Running A Marathon
By Chris Rowen
Entrepreneurship has a lot in common with running marathons. It may seem like a simplistic cliché, but the analogy works at multiple levels.
The surface connection is obvious—running a marathon is a huge effort, sometimes painful, and typically a little slower than you’d like. But ultimately, it is spectacularly satisfying. Building a company from scratch is much the same – it takes huge effort to build a team, sift through all the good ideas to find great ideas, win over the first brave customers, and then scale up the business into a serious technology franchise. (And even if you’re highly successful, the effort and time are usually larger than the first business plan suggested.)
The entrepreneurship-marathon analog works even as you dig deeper. Succeeding in a marathon requires two distinct kinds of effort. First, you need to train. That means long hours on the road simply putting in enough miles to get your body ready to run 26.2 miles in one stretch. Even if you don’t care about a specific time in the marathon, you need to get to the point of running more than 30 miles per week in the last couple of months before a marathon, with the longest runs of at least 15 miles or more. You need sustained commitment! Second, on the day of the race, you need to make a mental commitment to succeed. Running that distance is not comfortable or easy. It’s painful and boring. You want to stop, but you must go on. If you’re going to finish, if you’re going to set a personal record, you need intensity!
Building a company requires exactly that sort of commitment and intensity, not just at an individual level, but across the team. The sustained commitment is particularly visible in the development of the product. Everyone involved in architecting, designing, testing, documenting, releasing, maintaining and supporting the product is putting in long hours, often at the expense of other more comfortable activities with family and friends.
The critical role of intensity is particularly important in winning business. Few customers want to buy from a small, untried start-up company. They’d rather make safe and easy decisions. To get those first customer wins requires a great product and a strong technology foundation, but that’s rarely enough. It requires an obvious intensity and dedication to getting that customer’s agreement. You often see that intensity in the most successful sales efforts. In technology sales, that usually means a focused team of people—sales managers, applications engineering, factory experts and company leaders working relentlessly to connect with the customer’s hard problem, to overcome objections, to craft novel business models and product variants, and to drive to closure and delivery. This sort of success on “race day” is built on preparation, but also intimate and intense teamwork to bring all the pieces of the solution together at the magic moment.
I only started running with any seriousness a couple of years ago. It’s my form of middle-aged renewal. Right now, I’m in the middle of training for my third marathon (California International Marathon in Sacramento, Dec. 4). I’m running up to 45 miles a week, hoping to get my system tuned to the point that I’ll be prepared to set a personal record. On the day, I’ll need all my intensity. I’m trying to break 3 hours, 40 minutes. That’s nothing compared to what elite runners do. Patrick Makau just set a new world record of 2:03:38 a few weeks ago. But it would be a good run for an old guy like me.
–Chris Rowen is the chief technology officer at Tensilica.
Tags: Tensilica