fix that thing that is not a strategic focus that's just tactical stuff so i would say a year two years sometimes three like creating the lake house category took i think multiple years you know when we announced the lake house category uh we were ridiculed online uh but it was a long journey to get to the launch of the lake house because there was so much resistance internally and from you know consultants and whatnot then we finally launched it people like were laughing at us so you got to give things a few years um you can't you can't just give up immediately so i think you should that that's it's really important that you identify that focus really clearly because if you pick the wrong thing and you're focusing on it for two three years um needless to say you're not going to

5. 12:16

   go anywhere okay super helpful um what i read was the one of the first things you did on that