There is a golden moment when you have an idea for a new company. There’s a rush. It’s like scoring a touchdown, landing a job, getting into Harvard, but better. Because when you score a touchdown, you know what you get: 6 points. When you land a job, you know what your role is going to be. And when you get into Harvard, you’re going to go through 4 years of education.
But when you have an idea, anything is possible. You can see the steps towards taking over the world. And you can start on this quest where there are only the limits of physics to hold you. No not even laws matter to startups. Like Bird, you just drop your product wherever you want and ask permission afterward. This feeling of breaking the wold open is contagious. Your passion shines through everything and allows you to attract great people to get interested in this concept.
But that’s when the real work begins. With work, comes knowledge. And knowledge of the difficulty in front of you manifests itself in different forms: limitation, competition, and scope.
Limitations on what is possible, what industries are too tough to crack, and what methods have been tried and failed before.
The vast amount of competition. Not only slow incumbents but nible intelligent startups who had that same novel concept at the same time.
And scope. The sheer amount of time it takes to make progress. When you start to realize that everything is harder than what you originally anticipated.
Those who combat these forms of limitation and just keep moving forward are entrepreneurs. People who progressed from “I have this idea” to “I have this company” and move from “I don’t know what to do” to “I’m doing X”.
Time will tell if that entrepreneur is successful or not – but they’ve passed the first test. They realized the limitations to their idea, but move forward in pursuit regardless.