“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.

So many times when you are at a technology start-up you get caught up in the day-to-day drudgery of trying to make incremental progress. While it is essential to make the tactical decisions and efforts, you have to understand that you are doing something great. Only in making the world a better place (no matter how small a part of the world you are affecting), will you really create value. This thought was on my mind in an email I sent to one of our portfolio companies, PBwiki, this week:

John Wooden is famous for saying, “Be quick, but don’t hurry.” Unfortunately, it’s hard to act on this Yoda-like utterance. That’s why I’ve rephrased it (glancing nervously at the sky, hoping to avoid a lightning bolt) in my own words:

Be decisive, but don’t rush in.

Sports is one of the most popular metaphors for business, along with war. Famous players and coaches can make a mint off of books and speaking engagements. The same holds true for successful generals.

But here’s the funny thing–a lot of ex-athletes and ex-coaches (as well as ex-soldiers) have failed in the business world. Not all of them–just look at the success of guys like Roger Staubach and Magic Johnson, as well as military men like AG Lafley of Proctor & Gamble–but more than the general population of folks with similar advantages (rich, famous, well-connected).

It’s not because athletes or soldiers are unintelligent; many are smart and capable. The problem is that their instincts are ill-suited to business success.

The business world operates on a different time scale than sports or combat. How often do we talk about how fractions of a second separating victory and defeat or life and death? For athletes and soldiers, reflexes and instant aggressive reaction are the keys to winning.

I’ve been in the business world a long time, and even during the era of “Internet time” I cannot recall a single instance where a fraction of a second meant the difference between success or failure.

Be decisive, but don’t rush in. It’s rare that time frames less than a day matter, and unheard of for time frames of less than an hour.

When something happens, take the time to make the right decision.

This is not an excuse for dithering…being decisive and aggressive is incredibly important to business success. But recognize that whether you respond to that proposal in 1 second or 1 hour generally doesn’t impact your options and that you can come up with a much better decision in an hour than you can in a second.

Rather than thinking of business as sport or war, think of it as chess. Every move must have its purpose. Make the right decision.

One of the toughest things for an entrepreneur to do is to cut ties from something they started. It does not matter if it is a positive severing of involvement (e.g. a personally profitable acquisition) or a bad ending (e.g. closing down a venture because it failed), entrepreneurs alway feel like their ventures are their children.

Unfortunately, these thoughts may be the most destructive of any that an entrepreneur may have. At Wasabi Ventures, we are all parents. We all have children that we love and adore. We would do anything for them and often we wear the rose-colored glasses of parenthood that show everything our children do as wonderful. And as entrepreneurs, we also love and adore our “children”, i.e. our companies.  But these emotions blind us from always doing the smart thing. Turning down a lucrative acquisition offer because we don’t want to see someone else run our creation or changing direction as the company is bleeding cash are both examples of this misguided love.

Luckily, there are solutions to this problem.  Having a great advisory board is probably the best remedy.  These independent mentors and assistants are detached enough from the blood, sweet, and tears of running the company that they can offer clear assistance.  Great advisory board members should be like great friends or relatives who can give you feedback about your children.  Sometimes it takes that independent third party coaxing to choose the correct path.