Focus on Breakeven Operation Before Growth

Many first-time entrepreneurs make the mistake of chasing growth before building a financially sustainable business.

Breakeven is the first milestone.

Instead of asking “How big could this become?” The first question should be “Can this business pay its own bills?”

Once a company consistently covers its expenses, founders no longer have to inject personal funds simply to stay alive. That creates a valuable runway for experimentation and growth.

Once revenue consistently covers expenses, the business becomes self-sustaining, giving founders more time to learn from customers, refine their offering, and pursue profitable growth.

Positive cash flow provides independence, reduces reliance on outside funding, and allows entrepreneurs to make strategic decisions from a position of strength.

Breakeven is the foundation of viability, and profitability is the engine that enables long-term innovation and sustainable growth.

“Be patient for growth, but impatient for profits. Take the time to figure out you will make money before scaling your business.”
Summary of “There is Good Money and Bad Money” Chapter of “Innovator’s Solution” by Clayton Christensen

Why This is Important

1. It’s non-dilutive to your ownership of the company.
2. It provides proof of customer demand, which helps team morale, and can be used as part of a justification for a loan or a minority investment.
3. It helps you focus on how to evolve your product. Feedback from paying customers is more useful than opinions from prospects.

Related Blog Posts

• How to Bootstrap a Startup
• Starting Small Can Lead to A Big Success
• Startups Should Focus on Impact and Innovation Before Growth
• Amar Bhide: Start With Affordable Bets in Markets Too Small to Interest Large Players
• Startup Viability Toolkit: 6 Viability Worksheets to Test and Validate Your Business Idea
• Quick Take: Scaling Up a Small Team
• Jim Manzi: Focus on Delivering Value to Customers at a Foreseeable Profit.
• Chalk Talk: Sarasvathy’s Effectuation Model for Startups
• A Holistic Approach to Launching a Bootstrapped Startup
• Serge Toarca Offers Three Reasons To Bootstrap In a Small Market
• Challenging the ‘Growth at all Costs’ Startup Model 
• Discovery, Invention, Growth, and Renewal

Images developed with ChatGPT.

An MVP Adds One Missing Piece

Sell the smallest valuable solution first. Rather than spending months perfecting a complete product, startups should focus on solving one meaningful customer problem. Find customers who need a missing capability that saves time, reduces costs, improves quality, or delivers better results. By selling a limited but valuable solution, founders can validate demand, generate revenue sooner, reduce risk, and use feedback from paying customers to guide future product development.

Transcript

Entrepreneurs can spend months or years building their complete vision before discovering whether customers will actually pay for any part of it.

Technical founders want to do things “right.” We stay in the garage or our BatCave perfecting the product, telling ourselves we can’t sell until the full product is complete.

This is usually fear in disguise.

The truth? If you address a real pain point, customers will buy a partial solution that gives them some relief today. Their willingness to accept an early, limited version is one of the best tests of real need.

I advise startup founders to sell the smallest valuable result first. Instead of building every planned feature, focus on solving one meaningful problem exceptionally well.

Add one missing piece

Look for customers who already have most of the solution in place and provide one missing capability that helps them:

• save time,
• reduce errors,
• lower costs,
• improve quality, or
• obtain a better result.

This is like adding a small piece that plugs into existing infrastructure instead of asking customers to undertake a “forklift upgrade” that replaces everything they already use.

Don’t build your dream product first. Sell the smallest piece that delivers a valuable outcome, learn from paying customers, and let those lessons guide the evolution of the complete product. By reducing scope while preserving customer value, startups shorten time to market, reduce risk, generate revenue sooner, and increase the likelihood of building something customers truly want.

Related Blog Posts

• Chalk Talk: Write Down Key Hypotheses
• Expecting Too Much Too Soon
• One Mistake Entrepreneurs Make: A Great Product Will Sell Itself
• Don’t Assume Everyone is a Potential Customer
• Five Signs Your Startup May Be a Hobby
• Enhance Collaboration With Think-Write-Pair-Share
• Chalk Talk 1-2-4-1
• Chalk Talk: How Buildings Learn

Image sources: Theresa Shafer using ChatGPT with additional hand edits; (c) SKMurphy, Inc. all rights reserved.

