Execution
Ultimately there’s no substitute for great execution.
When it comes time to execute, think of your vision and mission (see 
Vision, Mission & Values: Create an Authentic Culture ) as threading each decision and resource together so that they are all ultimately bound into a single rope that all stakeholders can pull on with confidence. This makes everyone more effective and efficient as they execute.
Vision without execution is hallucination.”
— Thomas Edison
So where do you start? Especially as founder who
Ambition vs Focus
Ambition is great and can be really powerful, but there’s no substitute for focus. Focus specifically on what you can do uniquely well. And don’t be afraid to say “NO!” to all the distractions that look like opportunities. Don’t get carried away with an ambitious vision until you’re proving even small success. For various reasons, entrepreneurs often struggle with this. They often think they’ve got to prove they are going to be big, even before they’ve proven they can get traction or be successful at any scale. Remember that’s exactly why you have a roadmap.
The DON’T do list
I recommend creating a don’t do list where you keep all your “opportunities” for future consideration. Feel free to revisit the list for say quarterly strategic offsites or more regularly when you have earned the time because you’re succeeding at what you’re already doing. You’ll be amazed how revealing it is on later reflection.
Just remember if you bite off more than you can chew personally you’ll just get indigestion. But as a leader, it’s far worse. You’ll waste money and burn other people out and have to cut your business back and that’s just intolerably painful. So here’s a simple thing for you to remember:
It’s a lot easier to build on success, than is to cut back on failure.”
I learned some of this the hard way early in my career, and it’s not fun. So if you’re not succeeding, check your execution first. Eliminate that as a variable and look in the mirror before you start questioning your team, the market, or your product.
Product?
Seed stage founders, particularly technical founders, will often assume it’s their product that’s at fault, and will start adding more features to their MVP (Minimum Viable Product) to try to satisfy more and more customers’ needs. That might be part of the problem, but before you do anything, check your 
MVS - Minimum Viable Segment . You might just need to find and focus on customers who have the same need.
Pivot or persist?
Before you get tempted to just use the popular lean idea of “pivoting”, check your execution. You may be about to make your breakthrough if you can just get focused on further breaking down your milestones as clear goals, SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Resourced, Time-based) objectives, and manageable actions with your team.
Note: SMART fits in an overall framework i use called VMGOSPA - diagram below - explanation to come [[VMGOSPA))
Remember it’s so often back to Edison’s other truism that genius is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration and that so often makes the difference between winners and losers.
edl-KHDMKlKM9I —
Conclusion
If you delineate and balance between vision and execution with a clear roadmap in between, you can build on success and realize your mission. As usual none of this is a formula or a recipe for success. But we can all learn from experience. And so as usual please share yours in the comments below.
Thanks to all these great entrepreneurs for their help and inspiration with this article: Paula Long, Mike Duffy, Paul English, Jules Pieri.
At Underscore.VC , Michael partners with entrepreneurs from inception to market leader. As a former entrepreneur turned VC, Michael has backed and built teams that have created billions of dollars of value, focusing on large, market-changing technologies such as Cloud Computing, Mobile and Big Data, as well as disruptive business models such as Open Source and SaaS.
Follow Michael on LinkedIn
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Execution
In the end, everything comes down to how well you can build your company as you execute. Products, product-market fit, and even funding are a small fraction of the journey; the vast majority is execution over a multi-year roadmap. All the theory in the world comes down more than anything else to hiring the right people who know how to execute, and having the conviction, passion, and persistence to pursue your vision with the kind of execution it takes to become a leader.
Instrument the Business
As you get larger, it’s easy to think you’ve conquered your mission when you’re only 10% of the way along it, when you’re a hot company or you’ve gone public. So bring in data to guide you, like a pilot flying a big plane who uses instruments to know where they are. Set up the right instrumentation in your business so you know where you are on a bigger scale, a bigger journey of conquering markets. If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it; it’s about results-oriented, metrics-driven execution. And measure everything: when you find a sticking point, it’s often because you didn’t measure somewhere else, so if you measure everywhere, you can find the next blockage as it moves.
From Innovator to Operator: Managing Your Time and Others
The entrepreneur who becomes the operator quickly falls into the trap of doing what they find easiest, which is usually exactly the wrong thing to do. An audience member asked how a CEO or founder balances keeping up with technological changes (to communicate with sophisticated A players) against learning management skills like marketing and finance.
John Hirschtick lived it. He was CEO of SolidWorks until they were doing about $100 million a year, which happened pretty quickly (about eight years from founding, roughly five years of shipping product), then stepped down as CEO to become a group executive, an in-house adviser. His approach while CEO of a fast-growing company:
- If you’re still needed, your team isn’t strong enough, because next year you’re doubling. You quickly become not just a manager but a manager of managers, teaching managers how to manage.
- Every quarter, ask where you’re going to spend your time, and pick different areas. Strike a balance between micromanagement and being too hands-off: you don’t want to delegate everything, but you don’t want to be micromanaging.
- Set the culture as a guidepost for decisions. “My philosophy was always that the best thing is for all decisions to be made at the lowest possible level of the company. Someone would say ‘sign this,’ and I’d say, ‘Why am I signing this? Why don’t you sign it?’ ‘I thought we’d have to get approval.’ ‘Why don’t you approve it?’ If you have that attitude, it propagates down.”
- Deciding what not to do is the hard thing; deciding what to do is relatively easier. Keep a perspective view; it’s easy to get caught up in the to-do list and schedules.
- It can be a lonely job, so peer support is a great thing.
John’s powerful lesson on becoming a manager: “I started my career as a low-level engineer at a big company. The question in a lot of management decisions is not how do you learn to do it; it’s how do you avoid forgetting the right way to do it? When you start your career looking up at the organization, you make notes and say, ‘That sucks, and if I ever get to run things it’ll be different.’ The secret is not how you learn to manage; it’s how you avoid forgetting that when you’re in charge. I’d think: how did I sit in the audience of a company meeting? What was I thinking about? How did I want management to treat me? And I tried to remember that lesson.”
The lesson from Gail’s story reinforces execution: the entrepreneur-turned-operator must consciously choose where to spend their time, promote whoever can do marketing or sales so they’re not doing it themselves, and step back, because where you spend your time is one of the single most important investments you make in the business.