As a startup founder and leader, I take planning very seriously, maybe obsessively. But I’m also aware of that old saying about how no plan survives first contact with the enemy, a saying made more famous by Mike Tyson with his modern take: “Everybody has plans until they get hit the first time.”
Nothing could be more true.
But here’s a problem I see a lot across the few dozen startups I’ve advised over the past couple of decades. That conventional wisdom manifests itself in one of two ways: