I recently talked to a good friend who is a gifted and extremely talened developer and we puzzled over our professional life together. It occurred to me that there are two classes of problems one encounters throughout the life of startups. They are not the same and require different solutions.
One class, the Problems of Inertia, contains things like getting started, releasing, and finishing. Solving Problems of Inertia means doing whatever is needed to get moving, to overcome fear, to ignore doubt. These problems are mostly pyschological and social. We all know what these are. Once a course of action has been evaluated, options are limited. Either do it, or dont. This does not require great intuition or judgement or analysis. The important part here, however is that there is great cost to not acting and that is that things stay the same. Acting, however, creates momentum.
Problems of Momentum, contains things like changing a product, scaling, and exiting. Solving Problems of Momentum means doing a more subtle analysis, weighing many choices, and relying on intuition and judgement. There are more options and choosing among them is less psychological and more a rational cost/benefit and risk/reward evaluation. The important part here is that not acting is a valid choice because you have momentum.
So its important to understand what kind of a problem one is facing so that one may either suck it up and do it or follow a more subtle decision process. All in all I would rather face a Problem of Momentum!
