Last year, I wrote a blog post entitled, “The Van Halen Lesson” — the point of which being that you should launch big in small venues. In that spirit, I’m continuing on that path, while simultaneously stealing from Ben Horowitz (in using music as an instructive mechanism) and writing, “The Bon Jovi Lesson.”
“You live for the fight, if that’s all that you’ve got.” - “Living on a Prayer” - Bon Jovi
So, if the Van Halen lesson was “launch big in small venues” - what is the Bon Jovi Lesson? Simple. Have someone to fight against…and realize that as a startup with limited resources and capital, the fight is all that you’ve got.
To paraphrase Winston Churchill, “if you have enemies, good. That means that you’ve stood up for something in your lifetime.” And to paraphrase the Samurai, “a man is judged by the enemies he keeps.” The point being, if you’re a startup, “enemies” are important.
The worst thing that you can be is a startup without a target. There are great apochrypahl stories about Larry Ellison ruthlessly attacking larger competitors with brutal ads…because he needed a target. And, really, it’s very simple and instructive. If you’re a startup that doesn’t have an “enemy” (i.e., a market, company or industry that you’re attacking), then your mission simply isn’t big enough.
Find any successful startup, and you’ll find a company with a clearly defined target that they’re trying to “disrupt.” But “disrupt” is such a corrupted term. Fuck “disrupting” - honestly, that’s just a conference now…you need a target, an enemy, a fight that you live for. That fight gives you purpose, focus, and the will to win. Without it, you’re just some namby-pamby startup that’s simply replicating something else in a similar space.
Every great startup (Twilio, SendGrid, FullContact, Twitter, Uber) has an “enemy,” the “man,” a really large problem, person, industry, or company that they’re going after. And the more concrete, the better. The best startups have a clearly defined “enemy” that gives them a mission for their first two to three years of existence. They live for the fight, because they don’t have the capital or resources of their enemy — in short, the “fight” is all that they’ve got.
This isn’t to say that your enemy defines you. It never should. At the end of the day, you overcome your initial fight and end up redefining the fight itself. But in order to do that, you must first defeat your enemy.
So, if you’re a startup, embrace the fact that you have a fight that you live for. Win that fight, and then redefine the very terms of the fight that you’re in. That’s how you a) gain traction and then b) create an entirely new market.
p.s. all errors are due to the fact that I’m writing this at 12:02am after a very long week. Thanks, eric.
