The 5 Commandments

March 2018. I sat across from three entrepreneurs I’d recruited six months earlier. Their startup had all the ingredients for success: solid team, interesting market, our full support. They’d burned through $35,000 in investment and had exactly zero paying customers. Not because the product was bad: they hadn’t finished building it yet. They were simultaneously developing three different features, attending every networking event in town, and exploring a completely separate business idea “on the side.”

I asked a simple question: “What are you focused on this week?”

They looked at each other. Then at me. Then back at each other. Nobody had an answer.

That’s when I realized we had failed them. Not by withholding resources or expertise (we’d given plenty of both). We failed by not giving them the one thing first-time entrepreneurs desperately need: a clear set of principles to guide their decisions when everything feels urgent and nothing feels certain.

Over the next few months, working with that team and reflecting on what separated our successful portfolio companies from the struggling ones, I distilled five principles that kept appearing again and again. I started calling them “The 5 Commandments” (not because they’re religious, but because breaking them has consequences that feel biblical in scale).

These aren’t theoretical guidelines. They’re survival lessons, written in the wreckage of failed features and the triumph of pivots that worked.

1. Thou Shall Have Focus

The Shiny Object Syndrome

In 2016, we co-founded a logistics startup with two brilliant entrepreneurs. By month three, they were working on the core product, a mobile app for a different customer segment, a partnership with a university, and (I kid you not) a podcast about entrepreneurship. When I asked why, the CEO said: “We don’t want to miss any opportunities.”

They missed the most important opportunity: making their first product actually work.

Focus isn’t about being close-minded or inflexible. It’s about recognizing that as a startup, your only competitive advantage is speed, and speed requires choosing one direction and running flat-out in that direction. When you try to run in four directions simultaneously, you just spin in circles.

The builder environment amplifies this problem. You have access to resources, introductions, and opportunities that solo entrepreneurs can only dream about. The temptation to say “yes” to everything is overwhelming. I’ve seen entrepreneurs take meetings with potential clients they have no capacity to serve, pursue partnerships with companies whose timeline doesn’t match their development schedule, and start building features their current users never asked for, all because the opportunity presented itself.

What Focus Actually Means

Focus means ruthlessly prioritizing the single most important thing for your startup right now. Not the three most important things. Not the top five priorities. The ONE thing.

For most startups in their first six months, that one thing is: get someone to pay you money for your product. Everything else (networking, exploring adjacent markets, building version 2.0 features) is a distraction from that singular mission.

Here’s a practical test I give entrepreneurs: If I audit your calendar and task list for this week, what percentage of your time is directly contributing to that one priority? If it’s less than 70%, you’re not focused. You’re busy.

The logistics startup I mentioned? We sat down and killed the mobile app project, postponed the university partnership, and shut down the podcast. The CEO was devastated: these were all “his ideas.” But within two months of focusing exclusively on the core product, they closed their first three paying clients. By month six, they had ten. By the end of the year, they’d raised a follow-on round from an external investor.

Focus doesn’t limit your potential; it multiplies your impact.

The Focus Framework

When an opportunity, idea, or request comes your way, ask three questions:

Does this directly advance our current #1 priority? If no, it’s a distraction.
Can this wait three months? If yes, put it in a “revisit later” document and forget about it.
What am I willing to stop doing to make room for this? If the answer is “nothing,” you can’t actually do it.

I’ve seen this framework save startups from death by opportunity. It’s simple, but simple doesn’t mean easy. Saying no to potentially interesting things feels like you’re being cautious or unambitious. You’re not. You’re being focused, which is the most ambitious thing you can be.

2. Thou Shall Ask for Help

The Loneliest Mistake

October 2017. One of our CTOs spent three weeks building a feature that should have taken three days. When we finally caught it during a mentor check-in, he admitted: “I didn’t know how to implement the authentication system, but I didn’t want to look incompetent.”

Three weeks. Because he wouldn’t ask for help.

This happens more often than you’d think. Entrepreneurs (especially first-timers) believe they need to have all the answers. They think asking for help reveals weakness, or that it’ll make the builder’s management team doubt their capabilities. So they struggle in silence, burning time, money, and confidence while reinventing wheels that already exist.

