Executing
What does good execution involve, in concrete terms? The execution mindset means doing the next thing on the to-do list at all times. Rewrite the list every day or every week in response to progress.
This is easy to say but extremely hard to do. It means saying no to other people, saying no to distractions, saying no to fun, and exerting all your waking hours on the task at hand.
Executing is about running through the idea maze fast. Think of each task on the list as clearing a turn of the maze. The most important tasks get you closer to the exit, or at least to a treasure chest with some power-ups.
In terms of execution heuristics, perhaps the best is Peter Thiel’s “one thing.” Everyone in the company is responsible for one thing. Each person should at all times know what their one thing is, and everyone should know everyone else’s too.
Marc Andreessen’s anti to-do list is also good: write down what you just did, and then cross it off. Even if you get off track, this gives you a sense of what you were working on and your progress.
Doing things as fast as you can often means doing them one at a time.
How do you rally your team around your goals? First, ensure the goals are aligned with the big vision. You want to show how increasing a quantitative metric achieves the qualitative goals people joined for.
Here’s an example from my genomics company. We've tested over a million couples, but testing the first thousand couples was a huge deal. A lot of us had been PhDs working on genome sequencing for years before it was known to the public. We wanted to show the work we did in academia, and all that societal investment in the Human Genome Project was paying off. We’d say we just need to fix these bugs, to work overtime for a few more days, a few more weeks, to reach this thousand-customer milestone. It was our magic number. Until we executed on a thousand real patient samples at a high quality, we didn’t feel our scientific work had produced anything.
This is how you align the quantitative metric and show how it is achieving qualitative goals. It didn't hurt we also earned $1,000 for every customer. If we did a thousand tests, we earned a million dollars.
My brother Ramji is very good at execution. He is disciplined and very, very smart. He approaches problems in a different way than me. What I learned from Ramji is a skill or mode called “list, rank, iterate.” It’s a meta-algorithm, a simple but useful way to attack unstructured problems.
Say you have a problem like, “How do we increase sales?” or “How do we raise capital?” Start by making a list —of prospective doctors to sell to or VCs to fundraise from.
Then do a ranking function on them. “Which zip code is this doctor in? Is she likely to prescribe this test?” or “Has this VC invested in companies like ours before?”
Then iterate brutally through the ranked list. The key thing is setting a limit. You say, “All right, I’m going to do 150 of these. If I don’t get any hits on them, I’m going to try a new strategy.” This concept of list, rank, and iterate is a great way of structuring unstructured problems. That’s something I owe Ramji.
When starting a business, conventional wisdom says the idea is everything. People believe that with the right idea, bringing it to market and making a billion dollars is just a matter of details. This is how the general public thinks technological innovation happens.
“It’s not the idea; it’s the execution” is an excellent reminder, a mantra to keep ourselves in a state of focus. It’s especially useful for startup novices or dreamers. Novices tend to assign far too much importance to patents or seemingly brilliant ideas without working prototypes.
Making a product or experience seem easy is really hard. If you’re a builder or a founder, you tend to have respect for everything else because you know, “My God, it was a lift to do that from scratch. That was very difficult.”
As a general rule, if someone can steal your idea by simply hearing it, you don’t have something defensible. Compare “I have an idea for a social network for pet owners” to “I’ve developed a low-cost way to launch objects into space.”
