No habits beat bad habits

If you were going to rank training grounds for founders, politics would probably be somewhere near the bottom.

Government itself is big, and things move at a glacial pace. Instead of moving fast and breaking things, it’s move slow, and never break anything.

And politics, the game of climbing the greasy pole, might be great fun, but how can a skill-set based so strongly on the short-term, be useful for building anything that lasts?

But as someone who’s made the transition, it’s interesting to reflect on why that perceived wisdom is wrong.

In my head there are three important things you need to be able to start something.

For the first, I’ll turn to Sam Altman: “The hardest thing about starting a company is the level and the frequency of bad stuff that happens to you.”

Sam’s right. Building something is an endurance game. 

Fortunately, politics prepares you extraordinarily well for this. It’s all good stuff for about twenty four hours after you take office. After that it’s all bad stuff.

Every day you wake up, and troubleshoot your way through bad stuff after bad stuff.

A project’s off track. A minister’s done something deplorable. A department under-estimated how much something costs and is coming back for more.

In short, it’s chaos. And so you develop a respect, even a love, for chaos, and the ability it has to clarify situations.

So not only do you skip the cold-water-immersion of going from a structured working day within a company, to a life where you need to create and build your own structures.

When you have what most people would call a day-poisoning disaster, it’s just another day in the office.

Second, there's the ability to turn your hand to anything. In the early stages of building a business there’s no “x isn’t in my wheelhouse.” You do it, because you have to. Do it badly. And someday, you’ll be able to hire someone to do it 10x better than you. But that someday, is almost never today.

Politicians, and political advisers, are the ultimate masters of this.

You can go straight from being in the cabinet room, agreeing a landmark funding agreement, to having to adjudicate on where a new minister’s office should be, to finding a new colour tie before a clip to the media.It’s the high and the low. You’re not above anything. Or below it.

This is a very valuable thing indeed.

Finally, politics is the ultimate people business. As an adviser, at least, you have no actual power, so it’s all persuasion and negotiation. There’s another word for that: sales.

Which, unless you can code, is essentially all you do outside of developing your product.

There are other ways it helps as well. There’s a debate right now in American Football about bringing in players from outside the US, who have never played football before in their lives.

One of the coaches (I think it was Andy Reid) when questioned about why he’d bought one of these players onto the team, said: “no habits are sometimes better than bad habits.”

Doing such a heavy transition means you start from a strong base of humility.

If you’ve joined a successful startup and followed its trajectory before striking out on your own, you might under-price how different it is, and over-price how useful your past life will be.

Jumping from politics to starting something, you’re under no such illusions.

That’s not to say there aren’t weaknesses.

By default, you aren’t very useful at first, especially when compared to people who have spent years conceptualising, designing, developing, and selling products.

Nor will you have the constant grind of government to keep things moving. The news cycle never stops. Your startup, if you stop rowing the boat, will. 

There’s also an unfortunate status trap that, I think, for ex-politicos in particular, is lethal.

As a MP or adviser you get a few years in the sun, feeling very important, normally without actually having done anything.

It’s a lot of status. But it’s unearned, and certainly not very durable.

But it is enough for most people to feel sufficiently nervous about the years in the wilderness you need to build anything great, that they never take the leap.

It’s the status equivalent of the moment in Succession when Cousin Greg told Tom Wambsgans he would be left with $5m from his uncle.

Tom responds with pity, telling Greg that with $5m he’d be the “the poorest rich person in America.”

Just enough status to not make the big bet that might change everything, but not enough to keep you going for the rest of your life.

This, rather than a lack of ability, is the real reason I think so few people make the jump.

But ultimately, it doesn’t matter. And here’s the rub.

The beauty of doing a startup is that you don’t need to ask anyone for permission. It doesn’t matter how under or over-qualified you are: the market doesn’t care.

Before founding Boom Aero, Blake Scholl was a product director at Groupon.

His Linkedin bio for this period of his life is, enjoyably “There is nothing like working on Internet coupons to make you yearn to build something you truly love.”

He had no engineering experience, but wanted to make supersonic planes, so just did it.

It’s the same across the board, whether it’s a part-time accounting professor starting a sportswear company, or an unemployed design graduate starting a software-based marketplace.

It’s not about what you can do. It’s about being the person to make the leap.

aled@ashore.io