Evan Steeg on From Lab to Market:
35 Years of Closing the AI Gap

For more than three decades, AI practitioners have faced the same fundamental challenge: bridging the gap between what works in the lab and what delivers reliable value in the real world. Evan Steeg draws on 35 years of experience spanning early neural network research, genomics AI startups, consulting, and enterprise transformation projects to explore why that gap persists and what organizations can do about it.

How to Make AI Pilots Successful

Evan offered advice on how to make AI pilots successful.

1. Speed Is Not Strategy

AI makes it easier than ever to build prototypes and MVPs, but building faster doesn’t guarantee business success. AI can tell you how to build something, but not necessarily what to build or why customers will buy it. Product-market fit still requires real customer conversations, testing, and validation.

2. Choose the Right Problem Before Choosing AI

Successful AI projects start with a clearly defined business problem, quality data, and measurable success criteria. Don’t implement AI simply because it’s exciting. Focus on problems where AI can deliver meaningful improvements in efficiency, revenue, risk reduction, or strategic capabilities.

3. Assess Organizational Readiness Before Launching

AI success depends on more than algorithms. Organizations must evaluate their data quality, infrastructure, employee skills, workflows, leadership, and governance. A technically successful AI pilot can still fail if the organization isn’t prepared to adopt it.

Download slides https://www.skmurphy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/ESteeg-Lab_to_Market-v2.pdf

SKMurphy Take

Evan Steeg set a direction early in his career to leverage AI for biology, which is an extremely complex domain to build explanatory models for, much less predictive ones, and he persevered.

Evan offered an excellent high-level perspective on what it takes to move an AI application from a bench setup through testing to a full deployment. There were a number of good insights offered for what it takes to avoid common pitfalls on that journey.

Success factors: high-quality data, clear success metrics, high-quality people. Not all that different from most software projects except the data piece, which AI projects share with deploying machine learning models. It’s critical to manage data sources, monitor the data cleanup process, measure quality after cleanup, and monitor the impact of data updates. AI’s stochastic algorithms present a new challenge compare to traditional software and machine learning projects which rely on deterministic algorithms where the same inputs yield the same outputs.

Key failure modes

• Wrong Problem
• Data is not Clean
• No plan for adoption and scaling beyond lab
• Scaling too fast
• Measuring the wrong things, or not measuring at all
• Governance friction

Key aspects of well harnessed AI (Real-world AI agents fail to correctly follow instructions roughly 25% of the time in independent testing. Managing AI is primarily about paying attention.)

• Fixed tool registry
• Swappable models
• Deliberate context management
• Hard guardrails on tool calls and retries
• Logged agent loop
• Verification against trace not just model claims

Measuring AI Value

• Efficiency: Hours saved, error rates reduced, cycle times shortened, manual steps eliminated
• Revenue: New products or services enabled, faster time-to-market, improved conversion rates
• Risk Reduction: Compliance incidents avoided, fraud detected, decision quality improved, audit findings resolved
• Strategic Optionality: Capabilities built that enable future moves — platforms, datasets, and skills that compound over time

No value in creating a token furnace. These are standard metrics for most capability development or capability innovation projects. It’s still important to remember that an AI enabled capability must satisfy metrics in one or more of these areas. There is no inherent value in using AI per se.

Effective and safe AI systems blend Neural Networks, Symbolic, and Classic Software. The neural or LLM component is powerful and gets the most attention, but the two deterministic elements form the foundation that keeps the LLM relevant and on track.

How I got to know Evan: I curated this quote in September 2010″ “Organization and good planning are just crutches for those who can’t handle stress and caffeine,” that was credited to Evan Steeg. In August 2024 I went to use it again for a collection of quotes around “do it now because sometimes later never comes” and thought I should make sure he was a real person who acknowledged the quote. We connected on LinkedIn and I was impressed with his insights and invited him to speak at a Lean Culture.

