Good + Good > Excellent

Skills of a modern entrepreneur

Have you ever wondered what skills are the most important for a modern entrepreneur? Maybe perseverance and leadership? Marketing and sales? Ability to think systematically and critically?

In fact, a modern entrepreneur is a combination of a huge number of skills: perseverance, leadership, marketing, sales, systems and critical thinking, law, management, hiring, design, English, programming (unexpectedly!), finances, psychology, analytics, fundraising... You are probably already tired of reading, but this row can be continued for a very long time.

Interestingly, more often than not, a good entrepreneur doesn't go deep enough into each individual skill: he just knows some better, some worse, but nothing is perfect. Why does it work like that?

Increasing chances of success

The chances of successful business development in the modern world can be roughly described by the following formula:

Success = skill1*k1 + skill2*k2 +...+ skillN*kN

So this is the usual series of the sum of the products of the skill level and the coefficients corresponding to them. The trick is that the coefficients are set by the market and they change so often that the best strategy to increase your chances of success in the long run is to know a little bit of everything.

On a theoretical example

Suppose we have Rick and Morty. To keep the picture simple, let's limit the example to 4 skills: marketing, programming, design, and hiring.

Rick is a brilliant programmer, works at FAANG and is one of the best in his field. By profession, Rick also understands something in design, but has never dealt with hiring and marketing.

programing = 1
design = 0.3
hiring = 0
marketing = 0

Morty is a typical startup founder. He managed to launch several projects and fail in the market. Morty does not understand anything very deeply, but knows a little of everything.

programing = 0.5
design = 0.5
hiring = 0.4
marketing = 0.6

Now suppose that Rick and Morty try to run a new business in some area where the market has placed the following coefficients:

kPrograming = 0.7
kDesign = 0.2
kHiring = 0.6
kMarketing = 0.8

Let’s calculate the guys' chances of success:

RickSuccess = 1*0.7 + 0.3*0.2 + 0*0.6 + 0*0.8 = 0.76
MortySuccess = 0.5*0.7 + 0.5*0.2 + 0.4*0.6 + 0.6*0.8 = 1.17

As you can see, Morty easily beats Rick in the market fight.

Yes, there may be moments when the market values Rick's programming skills much higher than in the given case. But it is worth remembering that there are dozens of such skills, so the probability of the market shifting to only one or a few key competencies tends to zero.

Choosing the right strategy

It turns out that to improve the chances of successfully building a business in today's dynamic world, it is much more important to acquire as many different skills as possible, rather than striving to perfect a few skills. You could say that the proverb about eggs and baskets applies here.

Here we come to the final formula that can describe the message of my post:

Good + Good > Excellent

I would like to note that all of the above works well for entrepreneurs, product managers, startup founders and other type of managers. If, for example, you are a doctor and are building your career based on a narrow field of knowledge, it is unlikely that studying design in your free time will be the right strategy for you. Although, who knows where the market will go? 😏