What is the President's Role in a Stage Zero Startup?

This is another one of those "Tales from the Past" blog posts where something kicked off a memory. In this case, I was at a conference and talking with someone who was President of a startup and they weren't quite sure what to do. They had found themselves, at a very early stage, sidelined in their own venture and pigeon holed into a tiny portion of the business. And, keep in mind, that they did have specialized domain knowledge of that portion but still …

As I listened to them talk, I had a terribly blunt and not politically correct message for them. They encouraged me to be direct and so, I'm going to be mildly offensive here (bear in mind that I was talking to a woman when I said this a bunch of years ago):

"Strap your balls on and be the damn President"

I said that a bunch of years ago and while I find it more offensive today, I believe that it is still good advice. But before we get to that, let's talk about the "stages" of a startup.

The Stages of a Startup

Startups exist at all types of "stages". Here are some examples:

Stage Zero
Angel Funded
Seed Funded
Venture Funded
Pre IPO
Mature

Every one of these stages is different but the President's role, in a Stage Zero startup is particularly important:

The President's role in a Stage Zero startup is very, very simple. The President does whatever is needed to will the startup into existence.

That's a Scott Johnson quote; I said this. And I can say it, with a high degree of authority, because I've done it multiple times in my life. When I started my first software company, I was 19 and I dropped out of college to create hypertext linking software (this was 4 years before Tim Berners Lee created the world wide web). When I say "will it into existence", I know what I'm saying because when I did this, I wasn't a programmer or a software engineer; I simply wanted to create this product. Creating that company, NTERGAID, was literally an act of will.

And, despite all the pain that goes into a Stage Zero startup, one of my favorite stages in a startup is what I refer to as Stage Zero.

What is Stage Zero for a Startup?

As I look at startups, Stage Zero is what you have – before you have anything. Stage Zero can mean:

3 guys around a placemat in a restaurant idly dreaming
A business plan that you haven't shown anyone
A team that isn't yet operating
A pile of code and a running website that isn't really a business yet

In essence, Stage Zero is what you have before you start. You don't have investors, you don't have customers, you don't have product-market fit and you generally don't even have a product.

What Does a President Do at Stage Zero?

When you come to a startup leadership position from a mature industry, you often have the idea that you have a specific tasks or tasks in front of you. In a startup that simply isn't true. Here's what a President does in a Stage Zero startup:

They do whatever it takes to come to market.

An expression that I personally love is Root, Hog or Die which, according to Wikipedia, is "an idiomatic expression for self-reliance". And that's the nature of being President of a startup, you have to be self reliant because there aren't the other people around to do things that exist in a mature organization.

On any given morning in a startup, the President's tasks might include:

Settling a dispute between engineering (ok; the one engineer you have hired) and "product management" (the one person who owns the product vision)
Editing copy on the website
Cleaning the bathroom
Arranging for food for the people that are staying late tonight
Worrying about funding and burn rate
Figuring out the go to market strategy
Negotiating strategic alliances
Having a conversation with a new hire about something uncomfortable like the fact that they smell and other staffers have complained (this actually happened to me)
Recruiting the next hire(s)

Getting a startup out of Stage Zero means solving a thousand, thousand problems both small and large. And classical business training says that management is a specialized skill where you get to worry mostly about the big picture. That simply isn't the case in a Stage Zero startup.