Poop in the Toilet
The true delight is in the finding out rather than in the knowing.
-Isaac Asimov
Note: I wrote this almost two years back during our seed fundraise.
Investors ask a lot of questions. They tend to repeat.
When talking with investment committees, there’s always a member who asks a question we previously answered from someone else on their team. This is a part of fundraising as it is a part of sales. Investor questions tend to be of a certain type. Some go into our backgrounds (the clever ones call around and do their own reference checks), the business model, the competition, the go to market, product, operations, etc.
When investing in a startup, you’re betting that those running it are builders and diligent problem solvers who will solve or adapt to anything that comes up. Every business model has its inherent issues, e.g. for marketplaces you can say “it will never take off” or “you’ll get disintermediated”, for enterprise sales “how do you deal with the long sales cycles and align the incentives of the CIO when your software replaces their job”.
There are also the edge case criticisms. One feature of our software enables self-showings for potential tenants by integrating with smart locks. A large, well respected real estate investor said self-showings would never work because-- what if someone poops in the toilet and doesn’t flush. There wasn’t much data on self-showings at the time, so it could be that prospective tenants who do self showings serially poop in toilets and don’t flush. That’d be awful, but easily solvable in hundreds of ways… get feedback from others (hopefully non-poopers) who also did self showings of the same unit, monitor units to see which ones are taking more time to lease, hire someone to check out the unit at the end of the day if there was a showing... But if people were serially double deckering toilets… we’d set up cameras if legal or just pivot… maybe to an O2O anti-double decker app.
What if you parked your car outside and someone slashed your tires and keyed your car? Well, that would suck. You could call these complaints in a vacuum or what if questions, but we call them poop in the toilet questions. Asking one or two of them is fine, but when all your questions are poop in the toilet questions, you aren’t thinking critically. You can’t see the forest for the trees.
But xyz can go wrong! It’s a trap smart people create. The smarter and more creative you are, the more things you can imagine going wrong. But unless these issues are complete existential threats to the company, it’s bullshit. I noticed that the more inexperienced the startup investor, the more poop in the toilet questions they ask. This is also true for those who haven’t worked at a successful startup before. These hypotheticals are also why some of my smartest friends will never be entrepreneurs… they see too many ways things can go wrong.
Rule #1-- never build solutions for things that aren’t currently problems, caveat is unless you know 100% for sure they are problems you’ll need to solve in the very near future. This goes for engineering, sales, and every other part of business. Premature optimization is the root of all evil. There are a million things that could go wrong. Most never do. It’s always best to push forward and see what breaks. You will always run into problems, but they can rarely be predicted. What’s scary to a company are the things you could never foresee being issues, the unknown unknowns.
It’s easy to name the million things that could go wrong in any given situation. I remember when I first learned to flirt with girls. Yeah, you can go up and say “Hi, my name is ___”, but what if she says you’re creepy or slaps you. Those things can happen and maybe they will, but you’ll never know until you try. You’ll never know unless you actually do it, learn from your experiences, then change your approach.
It’s easy for intelligent people to be armchair critics. I’ve been guilty of it myself. The world isn’t changed by armchair critics. Having good faith is important for any endeavor.