Here’s the truth: the fastest-growing entrepreneurs in our portfolio are the ones who ask for help constantly. They’re not the smartest or most experienced. They’re the most willing to say “I don’t know how to do this” and then immediately ask “who can teach me?”

What the Builder Is For

The whole point of a venture builder is resource sharing. The builder has done this before. It has made the mistakes you’re about to make. It knows people who know people. It has processes, templates, contacts, and experience specifically so you don’t have to figure everything out from scratch.

Not using the builder’s resources is like joining a gym and then doing push-ups in the parking lot. Technically you’re exercising, but you’re ignoring the entire reason you joined.

I tell every entrepreneur during onboarding: My job is to help you. Your job is to let me. If I find out you spent two weeks struggling with something I could have solved with a ten-minute phone call, I haven’t failed; you have.

The Types of Help You Should Ask For

1. Technical knowledge: Don’t know how to structure a database? Set up Google Analytics? Write a business requirements document? Ask. Someone in the builder network knows this cold.

2. Introductions: Need to talk to someone in a specific industry? Looking for a supplier? Want to understand how a competitor thinks? We probably know someone who can help.

3. Decision validation: Facing a tough call on pricing, hiring, or product direction? Talk it through. You’re not asking us to decide for you; you’re using us as a sounding board to stress-test your thinking.

4. Emotional support: Entrepreneurship is lonely and terrifying. Sometimes you need someone to tell you that what you’re feeling is normal, that it gets better, that you’re not crazy for doing this. That’s legitimate help to ask for.

The CTO’s Redemption

That CTO who wasted three weeks? After we had the conversation about asking for help, he transformed. He started pinging our technical team with questions daily. “How would you approach this?” “What’s the standard way to handle X?” “Can you review this architecture diagram?”

His velocity tripled. Features that would have taken him weeks now took days. And you know what happened to his credibility? It went up, not down. We respected him more because he was learning faster and shipping better work.

The strongest entrepreneurs aren’t the ones with all the answers. They’re the ones who know who to ask.

3. Thou Shall Document

The $40,000 Mistake

January 2019. One of our startups had a major breakthrough in their conversations with a potential enterprise client. The client explained exactly what features they’d need to commit to a $40,000 annual contract. Massive deal for a six-month-old company.

The entrepreneur took mental notes during the call. He was excited: I could hear it in his voice when he told me about it afterward. He assured me he remembered everything the client said.

Three months later, the product was ready. He scheduled a demo with the client. The client looked at it and said: “This isn’t what we discussed. We specifically said we needed X, Y, and Z, not A, B, and C.”

The entrepreneur had misremembered. The features he built were close, but not quite right. The client passed.

We lost the $40,000 deal because he didn’t write down what the client said.

Why Entrepreneurs Don’t Document

Documentation feels like busywork. It’s not building the product or talking to customers (the “real” work). It’s boring. It’s administrative. It’s something you’ll “get to later.”

Except later never comes. And the information you needed to remember is gone, living only in your increasingly unreliable memory.

I’m somewhat ashamed to say I made this same mistake in my first company. I had a brilliant idea for a feature during a shower. By the time I got to my computer, I’d forgotten half of it. The partial implementation I built from my vague memory was confusing and had to be scrapped.

Your brain is not a filing cabinet. It’s a workspace. If you try to use it for long-term storage, you’re wasting its processing power.

What to Document

1. Customer conversations: After every sales call, user interview, or feedback session, write down:

What they said they needed
What problems they’re trying to solve
Exact phrases they used (direct quotes matter)
Pricing signals
Timeline expectations
Follow-up commitments

2. Decisions made: When you decide something significant (pricing model, target market, technology choice), write down:

What you decided
Why you decided it
What alternatives you considered
What could change your mind
Date of decision

This sounds obvious, but six months later when you’re second-guessing yourself, you need to know why you made the original choice. Otherwise you’ll waste time relitigating decisions that were already settled.

3. Processes that work: When you figure out a good way to do something (onboard a customer, handle a support ticket, run a team meeting), document it immediately. Write the steps down. Next time you (or a teammate) need to do it, you have a template instead of reinventing from memory.

4. Numbers: Every key metric should be tracked religiously. Revenue, customers, conversion rates, costs, burn rate. If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it. More importantly, if you don’t record it, you can’t see trends.

