If learning is your highest priority, then startups are the place to be.
Columnist
Serge van Dam
My friend and mentor Sam Knowles, who was founding CEO of Kiwibank and chairman at Xero, is still heavily involved with startups. Why? Surely he is way beyond startups? The primary reason he has articulated to me several times is that startups are ‘optimised for learning’. Sam is a lifelong learner and, like me, finds learning fulfilling in and of itself.
Beyond the human part of startups, the biggest benefit I personally experience is the continuous, high-speed learning that startups force on anyone in or near the cockpit.
I recently had the privilege of hosting a ‘Disruptive Marketing Jam’, which was sponsored by venture capital firm Movac (where I’m an operating partner) with support from Salesforce.
Various marketing/revenue leaders from high-growth Kiwi companies told their best stories of growth interventions that accelerated their success. These included community initiatives, exploiting data, building great brands, leveraging ‘PR disasters’ and so on.
It occurred to me that these ideas can only really be brought to life inside a startup, because they require risk taking, experimentation and a lack of concern for their failure or blowback. And what also became clear is that the protagonists in these stories had a learning mindset.
And it’s knowledge that’s almost impossible to acquire outside of an ambitious and nimble company, or from textbooks.
There are some specific reasons why learning happens a lot faster in a startup than elsewhere. For me, these include:
As you might expect, they typically adopt more effective collaboration tools and organisational models too, and operate at a much higher tempo. How they work means startups learn faster.
Startup ‘downsides’ are too many to list but include earning less, the stress of uncertainty, the increased likelihood of failure, and so on. And the constraints to going faster are everywhere, including – most importantly – in the market itself. It’s not all glory.If learning is your highest priority, then startups are the place to be.
Not everyone likes learning – not everyone is wired that way – but if you get a big kick out of getting smarter every day, startup life has a lot to offer. Get amongst it!
Serge van Dam is an early-stage startup investor, focused on going-global productivity SaaS companies. He spends much of his time with a bayonet in hand yelling ‘now!’ in the startup trenches.
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