In the second week of Techstars, Dick Costolo and Rick Klau from Feedburner were scheduled to meet with the companies to talk about how Feedburner went from being a teensy weensy startup to a killer acquisition target for Google. This is clearly a skill we’d all like to pick up for our individual businesses.
Dick was an incredible presenter and I loved his honest, no bullshit, oftentimes sarcastic approach to business. But at the end of the day, I admired him most for his unwavering (and uncanny, at times) commitment to the strategy and metrics they put in place to reach their companies’ goals.
Even as a young company, Dick and the team decided they were not going to be a solution for the enterprise. The goal, instead, was to remain consumer-oriented and the strategy was simple: get more feeds. Inevitably, as their sales force hit the streets to do just that, little ‘rabbits’ popped up out of nowhere. Sometimes these ‘rabbits’ were lucrative little rodents (is a rabbit a rodent? not sure…) that would have given his small company a nice little stack of money to nibble on. But Dick refused to stray from the vision and the goal. He told Rick and others, “Throw away the rabbits. Get more feeds.” Later in his talk he expounded on the advice with an even better quote: “You can either throw away the rabbits…or fedex them to your competition…just get more feeds.”
Dick’s behavior is easy to admire but much tougher to emulate for a small business trying to grow and gain traction in a competitive market. But as a team, we’re trying keep his words of wisdom at the forefront of our straegy throughout the summer because it’s absolutely crucial to our success. We’ve already had our fair share of rabbits jumping in the way of progress. Hell, sometimes it’s really hard to differentiate between the rabbits and the opportunities. But we’re learning to evaluate each and every one of them and to consider our next move with a critical eye. Throughout this process, I think we’re getting better at just focusing on what’s really important—-creating something that people actually need and that might make their lives a little easier.
As for the name of the blog, I think focus is going to be the largest challenge for our company (new name TBA) this summer in TechStars, so I want to be reminded of those pesky rabbits every day I write in my blog.