The Simple System

You don’t need fancy tools. You need a habit.

Every startup in our portfolio uses the same basic system:

CRM for customer conversations and deals
Project management tool (Trello, Asana, whatever) for decisions and processes
Shared drive for important documents
Spreadsheet for financial tracking

Pick your tools and use them consistently. The tool doesn’t matter. The discipline does.

That entrepreneur who lost the $40,000 deal? He now takes notes during every client call, shares them with his co-founder immediately afterward, and logs action items in their CRM before the call ends. He’s closed four enterprise deals in the last year. Documenting changed everything.

4. Thou Shall Achieve Mastery

The Generalist Trap

Early-stage founders wear a lot of hats. You’re the CEO, CTO, head of sales, customer support, and janitor. The temptation is to be mediocre at everything, spreading your learning across every domain you’re touching.

This is a mistake.

The most successful entrepreneurs in our portfolio became masters of one thing first, then expanded. The pattern is consistent: identify the skill that’s most critical for your startup right now, and get dramatically better at it. Not “pretty good.” Not “competent.” Master-level good.

For a B2B SaaS startup, that’s often sales. For a technical product, it’s usually product development. For a marketplace, it’s typically customer acquisition.

The 100-Hour Rule

I learned this from one of our most successful CEOs. He had no sales background: he was a developer. But he was building an enterprise software startup, and enterprise software lives or dies on founder-led sales.

So he committed to 100 hours of deliberate practice. He:

Read three books on enterprise sales
Listened to 20 hours of sales call recordings from other companies
Scheduled practice pitches with our builder team (we role-played skeptical clients)
Deconstructed every real sales call he had, analyzing what worked and what didn’t
Got coaching from our advisors who’d sold to enterprises before

After 100 hours spread over two months, he wasn’t just “okay” at sales. He was genuinely good. He understood the psychology, the process, the objection handling. He closed his first enterprise deal in month three. Three more in month four.

That focused mastery effort made his company.

The Compounding Effect

Here’s what most people miss about mastery: it compounds. Every hour you invest in deeply understanding something makes the next hour more productive.

When you’re a beginner, you’re constantly stumbling, googling basic concepts, making obvious mistakes. When you’re approaching mastery, you see patterns instantly, you know the subtle nuances, you can improvise because you understand the principles.

A beginner salesperson might need three hours to prepare for a pitch and still stumble through it. Our CEO, after achieving sales mastery, could prep a custom pitch in 20 minutes and deliver it confidently because he’d internalized the framework.

That efficiency multiplies across every sales call, every customer interaction, every negotiation. Mastery saves time exponentially.

What Mastery Doesn’t Mean

Mastery doesn’t mean you stop learning or that you know everything. I’ve met true masters who’ll tell you how much they still don’t know.

It means you’ve moved from “consciously incompetent” (knowing you’re bad) through “consciously competent” (being good but it takes effort) to “unconsciously competent” (being good naturally).

You’ve internalized it enough that you can teach it to others, which is the real test of mastery.

Pick One Thing

Right now, what’s the one skill that, if you mastered it, would most accelerate your startup?

Don’t pick three things. Don’t pick a skill you’re already good at. Don’t pick something you enjoy learning just because it’s fun.

Pick the skill that most directly creates value for your business right now, even if learning it sounds boring or hard.

Then commit 100 hours to it. Two months, ~12 hours per week. Books, courses, practice, coaching, deconstruction, deliberate repetition.

I’ve seen this pattern work dozens of times. The entrepreneur who masters customer development talks to users so effectively they pivot into exactly the right product. The entrepreneur who masters paid acquisition scales from $0 to$ 50K MRR in eight months. The entrepreneur who masters product design builds something so intuitive it spreads by word-of-mouth.

Your startup’s success is limited by your skills. Expand the skills, expand the success.

5. Thou Shall Pivot

The Hardest Commandment

June 2017. One of our startups had spent eight months building a sophisticated platform for gym owners to manage their memberships. They’d invested over $60,000 in development. The product worked beautifully.

Only two gyms signed up in the first four months of sales.

The problem was obvious to everyone except the founders: gym owners didn’t actually have the problem this product solved. They had a different problem: they needed more members, not better membership management. Our product was a solution looking for a problem.

