Blank; Thiel; or something in between

My co-founders in our last venture insisted I conduct interviews to survey our marketplace before writing any code this last go-around, and to be honest, it went against my intuition.

You see, I was groomed on the notion that the builder is king… and everything is downstream from their big brains.

It’s hard to pinpoint when and how this notion took hold in me. It’s certainly true that startup culture, on an abstract level, celebrates the likes of Steve Jobs, where the idea and inspiration can move mountains.

But to interview people in the market instead of building was surely going to be annoying: after all, geeking out is so much fun; getting people on the phone, not so much.

Steve Blank

When I was reading startup theory, conducting one-hundred interviews in and around the market of interest was the benchmark.

You see, ‘Lean’ was something that came out of the dotcom crash ashes, and Steve Blank was a big part of that pendulum swing for how to right the ship.

For a while, this idea made a strong impression on me. What made a ton of sense was that a startup was a kind of experiment, so why not treat it like basic science: get data, iterate, change one variable as you stumble/pivot forward.

Peter Thiel

Skip ahead a decade or so, and enter ‘Zero to One.’ Now this was something that hit me like truck. Iteration was a loser: one had to have an amazing idea — a universal secret — in order to move forward.

One didn’t look at the next step. Rather, one had to study the end-game. You needed a spark to ignite the kindling. The idea was king again.

Both correct

In a sense, both these ideas are knocking heads. But as it happens in life, the two ideas were opposing but in a paradoxical way. (And whenever paradoxes are uncovered, they should be examined with keen interest.)

Thiel suggests that to iterate leads to marginally better companies. Blank suggests that to plow ahead with technology that has no market leads to waste. But if one walks a tight-rope between the two, in theory, you have bold ideas that can serve a hungry market.

In practice

If founders come forward with a passion for bold progress, I submit that a good deal of core ingredients will be present. However, as a first order of business: one must discover the market. Full stop.

By conducting interviews, you get to decide how your passion will be focused. And this is key to early-stage companies, and something that Paul Graham would endorse: identifying a small but hungry market will do more for you than coming up with a great idea, but one that will serve nobody.

And as much as Thiel promotes sales in ‘Zero to One,’ that’s certainly not the same thing as picking up the phone and conducting interviews for what might seem like a small eternity for those who like to build.