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At a glance
WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT
Stupid Goals, Stupid Prizes: Avoiding Founder Mistakes in Setting and Hitting Goals
- Seibel and Caldwell frame goal-setting mistakes through the meme "play stupid games, win stupid prizes," splitting errors into setting bad goals and accomplishing goals badly.
- Bad goals include overly aggressive targets driven by fear, fake metrics that avoid measuring whether the business works, superficial comparisons to other companies' fundraises, and sandbagging.
- Accomplishing goals poorly means cheating to hit a number, refusing to accept a miss and reset the goal, and spending energy on excuses instead of moving on.
- The 'stupid prizes' include losing control after over-raising, over-hiring and layoffs, premature executive hires and acquisitions, burning money on negative margins, legal consequences for defrauding customers, and distraction from angel investing as a status game.
- They close by noting that founders set the example for their team, and that the best companies get remarkably good at setting and hitting goals over time.
IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING
5 ideasA goal's purpose is to motivate smarter, faster action.
Seibel says goals set out of fear that are too aggressive stop being motivational, and examples include expecting 100,000 daily users right after launch or $30K MRR by Demo Day.
Measure the thing that shows whether the business works.
Caldwell and Seibel note that founders count hits, downloads or half-finished registrations rather than money or active users, which avoids the real meaning of the metric.
Don't copy other companies' fundraising on a surface level.
Pointing to a past round at a given ARR ignores differences in timing and underlying factors, such as the Facebook example where a small user base had extremely high engagement.
Sandbagging backfires when you are your own boss.
Caldwell says padding goals may help you look good at a big company, but when you run the company it hurts you, and the founders of big companies didn't work that way.
Hitting a goal by cheating means you didn't accomplish it.
Seibel compares it to cheating to get an A in calculus: the grade represents knowledge, and if you learned nothing, you didn't really reach the goal.
WORDS WORTH SAVING
5 quotesLike, the A isn't the goal, it's the representation of your knowledge and your mastery. Like, and if you didn't, if you didn't learn something when accomplishing the goal, maybe you didn't accomplish the goal.
— Michael Seibel
It's like we're not playing Monopoly. We're not playing Settlers of Catan. And I think that the, the, the, the prize that you win is the knock on the door, um, from the police.
— Dalton Caldwell
You won the fundraising game. Here's your prize. You have a messed up company that shouldn't have raised all the money, and you've gotta dig yourself out of a disaster, and everyone's mad at you.
— Dalton Caldwell
Assume you're gonna be bad at it, and, like, you can adjust over time. You can set better goals over time. You can not accomplish your goals and learn from it
— Michael Seibel
Spend energy in a positive, proactive direction than weaving the narrative of yourself as the person who did great, but you're misunderstood by the universe.
— Dalton Caldwell
High quality AI-generated summary created from speaker-labeled transcript.
