How to balance startup innovation and grit with operational excellence

The single most important decision you make as a founder isn’t the product you build or the market you chase. It’s who you hire. Talent makes or breaks a company. And the kind of talent you need changes as your company evolves.

I’ve seen two distinct phases in every successful startup’s life, each requiring a different mix of people:

Startup

This is where you want the mavericks: rule breakers, big company outcasts, creative innovators, wildcatters, in-the-trenches brawler types who start each day questioning the status quo and who personify grit and determination.

These people have something to prove and live for changing the world. The startup environment is where they thrive.

Find them. Hire them. Let them run. They’ll sniff out high-potential areas until they hit paydirt again and again.

Scale-up & optimize

Once your tenacious team has built a product, refined its value proposition, and started to get real adoption and rapid growth, it’s time to bring in the operators: the people who know how to set up a business to scale because they’ve done it before. That transition is vital. Startup folks often haven’t scaled past a certain point. They may lack the operating skills, experience, or orientation to navigate deeper waters.

Creating a diversified culture that endures

But when you bring in later-stage people, they tend to hire more like themselves. Soon, operators can/will outnumber the startup folks, creating a culture shift that alienates your original team. Startup folks don’t always fit into a culture run by operators—their PowerPoints aren’t as neat, they may not think in traditional, structured ways, and they might not always make it to meetings on time. But if you run these guys out of Dodge, you risk the company's ability to continue to innovate.

Innovate or die

There is a natural lifecycle to companies. They innovate/create a new product or service. They scale up. They optimize. And then they either create again (organically or via acquisition), or they begin to die. And you have to have the right balance of start up innovators and scale operators in order to navigate this crucial stage. The stakes are high–the penalty for not innovating is usually death.

The answer is to build an inclusive, listening, collaborative culture from the start. Startup types rarely need an invitation to share their opinions, but you still have to create space where both groups feel heard and valued. When wild-eyed status-quo questioners and Excel wizards work together, you get a team that “thinks different” and executes well. That’s true diversity—balancing the strengths of startup types with the strengths of operator types.

Companies are really just a collection of people, brought together to achieve certain clear objectives over a period of time. Different types of people carry the lion's share of the load at different stages. But companies always need to innovate, and they always need to operate efficiently, so it is vital that you build a culture and team that understands this truth: the differences between innovators and operators are a vital kind of human diversity that is foundational for a company that can innovate, operate and thrive at any stage.

Cheers,
Jason