What can you learn from peoples’ stories of startup and entrepreneurial success and failure?

A lot.

But listen carefully.

Encased in anyone’s story, lesson or example of success and failure is the bias created by their own experiences: what they noticed and learned, the choices they made, the insights they gleaned and the conclusions they drew.

But that’s just a part of the story:

• What did they neglect to notice?
• How much of the results can be attributed to their decisions, strategy and tactics and how much is due to just their environment? (i.e. were they lucky or good?)
• What lessons did they not not pick up? What conclusions did they fail to draw?
• What “unknown unknowns” stayed unknown?
• What special insights or attributes did they bring that you won’t be able to match?
• What could you have done better if you were in their shoes?
• How can you separate the strategies they adopted from the tactics they used?

Entrepreneurs, just like everyone else, develop biases based on their experiences. And our biases are an important part of our messages…

Perhaps it’s the viewpoint and knowledge, the sum of the experiences and wisdom that forms the bias, that contains the most valuable part of the message.

… but they have to be used carefully. Our knowledge, education and experiences form how we create solutions. We develop biases and frames of reference to help us understand new situations and solve new questions.

But we tend to use the tools we know. If I’ve got a hammer, I’ll probably use a hammer. But what if I need a wrench? What if the answer is really a flute? What if the solution is really a tool I’ve never heard of?

The point is not to get rid of our biases: our biases can be incredibly valuable if we recognize where they exist, how they were formed and how they shape us.

—

Friends and colleagues have asked me if I could create a repeatable “blueprint” or process for evaluating and executing a startup idea: a strategic framework and decision-making process resulting in a template business plan, financial model and investor pitch deck.

Yes, I could, and I’ve started doing that (download XLS template financial model) but it’s only valuable as a starting point, not as the end result.

There’s a bit of art to the science of creating a business plan and a financial model: the value is created not by the output but through the process.

Creating new ideas depends on people, not the process. The value is in the process of questioning, analyzing, evaluating and breaking down a business into its core: assumptions, variables, drivers, equations, relationships, bets, risks and mysteries. And this process depends on people sharing their ideas, bases of knowledge, biases and frames of reference, not from using a template “fill-in-the-blank” business plan.

The bigger value is in being able to step past our narrow spheres of knowledge and connect to broader ideas and experiences. Instead of adhering to our biases, bring them together to clash and create. A template doesn’t do that: people do.

That’s what I do. But it also takes you.