“Il nous faut de l’audace, encore de l’audace, toujours de l’audace!” - Frederick the Great and then later Napoleon
It is fairly rare that you will find me quoting a Frenchman, but this is one of those occasions. I was reading Schom’s biography of Napoleon when I came across this quote.
The jest of this quote is that must have audacity, audacity again, always audacity. A bold commander never gives up the aggressive initiative to his enemy.
As a start-up, even when you have great success you have to keep going. Great sales success is not an excuse not to do more marketing. Great new features in a product are not an excuse not to build the next great thing.
This probably means extended time of 15 hour days, doing sales calls on weekends, answering support tickets at crazy hours, and never losing the audacity that got you success in the first place.
It is in this effort that you will win. Your competitors are not your friends. They are the enemy, and you must step on their throats and cut off the very air they breathe. Every customer/user they add is one you never are getting. Start-up life is a blitzkrieg land grab, and you need to push every day to steal the next inch of ground.
Winning is what this game is about, and that is what determines who gets to cash the big checks at the end of the day.
“l’audace, et encore de l’audace, et toujours de l’audace” was coined by Georges Jacques Danton.