What is the startup mentality?

As Paul Graham said, “A startup is a company designed to grow fast. Being newly founded does not in itself make a company a startup. Nor is it necessary for a startup to work on technology, or take venture funding, or have some sort of "exit." The only essential thing is growth. Everything else we associate with startups follows from growth”.

Startup mentality embraces four main things or values.

Simplicity 

We like the saying, simplicity scales, complexity fails. It works exactly so because simplicity leads to velocity.  In the startup mentality, our ultimate value and the final strategy bet is time. We can even say, we bet on time and we value time.  And all the metrics that start with the word “time”, for example, time to money, time to conversion, time to market. 

It is drastically different from the approach of established companies that first use the word “cost” when naming their metrics. For example, cost of customer acquisition, cost of production of a unit of content and so on. 

Where they meet is probably where the truth lies. For example, revenue per customer per life cycle (for example month, etc) emphasises both value creation (value-based pricing) and extreme time cautiousness.

Simplicity is a key to: 

1. a timed and error free implementation,
2. internal [teams] alignment, 
3. ability to overcome the comprehension barriers, etc.

But this comes at a price too.  Boiling down complex ideas to one sentence strategy  that's easy to grasp and easy to follow, that's the goal. 

Speed

It means getting things done fast, at a good and even pace.

The need for speed is necessitated:

• by the value of the underlying idea, 
• by the state of competition or temporary absence the blue ocean strategy and 
• by the pressure that comes from this deficit of resources. 

The latter is the natural state of startup mentality which however can be appropriated to any business setting.

The speed lies in the heart of startup mentality and thinking.

Why? 

Because of the notion of the “lean”. Many strategy choices or actions are done in the uncertainty, for example, uncertainty of the effect of the market response of the competition response and so forth.

So here speed also means the lean allocation of resources  to try actions at the low expenditures as per each, until the proper solution is found.

Pay ir forward

It’s contrary to “pay it direct” or the principle of reciprocity. In this sense it means benefitting (or, in you like, investing into) unknown vs benefitting the close and known. Why? Because the start-up way of making strategic moves is based in the sense and importance of “weird” data, the magic key that will open the door to your Super-Consumers. Likewise, finding and monetizing Superconsumers is a pivotal thing to grow your existing and create new categories. So, paying forward is simply the way of searching for the Superconsumers who are unknown.

Sharing what’s learned

It’s about feeling yourself within a circle of other entrepreneurs who are searching. Sharing has been the foundation of the Internet too. By contrast, information withholding is a characteristic of a closed and oligopolistic market, i.e. not interesting by definition.