TLDR: The three forms of leverage are money, technology, and people. You can be a builder or a seller, but the job is the same—to consistently maximize all three.
There are two things every company needs to be able to do at a world-class level. They need to be able to build and they need to be able to sell.
When it comes to pre-seed companies, on rare occasions, one founder can do both at the highest levels, but it’s more common to have a founding team with a diverse set of skills and complimentary roles and responsibilities. Across these two personas of the builder and the seller, the job is essentially the same: to create leverage for you and your company.
As Archimedes said:
“Give me a place to stand, and a lever long enough, and I will move the world.”
You can do incredible things with leverage, but you first need to understand the three forms it comes in: 1) Money, 2) Technology, and 3) People.
Seeing the game from each of these vantage points is a superpower. If you can develop self-awareness as a leader and a founder, then you can work to continuously improve in all three areas and maximize your impact.
Money
As a founder, you need to be able to capitalize the business. As an employee, you need to understand the financial impact that you can have. For example, to raise money or to win customers, you must become a great storyteller and develop mastery over sales. Money is what allows you to hire people and build technology, both of which drive incremental capital along this continuum of leverage.
Technology
You either need to be able to build at the highest levels, or find others who can. This job is best done by a builder of course, but if you’re the seller who cannot, you must attract world-class engineering talent and grow into a world-class product manager. Technology is a wildly powerful form of leverage in that in never sleeps and has incremental costs per user that are nearly zero. Lines of code and software have enabled machines to do work and create value both much more efficiently, and at much greater scale than humans ever could.
People
You need to be able to recruit exceptionally talented people and inspire them toward a shared objective. That’s why, as a founder or an employee, your surrounding team is your core competitive advantage. You need to get into the conversation with elite talent, and win them over with your vision, your technology, your commitment, and your execution. This is how all decisions are made and how opportunities are created. It is the backbone of all of the work to be done, and this is where all of your leverage flows from.
If you look at your role through these three lenses, what do you see? What can you do to increase your financial position, implement or build technology, or improve the dynamics of the people you partner with?
See you Monday.
Code or Close; The Human-led tech enabled money making machines. Thanks for another wonderful post Jeff!