Do More Faster: TechStars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startup

Chapter 46. Focus on What Matters

Dick Costolo

Dick is the COO of Twitter and was previously the co-founder and CEO of FeedBurner, which was acquired by Google in 2007. Dick has been a TechStars mentor since 2007.

It is very easy to lose your focus at a company of any size; to go chase some shiny object instead of making sure you have nailed down the single most important thing. This is most dangerous when you are a small company starting to gain traction. People are calling you! Other companies know who you are! Journalists know who you are! At this point in your company's life, there are numerous opportunities to lose focus coming at you every day. Large financial opportunities appear that are off strategy but have big revenue attached to them. Strategic opportunities that are not central to what you are doing, but possibly could provide real lift and momentum to your business, show up at your doorstep. Each day you think about all the progress you could make if you just changed some of your priorities for next week, next month, and next quarter.

When FeedBurner was starting to become popular in 2005, and we'd hired our first director of business development, Rick Klau (now running Blogger at Google), he would occasionally come to my desk and say, "Company X will pay us an extraordinary amount of money to do this thing with their feeds. We've never really talked about that before but ...