“Now” matters the most

Posted by Jaan on March 6th, 2008 | Add your comment

David just posted a piece over at SvN called “Optimize for now!“.

“One of the easiest ways to shoot down good ideas, interesting policies, or worthwhile experiments is by injecting the assumption that whatever you’re doing needs to last forever and ever. Which means that the concept has to scale from 5 people to 5,000 or from 100,000 users to 100 million.”

I was quick to add my two cents in the comments as the topic has always struck a cord with me. Whether it concerns large or small initiatives the biggest enemy of any kind of true progress is the lack of courage to do what makes sense now. Granted, if you are building a freeway system it is a good idea to think ahead, but we’re in the business of working on the web. If something doesn’t work, we can change it faster and at a lesser cost than basically any other industry in the history of this planet.

And building for when your company has 100 employees instead of the 20 souls that work with you now is not helping you grow, it is only hindering you, and letting those 20 peeps down.

So why do some entrepreneurs ignore the here and now? I see two main reasons.

1) Sometimes it is strongly encouraged by VCs against the express will/knowledge of the entrepreneur. Which is another good reason to keep outside funding out of the picture for as long as possible.

2) Inexperienced management who feel the need to “become a proper company” or simply aspire to play in a bigger (ego boosting) league before they even make it in the minors.

Both are equally destructive.

“Now” matters the most.