StartUp Founders: Black Magic.

Hey Reader,

Last week, I expressed that current-you is the least experienced, least skilled version of yourself that will ever run this company, and that you have full permission, and would be well served, to punt future scaling problems, future complex problems, to the cleverer version of you down the road.

10000% true, but there is a flip side.

Current-you might be the least skilled CEO your company will ever have, but you are also, very likely, the only idiot on earth equipped to survive the exact phase you are in right now.

One of the great myths in startup mythology is that early-stage founders are supposed to be gracefully executing their vision. The number of calls that start with people telling me they are sure they are doing it all wrong....

Bullshit. You are exactly where you are supposed to be. Upside down, running into the fire, and everything is a bit fucked up.

The point is that in this early phase you aren't running toward success, trying to get to the magic number. Literally not at all. You are doing the opposite, you are running away from failure and running a race backwards (from failure) is an entirely different sport.

THE... Don't fail. Don't fuck it up. Don't lose the anchor client. Don't let the software crash on Thursday. Close the deal. Make payroll. Try to remember you have a family. Do whatever it takes. ...PHASE

The "this could easily all burn down by Tuesday" is the Black Magic Phase. There is nothing noble about this time, no matter how many linkedin posts tell you otherwise. Fighting for oxygen is not noble, it's survival.

Everyone gets to this starting line from a different place:

• Arrogance: The genuinely unreasonable belief that you can pull off something you have zero evidence you can do (and probably no right to attempt).
• Ignorance: You didn't know it was impossible, so you went and did it anyway. By the time someone explained why it couldn't work, you'd already built the thing.
• Spite: Someone told you no. An investor passed. Someone made you feel small in a meeting in 2021, and you've been running on that for five years. (Spite isn't a strategy, but it is easily the most flammable fuel you can pour onto a founder)
• Being Cornered: Just you and a job you hate, or a job you can't get, and zero options left.
• Obsession: You know the problem so intimately, so obsessively, that the answer is visible to you in a way nobody else can see.
• Psychopathic Conviction: The world didn't ask you to fix this, but you're going to force the solution down its throat whether it asked for it or not.

It doesn't really matter how you got here, the point is, how you enter the arena can rarely be taught, there is no playbook, it's a feeling that you got that made you open this particular door.

THE 92/8 TRAP

As you're suffocating in the arena, convinced you're doing it all wrong, everyone around you will have an opinion on how to run your business.

To survive, you have to remember one non-negotiable rule of hierarchy:

Every single person around you is in service to you.

It is critical that anyone opening their mouth to give you advice or do a job understands one non-negotiable fact. This is not their business. Their entire function in this phase is to help you walk faster away from failure.

And the way they do that comes down to math: the 92/8 rule.

An overwhelming 92% of your company is virtually identical to every other company in your sector. The back-office stack, the billing things, the payroll, the sales motions, the onboarding, the customer success, the bits things and stuff that have broadly a good playbook that if followed work. None of this is your differentiator, it's just baseline, important, but not unique.

The 92% is so easy to critique from the bleachers, it has templates, it has textbooks, the you are doing this wrong is probably technically right, but it's just not applicable. Of course we are doing support wrong, of course our onboarding is a nightmare, of course, of course, of course.

What we are focused on is the black magic that lives in your unique 8%: the proprietary IP, your unreasonable and weird obsession, the pitch that only you can deliver that excites a customer.

Too many early stage founders in this black magic phase take advice from people trying to drag you into the 92%. The ones who want to talk about processes, systems, charts - the "this is how we did it at my last company" - the "we need to steady the ship" and it's not bad advice, it's just rarely good advice FOR YOU - it's advice that runs off a template, an SOP, or a playbook for a company likely more mature than yours right now.

Your 8% doesn't have a playbook because by design your 8% is chaos, obsession, and gut (and prayer).

When someone is truly in service to you, they don't drag you into the 92%. They do the opposite, they do everything in their power to keep you in the 8%.

You don't keep the founder in the chair to manage the 92%. Thats someone you can hire, a commodity. You keep the founder in the chair to pour 100% of their irrational, obsessive energy into the 8% that actually matters because everything else is just there to support that 8% aka scaffolding.

There is a catch. Obvi.

The belief that "only I can do this" is the exact right posture at zero-to-one, because the thing you're doing can't be systematized yet. That's what makes it magic.

Carried too far into the next phase, that exact same superpower turns fatal and becomes your ceiling. The company grows to the outer perimeter of your personal capacity and stalls out. The word founders give to this when they don't see it, is plateau.

So hold onto the magic tightly today, knowing that if you survive long enough, you will eventually be lucky enough to have to put some of these tasks down (delegate!).

Just not today.

Today is the not-failing race. No playbook, no safety net, and nobody coming to save you. Just you, pulling something out of thin air, powered by whatever fuel that got you here in the first place.

Go run. Everyone else is in service to you.

If I can be of service, feel free to grab time.

LFG.

— James