If You Want Your Startup to Succeed, Keep It Simple
Simplicity Is Not an Art, It’s a Learned Science
Like most entrepreneurs, I’m often guilty of adding unnecessary complexity to almost everything I do.
It’s an entrepreneurial trait that’s so sneaky, I don’t even have a catchy name for it, like “complexity enthusiast” or “chaos enabler.” If anything, we’re “over-doers” — we overbuild, we over-communicate, we oversell. It always seems like I’m adding value when I do it, but what I’m really adding is hurdles to a 100 meter dash.
Even after a couple decades of learning from my mistakes, I still love to throw those hurdles onto the track. A few years ago, working with one of my mentors, I sent him a draft of a proposal I wanted to send to a large and strategically important partner prospect. The draft was three perfectly sculpted paragraphs, delicately worded to simultaneously explain our business, our value, and how we could make the partner exponentially more successful.
He sent me back an edit of my draft that turned my three paragraphs into three sentences. And he was right. And I’ll always remember the note he added to the bottom:
“You could probably lose that last sentence too. Up to you.”