Related Blog Posts

• Irina Calciu: Lessons from Building AI Systems, Products, Startups (Q&A)
• Bill Grosso on Startups after AI (webinar)
• Andrew Shindyapin: AI’s Impact on Software Development (Q&A)
• The AI Gold Rush: It Still Takes Teams (podcast)
• Mark Bennett on Using Claude Code for Application Development (Q&A)
• AI in Action: Practical Automation by Alex Panait (webinar)
• Matt Trifiro on Lessons Learned using AI for Marketing (webinar)
• Alex Panait on Current Trends and Possible Futures for AI (Q&A)
• Time to Market S01 E03 – How Will AI like ChatGPT Impact B2B Founders?  (podcast)

Image Credit: “Complexity in the Real World” by Virpi Oinonen (@voinonen) Low resolution version used with attribution.

Irina Calciu: Lessons from
Building AI Systems, Products, Startups

Irina Calciu, founding systems architect at Pervasive AI and former co-founder of Graft, shared lessons from building AI systems, products, and startups. Drawing on her background in distributed systems, VMware Research, and enterprise AI, she emphasized the challenge of turning AI into reliable production systems.

A major theme was the difference between building impressive technology and building a successful business. Startups must continually balance moving quickly with thinking deeply. Better technology does not automatically win; once customers adopt a solution, switching costs can make a technically superior alternative difficult to sell. Customer adoption can also fail for reasons unrelated to product quality, including budgets, staffing, timing, and organizational readiness. This makes working with multiple design partners essential rather than depending heavily on one or two early customers.

Irina strongly advocates dogfooding, using your own product every day. Founders should also stay closely involved with early customers, respond rapidly to problems, and learn from real attempts to deploy the product. However, customer requests need boundaries. If one customer pulls development toward highly specialized features that others will not buy, a software startup risks becoming a custom consulting business.

Product-market fit comes from talking to real customers, testing real deployments, learning constraints, and distinguishing valuable needs from distracting customization.

Her three closing lessons for entrepreneurs were simple: use your own product, don’t be afraid to fire customers who are the wrong fit, and grow your team carefully.

Full chat with Irina Calciu on Lessons from Building AI Systems, Products, and Startups

Related Blog Posts

• Bill Grosso on Startups after AI
• Build a Cannon to Kill a Mosquito with Mani Doraisamy
• Martin Hernandez Navarro on Data Science, Big Data, and AI
• Andrew Shindyapin: AI’s Impact on Software Development
• Matt Trifiro on Lessons Learned using AI for Marketing
• The AI Gold Rush: It Still Takes Teams
• Frank Tisellano: “Business First” Product Management
• Moe Arnaiz: Lessons Learned Bootstrapping eMOBUS and Weeldi
• Qualitative Research: Problem Exploration for Lean Startups
• Lean Culture Startup Community

Quotes for Entrepreneurs Curated In September 2026

I curate these quotes for entrepreneurs from a variety of sources and tweet them on @skmurphy about once a day where you can get them hot off the mojo wire. At the end of each month I collect them in a blog post that adds commentary and may contain a longer passage from the same source for context.

My theme for the September 2026 “Quotes for Entrepreneurs” is character and ability, personal qualities that both benefit from ongoing cultivation.

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“Character is simply habit long continued”
Plutarch in “On Education“

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“Success isn’t finding the one trick or secret nobody knows. It’s doing the boring things everyone knows about but are too undisciplined to do. Get good at being boring.”
Mark Manson in a Sep-1 tweet

In “Pick Boring Or Grinding Over Losing Money” I suggested that, “The sad reality is that a business cannot be fun, educational, and profitable all at once. Pick boring or grinding over losing money.”

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“Character consists of what you do on the third and fourth tries.”
James Michener in Chesapeake

h/t WIST; more context

“For a woman to achieve her capabilities she must have an example. She cannot discover the truth by herself.”

