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My Co-Founder Was a Perfectionist, and It Ruined My Startup
Uber-talented people make crappy business partners
My first co-founder used to describe everything I produced as “half-assed.” He thought I was sloppy and had too much of a tendency for cutting corners. The code I wrote for our software was never clean enough. The marketing emails I drafted were never compelling enough. My fundraising pitches were never crisp enough. And so on. Naturally, when our company eventually failed, guess who he blamed it on.
Me…
I was the problem because I wasn’t a talented enough person. And, for a while, I thought he was right. I told myself if only I’d been able to do better work, my startup would have been successful. But, with the help of nearly two decade’s worth of hindsight, I finally understand I wasn’t the problem. He was the problem, and it killed our startup.
The problem with incredible talent
While the death of a startup you’ve never heard of from almost 20 years ago surely doesn’t concern you, the cause of that startup’s death should. Specifically, my startup failed because I did exactly what I thought every startup founder should do when choosing people to work with and searched for the most talented human being I could possibly align myself with. I did this because I believed quality of output trumped everything else. But I was wrong.
People who are incredible talents in a given field or industry are incredible talents because they’re perfectionists. While perfectionism and strict adherence to quality is admirable, it’s not helpful for startups because it requires time.
This reliance on time is the part I didn’t understand when I was searching for an uber-talented person who always created amazing things. Yes, the things he created were incredible, but that level of immense quality came with a huge cost: He was meticulous and spent tons and tons of time working on every task.
The same is true of just about any expert. The best violinists in the world don’t get that way by pure talent. The best basketball players in the world don’t make it to the NBA just because they’re tall. The best software engineers in the world aren’t people who can magically…
