A comprimise never is ground-breaking
How the middle-ground craetes mediocre startups
The compromiser vs the ground-breaker
I’m painting two caricatures. The compromiser and the ground-breaker.
Ground-breakers have weird, unusual and fancy ideas. They are visionaries.
Compromisers focus on finding the middle ground. Often these people are driven by social peace, maintaining good vibrations in a team.
Compromises are fruitful soil for mediocrity
Great ideas get killed with compromises. The more you tune down your crazy idea, the craziness, what made it unique, evaporates.
This goes for your startup as well. You are bound to be unique on one level, at least. You won’t get a great product if you settle for something safe.
My first manager said for every experiment to always start extreme because you can always make it less extreme later. You want that first benchmark on the most extreme variant.
Big and ground-breaking are not similar
You don’t need to start big to be ground-breaking. You can still do diligent, small yet crazy experiments. But, compromises, as the averages between extremes, are the worst way to go.
Are you a compromiser or a ground-breaker? Be sure what effect you have over the ideas you work with. Are you killing the crazy?