Founders who focus, obsessively, on small things seem more likely to grow massive companies.

Founders that focus on growing huge without paying attention to the small things, fail.

Facebook is the best example of this rule in action. Even today, it is clear that Mark Zuckerburg’s focus is on how to make something useful. This is how he still talks about Facebook:

Q: How were the first users using Facebook?
A: Looking people up, but it was so simple. There were no messages. You could look at profiles, poke people. Everything else built over time. People say launch early and iterate, Facebook is clearly a good example of that. YC has a shirt that says “do something people want” and I think that’s a great way of looking at it. Techcrunch

Facebook has consistently released the minimum features for the next level of usefulness and not gone further until the machine is humming and the existing user-base is settled and using the product to the limit. They did not try to add more features on top of profile lookup and poking until the tiny community at Harvard used the site under their own momentum and found it useful. They did not allow college students to sign up outside of Harvard until the Harvard community had its own momentum. They did not open up the site to non-education organisations until education had its own momentum… and so on. Facebook does this time and time again.

They focus on the small things and are growing enormous because of that.

Investors can cause the companies to fail by triggering the a dangerous focus on growing large, especially when they come in too early. Founders usually get to a point were they need to reach beyond family and friends to fund the growth of the company. At this stage they get the talk from investors about how they expect a 4-6x return on investment (minimum) in order for them to explore investing in the company. Frequently they sweeten the discussion with the desire and promise of a 100x return and because its a beautiful future for everyone and the money is needed, founders can be seduced like moths to the flame.

Founders can be distracted for months and months in their capital raising. During this time they might have 10 meetings a day, all over the world, and they will hear the same thing most times. 6x. 10x. 100x. It rewires their brain. The financial projections start to change. Instead of showing a bottom up growth period for the year that is achievable through attention to detail and discipline, they start to show the business expanding globally, or simply “to the US”, in the next quarter with no anchor to the operation of the business and the roadmap of the product.

This is the moment that the the company is infected with something which can kill it. Now the founders have made promises and they need the product team to deliver magic. Many business development opportunities start to come in to drive growth but the product isn’t ready to absorb the people that come. So the people go again.

They are aiming for the big opportunity and because they are doing so they are failing to build a product that people find useful.

Watch out for the Inverse Law of Ambition.

Image thanks to Zoomar

Have a meeting once per quarter and put this proposition to the team. It’s not about being negative. It powerfully shakes us out of that obsession we can get about our products. The obsession that keeps us going when the going gets tough. The obsession with our product that makes something out of nothing. Its a good obsession to have. Evan Williams had to have it to get an idea as crazy as Twitter to where it is today. But it’s healthy, just 4 times a year to step back and be tough. Maybe it just isn’t going to work and we are going to waste another year and lots of money getting there.

More often, the result of these discussions isn’t to shut down operations. It is the discovery of the tight focus required for the things that must be done to succeed and the things which we are wasting our time on.

Try it, and let me know how you go.