You Just Have to Care
A special thank you to the following people who provided early feedback on a draft of this post. Lenny Rachitsky, Bob Moesta, Des Traynor, Scott Belsky. An additional thank you to Kyle, Erika, Scott, Aakash, Rajiv, Jean, Frederick.
Lifetime Customer Value, Customer Acquisition Cost, Net Promoter Score. Time to Market, Net Recurring Revenue, Minimum Viable Product… I feel like I could go on and on regurgitating terms and acronyms like these for hours and hours. Like many of you, I became familiar with these concepts when, nearly 2 decades ago I dropped out of a finance career, to move my first steps as a Product Manager in tech.
But today, when I see them across Twitter threads or Substack posts, I can’t help but feel a bit dizzy. It’s like for the last 20 years or so, every new software business has been condensed into this sort of dense crossword puzzle.
Why does starting a tech company mean you need to be fluent in this 5,000-word glossary? How did we end up like this? Reflecting on the past decade in the tech world, it feels like the vast majority of entrepreneurs (myself included) have overly indexed on some of these numbers—maybe losing sight of what makes great companies. Are all these metrics, definitions, and methodologies truly at the heart of what it means to create a business?