“What example had you?”
“William Shakespeare.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that I was an ugly child–had no young men pursuing me–and in God’s grimness I could do nothing but read. I read all of that heavy book you see on the table near the window, and I warrant it hasn’t been opened since I left.”
“I couldn’t understand Shakespeare,” Mark said honestly.
“Nor could I…the first two times. Character consists of what you do on the third and fourth tries.”

James Michener in Chesapeake

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“Talent is a gift, but character is a choice.”
John C. Maxwell in “21 Indispensable Qualities of a Leader” (section heading)

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“Character–the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life– is the source from which self-respect springs. Self-respect is something that our grandparents, whether or not they had it, knew all about. They had instilled in them, young, a certain discipline, the sense that one lives by doing things one does not particularly want to do, by putting fears and doubts to one side, by weighing immediate comforts against the possibility of larger, even intangible, comforts.”
Joan Didion in On Self-Respect

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“It’s good to do uncomfortable things. It’s weight training for life.”
Anne Lamott in Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith

I originally curated this in December 2015.

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“Occasions of adversity best discover how great virtue or strength each one hath. For occasions do not make a man frail, but they show what he is.”
Thomas à Kempis in “The Imitation of Christ” (c. 1418)

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“There is only one proof of ability—action.”
Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, in Aphorisms (1880–93)

Originally curated in February 2025. Sometimes the ability to be patient, to wait until the time is ripe, is also proof of ability or character. Benjamin Disraeli observed: “Next to knowing when to seize an opportunity, the most important thing in life is to know when to forego an advantage.”

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“People’s beliefs about their abilities have a profound effect on those abilities. Ability is not a fixed property; there is a huge variability in how you perform. People who have a sense of self-efficacy bounce back from failures; they approach things in terms of how to handle them rather than worrying about what can go wrong.”
Albert Bandura in “Self-Efficacy: The Exercise of Control” (1997)

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“It all goes so fast, and character makes the difference when it’s close.”
Jesse Owens

quoted in Jesse Owens, Champion Athlete (1990) by Tony Gentry

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“Character is a strange blending of flinty strength and pliable warmth.”
Robert H. Shaffer

I originally curated this in November 2023, noting: “To survive and manage the rich variety of situations we encounter in this life you need a range of strategies you can employ effectively. I like Shaffer’s suggestion that we need to combine hard strength with encouraging support as the situation requires. When you find yourself over your head or in a survival situation you will need to be able to try different approaches to persevere.”

It reminds me of this quote by Edna O’Brien I curated in November-2010 and January-2012:

“When anyone asks me about the Irish character, I say look at the trees. Maimed, stark, and misshapen, but ferociously tenacious.”
Edna O’Brien

I think this matches the character of many successful entrepreneurs who are not Irish as well.

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“Judge of your natural character by what you do in your dreams.
If you yield to temptation there, I am afraid you will, awake.
If you are a coward then, I jalouse of your courage by day.
Ralph Waldo Emerson in journal entry for “Naples March 12, 1833“

Jalouse is an old Scottish verb meaning to suspect or surmise. I am not sure that Emerson is accurate about dreams: may be as much our exploring implications of potential actions and exploring the impossible to find the limits of the possible.

“The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.”

Arthur C. Clarke in “Profiles of the Future” (1962)

This was reworked by Clarke in a 1972 talk “Report on Planet Three and Other Speculations” as “Clarke’s Second Law: The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible.”  h/t Garson O’Toole (Quote Investigator) in “Limits” for history of Clarke’s Second Law.

