But the second you start a new product, you have to hit the restart button—even if you’re at a big company. Sometimes it’s even harder the second time around because all the

infrastructure that’s been built up for the first product gets in the way. So you’ll still need to go through at least three generations before you get it right.

You make the product. You fix the product. You build the business.

You make the product. You fix the product. You build the business.

You make the product. You fix the product. You build the business.

Every product. Every company. Every time.

But be careful—even if you have a cofounder, there can only be one CEO. And if you pile on the cofounders, you’re asking for trouble. Having two founders works well. Three can work sometimes. I’ve never seen it work with more.

I remember one startup we worked with that had four cofounders. Every decision was made by consensus, which meant every decision took forever. They’d never started a company before, so even the most basic questions were endlessly debated—hiring, product changes, who to take money from, and how to structure the agreement. If they couldn’t agree they would hem and haw, trying to be nice, trying to be reasonable, watering down their opinions until the company fell behind the competition, ran out of money, and the board had to swoop in, remove some founders, and change the whole team around.

I’ve seen way too many people come out of the corporate world, decide to start a company, and be completely unprepared for what it takes. If they’ve never been on a small team starting from scratch, they’re often a fish out of water. They spend too much money too fast. Hire too many people. Don’t put in the time, don’t have the startup mentality, can’t make hard decisions, are buried by consensus thinking. They end up making mediocre products or

nothing at all.

Don’t let that be your story. If you want to start a company, if you want to start anything, to create something new, then you need to be ready to push for greatness. And greatness doesn’t come from nothing. You have to prepare. You have to know where you’re headed and remember where you came from. You have to make hard decisions and be the mission-driven “asshole.” [See also: Chapter 2.3: Assholes: Mission-driven “assholes.”]

So do the work. Know what you’re getting into. Trust your gut.

And when the time comes, you’ll be ready.

If you’re a company of one, your mind-set is to build your business around your life, not the other way around. For me, being a company of one means not having to bother with infinite growth, since that was never the purpose of my working. Instead, I just focus on maximizing work in a way that works for me, which can sometimes mean doing less.

Consider serial entrepreneur Steve Blank, a colleague of mine at Columbia and a legend in the startup world. He’s guided four companies to IPO status and mentored many more. To find opportunities, Steve says, an entrepreneur has to be endlessly curious and to recognize patterns that no one else does, by, as he puts it, ‘showing up.’ To validate ideas, he advocates ‘getting out of the building’ and learning how a potential innovation might change a customer’s life. He calls this ‘customer development.