I remember the conversation where I told the founders they needed to pivot. The CEO looked like I’d punched him. “We’ve built so much,” he said. “All that work, all that code, all those features. We just need to market it better.”

No. They needed to change the product. Or change the market. Or both.

They resisted for two months. Burned another $15,000. Signed one more gym.

Finally, in August, they pivoted. They rebuilt the product as a member acquisition tool instead of a management tool. Same technical foundation, completely different value proposition.

Within three months, they had 15 gym clients. By the end of the year, they had 40. The company is still operating today, profitable and growing.

The pivot saved them. The two-month delay in deciding to pivot almost killed them.

Why Pivoting Is So Hard

Pivoting means admitting you were wrong. It means throwing away work. It means telling people who believed in your original vision that the vision has changed.

For entrepreneurs, especially in a builder where you pitched management on a specific idea, pivoting feels like failure. You worry: Will they think I don’t know what I’m doing? Will they lose faith in me? Will they pull their support?

The opposite is true. We worry when entrepreneurs refuse to pivot despite clear market signals. That looks like stubbornness, not commitment. That looks like ego, not vision.

The best entrepreneurs pivot quickly when the data demands it. They’re loyal to solving a real problem, not to their specific solution.

When to Pivot

You should seriously consider a pivot when:

1. Customer conversations consistently contradict your assumptions: You thought people would care about feature X, but every conversation reveals they actually care about feature Y.

2. Sales cycles are impossibly long or close rates are impossibly low: You’re converting less than 5% of prospects despite great conversations, or deals that should take 2 weeks are taking 6 months.

3. The value you’re creating doesn’t match the effort required: You’re building something complex that solves a minor inconvenience. The ROI doesn’t justify the product.

4. A different opportunity keeps appearing: In customer conversations, you keep hearing about a related but different problem that sounds more urgent, more painful, more valuable.

5. You’ve given it a genuine effort and it’s not working: “Genuine effort” means at least 50 real customer conversations, at least 3-4 months of building and testing, at least some marketing effort. If you’ve done all that and gotten nowhere, the market is telling you something.

Types of Pivots

Not all pivots are equal. There’s:

Full restart: Completely new product, new market, new everything. Rare, but sometimes necessary.

Customer segment pivot: Same product, different customer. The gym startup did this: same technical product, different buyer.

Value proposition pivot: Same general product, different main benefit. You thought you were selling speed, but customers want reliability.

Feature pivot: You thought feature A was the core value, but users actually love feature B. Make B the center.

The gym startup did a value proposition pivot. The product was still for gym owners. The core features were still there. But the “why” completely changed.

How to Pivot in a Builder

The advantage of being in a builder is you have experienced guides who’ve seen dozens of startups pivot. Use us.

When you start seeing signals that a pivot might be needed:

Talk to management immediately. Don’t wait until you’re certain. Say “I’m seeing some patterns that make me wonder if we should reconsider our approach.”
Present the data, not just intuition. Show us the customer conversations, the conversion rates, the feedback. We can help you distinguish between normal early-stage friction and genuine market rejection.
Propose hypotheses, not just problems. Don’t just say “this isn’t working.” Say “I think the reason is X, and we could test it by doing Y.”
Move fast once the decision is made. The gym startup’s mistake wasn’t pivoting: it was delaying the pivot for two months. Once you and the builder agree a change is needed, execute immediately.

The Courage to Pivot

Pivoting takes courage. You’re abandoning certainty (however false) for uncertainty. You’re admitting the path you chose isn’t working.

But I’ve never seen a successful startup that didn’t pivot at least once. Not in our portfolio, not in the market generally. The version of the product that wins is never the first version imagined.

The question isn’t whether you’ll pivot. It’s whether you’ll pivot fast enough to survive the discovery.

Instagram started as a check-in app called Burbn. Twitter started as a podcasting platform called Odeo. YouTube started as a video dating site.

Your startup will probably pivot too. When the market tells you it’s time, listen. That’s not failure: it’s progress.

These five commandments aren’t guarantees of success. Nothing is. But in eight years of building and supporting startups, I’ve never seen a company succeed while consistently violating them. And I’ve seen dozens of companies transform their trajectories by finally embracing them.

Focus. Ask for help. Document. Achieve mastery. Pivot.

Simple principles. Hard to follow. Essential for survival.