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“Man is like a card-player who receives from Nature his cards—his disposition, his circumstances, the strength or weakness of his will, of his mind, and of his body. The game of life is one of blended chance and skill. The best player will be defeated if he has hopelessly bad cards, but in the long run the skill of the player will not fail to tell. The power of man over his character bears much resemblance to his power over his body. Men come into the world with bodies very unequal in their health and strength; with hereditary dispositions to disease; with organs varying greatly in their normal condition. At the same time a temperate or intemperate life, skillful or unskillful regimen, physical exercises well adapted to strengthen the weaker parts, physical apathy, vicious indulgence, misdirected or excessive effort, will all in their different ways alter his bodily condition and increase or diminish his chances of disease and premature death. The power of will over character is, however, stronger, or, at least, wider than its power over the body. There are organs which lie wholly beyond its influence; there are diseases over which it can exercise no possible influence, but there is no part of our moral constitution which we cannot in some degree influence or modify.”

William Edward Hartpole Lecky in “The Map of Life: Conduct and Character” (1900)

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“Character is Destiny”
Heraclitus

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“People speak of Hope as this delicate, ephemeral thing made of whispers and spider webs. She is not. Hope has dirt on her face, blood on her knuckles, the grit of the cobblestones in her hair, and she just spat out a tooth as she rises for another go.”

Matthew (@CrowsFault) Mar-10-2022 tweet

I like this perspective on hope as an aspect of a muscular faith. It reminds me of James 1:17: “Every good endowment and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.” I originally curated this in November 2022.

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“Character is what emerges from all the little things you were too busy to do yesterday, but did anyway.”
Mignon McLaughlin in  “The Second Neurotic’s Notebook” [Archive.org]

I like this quote and believe it is especially good advice for bootstrappers who are always pressed for time since they have less money to trade for time, at least in the early going. I have curated it twice before, first in December 2009 and again in November 2014. If I am still above ground and blogging in the 2030s I will doubtless find one or two more uses for it. I like a lot of McLaughlin’s aphorisms.

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“The acquisition of one sort of ability often makes that of another unlikely, if not impossible…To take the gifts one does have to concentrate one’s strength upon their development to disallow distractions–none of these is an easy task.”
Joseph Epstein in “Ambition: The Secret Passion” (1980)

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“There are many rare abilities in the world, which Fortune never brings to light.”
Thomas Fuller in Gnomologia

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“A special ability means a heavy expenditure of energy in a particular direction, with a consequent drain from some other side of life.”
Carl Jung

I am not sure I believe this completely, but it’s certainly the case that you cannot “ride out in all directions at once” and get good at everything at the same time.

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“The brain grows to the exact modes in which it has been exercised. Man is, par excellence, the educable animal.”
William James “Principles of Psychology” 1890

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“The world is created by fewer men than we often realize, and they tend to be more extraordinary than we’d like to acknowledge. Ground floor, it’s hard to replace people like this.”

Mike Solana in Flexport: Return of the King (Sep 13, 2023)

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“Uncertainty is not a property of the world, but of our relationship with the world”
David Spiegelhalter in “The Art of Uncertainty”

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“I always keep a bottle of chilled champagne on hand, just waiting for something to celebrate. And when I visited a friend after a sad event, I took them a bottle and told them to set it aside for when good things happened in the future, because they would. And, later, they did and they even called me to tell me they drank it. That’s faith in the future, and so far it’s worked out for me pretty well.”

Glenn Reynolds in A Tale of Two Centuries

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Image Credit: Moon with a wisp of cloud by Steve Houston. Used with Permission.

A Quarter-Century After 9-11

“The world we see today is far different from that of September 10, 2001. On that day, who could have predicted that both New York and London would have radical Muslim mayors? That a real estate developer would be in the White House? That antisemitism would become a trademark of the Left and that the U.S. would be on the leading edge of technologies which weren’t even conceived at the turn of the 21st century? We have gone from a world that thought it knew where it was going to a journey in the dark.”

Richard Fernandez “September 10, 2001“

Watching People Jump Off the Twin Towers

The morning of 9-11 was completely disorienting: watching the first tower collapse seemed like a special effect. When the second one went, I had the strong sensation I was a minor character in a Tom Clancy novel. A number of us gathered in a training room that was not being used so that we could watch a working TV. It was working to the extent it could get a Spanish channel, but only a Spanish channel for reasons that none of us could figure out. The most chilling scenes that they played over and over but which I did not see on any network or US cable channels when I got home were those of people jumping off of the towers before they collapsed. I was reminded of an old movie, “The Towering Inferno,” and I kept thinking there must be a way to put that fire out or get those people off the roof. But no happy Hollywood was ending to be found.

From “Do You Ever Get The Feeling Everything You Know is Wrong?” (2018)

Anybody who survives the impact, we’ll go to an alternate center, and we’ll continue.

Lewis “Scooter” Libby, chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney: We learn that a plane is five miles out and has dropped below 500 feet and can’t be found; it’s missing. You look at your watch and think, Hmmm, five miles out, 500 miles an hour. Tick, tick, tick.

Dick Cheney: My Secret Service agent said, “Sir, we have to leave now.” He grabbed me and propelled me out of my office, down the hall and into the underground shelter in the White House.

Mary Matalin: My jaw dropped and the jaws of my colleagues dropped because we had never seen anything like that.

Condoleezza Rice: The Secret Service came in and they said, “You have got to go to the bunker.” I remember being driven along, almost propelled along. We had no idea where it was safe and where it wasn’t. We didn’t think the bunker of the White House was safe at that point.

Dick Cheney: They practice this—you move, whether you want to be moved or not, you’re going.

Gary Walters: The Secret Service officers started yelling, “Get out, get out, everybody get out of the White House grounds.” I remember early on, the chaos. People running, screaming. Fear was in my mind.

Christine Limerick, housekeeper, White House: The look on the faces of the Secret Service agents who were told that they had to stay—I will never forget that because we had at least the opportunity to flee.

Ian Rifield, special agent, U.S. Secret Service: We were fairly confident that plane was going to hit us. The supervisor in the [Secret Service’s] Joint Operations Center basically said, “Anybody who survives the impact, we’ll go to an alternate center, and we’ll continue.” It wasn’t a joke.

Garrett M. Graff (@vermontgmg) “The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11

There was a mindfulness in Silicon Valley after 9/11 and the dotcom crash that I miss.

“There was a mindfulness in Silicon Valley after 9/11 and the dotcom crash that I miss. I don’t miss the terrible turmoil and the anxiety and the 25% contraction in employment, but I do miss the mindfulness. I remember attending a Churchill Club program “Beyond the Bubble: the Future of Technology and Investing” that was held on September 20, 2001; it was a little over a week since 9/11 and there was a minute of silence to memorialize the dead that lent a candor to the program that followed. Edward Howe has observed that “a good scare is worth more to a man than good advice” and that was true in late 2001 and 2002 in Silicon Valley.”

Lesser Sons of Greater Fathers

In “9/11 A Quarter Century On…it may be time to point our eyes forward” Cdr Salamander (@cdrsalamander) suggests, “It is time that we move on and stop treating 9/11 as a secular holy day of some sort. […] We should not forget 9/11, but it should be put is a place like the Fall of Saigon was in 2001, and the attacks on Pearl Harbor were in 1965. I think it is time.”

Related Blog Posts

• Reclaiming Nine-Eleven
• 9-11 at Twenty-Two
• 9-11 Twenty Years Later: An American Cultural Watershed
• 9-11 at 19: Looking back at a Unified America
• On That Day: 9-11 Eighteen Years On
• Thomas Schelling on Strategic Surprise
• Do You Ever Get the Feeling That Everything You Know is Wrong?
• If You Predict Rain, Build an Ark”
• Pearl Harbor to 9-11 to the Panopticon
• Lee Harris’ Insights on What 9-11 Means
• Second Sight: A Meditation on Silicon Valley and 9-11
• Remembering 9-11: Our Children Will Also Live in Interesting Times
• Take a Minute To Remember 11 Years Ago
• Remembering What Happened
• Take a Minute To Remember 9 Years Ago
• Take a Minute to Recall 8 Years Ago, Part 2
• Take a Minute to Recall 8 Years Ago
• Lesser Sons of Greater Fathers

Q: How Do Early Employees Get Founders to Listen?

Q: I am in my second full-time job; it’s my first time in a startup. I spent two years at a software firm with three hundred employees and absorbed insights into developing and shipping features. The startup has only a dozen people, and it moves faster but is much more disorganized. I have been involved in interview rounds for new employees that were poorly managed. That was frustrating, but what has been more frustrating is that no one seemed to see the problems. As a result, they were not open to my suggestions.

A: A startup with a dozen people is starting to gain some structure but can still be a wild ride, especially if there are not many experienced employees. The decision of who to hire is a critical one in a startup, as is the need to assess a potential candidate’s capabilities and fit with the team. It’s also the case that interviews are an opportunity to encourage qualified candidates to feel welcome and wanted.

It’s entirely possible that you had some good suggestions and should have been listened to but it’s also possible you don’t understand all of the constraints on what’s possible. While initiative and frank talk are expected, if not required, of early employees in a startup, most change is incremental and the result of patient persuasion and appeals based on organizational survival or robustness.

Since you are newly hired and have only two years of work experience, you probably have less work experience than many others on the team. I suggest a more indirect approach. Who, outside of the founders, has the most experience with managing an interview process? Can you talk to them one-on-one and get feedback on your suggestions? Ask how the process was defined and whether they see the same problems today that you do. This approach is likely to work for other areas as well. At a dozen people, the organization is in transition from a flat structure to one or more levels of hierarchy; it’s important to recognize who may be responsible for an issue or decision besides the founders and approach them first.

Different people absorb information in different ways. Some on the team may prefer numbers related to time savings or financial impact. Others may prefer stories or case studies, either in writing or in a conversation. Presenting to a group can be hard, so it helps to write down your suggestion, rehearse it, and have one-on-one conversations first with people who may be more willing to give you feedback or ways to improve your presentation.

In “On Being a Teacher,” Jonathan Kozol offers a perspective on managing learning challenges I have found valuable:

“Struggles that we and our students hope to undertake ought to be measured by their value, on the one hand, and real chances for completion on the other: Battles large enough to matter, small enough to win.”
Jonathan Kozol in “On Being a Teacher”

This often gets condensed into “Pick battles big enough to matter, small enough to win,” but I find his original compelling since it is clearly focused on learning.

My assumption is that you don’t feel you are being asked to compromise your values. If you do feel that, then it’s probably better to look for work at a company you believe is more aligned with your values.

SideBar: Some Traits to Develop for Success as an Early Employee

In “Working Capital: Assembling Your Team,” I suggested these key traits founders should look for in the first dozen employees:

• Experts in at least one area relevant to your business with a bias toward action: they can roll up their sleeves and get things done.
• Flexible contributors who can tolerate the irreducible uncertainties and ambiguities in a startup. They understand E. L. Doctorow’s insight that “Driving a car at night, you never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”
• Constructive collaborators who communicate clearly, appreciate other points of view, spot defects in a plan or design, and suggest fixes.
• People who are willing to experiment and learn from the results, to manage multiple hypotheses and to look for complex causes and outcomes, balancing exploration and refinement to avoid premature optimization.
• People with a demonstrated commitment to continued self-improvement.
• People with a track record of taking the initiative to provide value to customers. Someone who bent the rules to do the right thing, or gave the customer the benefit of the doubt, or worked overtime when the customer situation called for it.

Related Blog Posts

• How to Influence Executive Decisions with Data
• Angel Rampy on Influence Skills for Technical People
• Orienting, Observing, Doing Homework, and Paying Dues
• Marshall McLuhan: How To See The Future
• Learning from John Perry Barlow’s Principles of Adult Behavior
• College Graduation: From Traveling Station to Station to Navigating a Borderless Sea
• College vs. Startup
• 12 From Sydney J. Harris’ “Winners and Losers” For Entrepreneurs
• Managing Change in an Organization: An Incomplete Resource List

Image credit: “Questions licensed from 123rf.com/profile_maxborovkov 211007599