Stubborn about the goal, loose about the route

One camp tells founders to ignore the doubters and keep going. The other tells them to listen to the market and change course. Both are right often enough to sound wise, and a founder who follows either one alone can run a company into the ground.

Hoffman has had reason to think about the tension. His first company, SocialNet, an online community and dating site started in 1997, did not last. LinkedIn, which he started in 2002, grew slowly for its first year, when a network for professionals seemed to many people a thing nobody would bother to join. He kept the central idea, that working people would want a public professional identity online. What changed around it was almost everything else: how the site made money, which features came first, who the paying customers were. Job listings, premium subscriptions and tools for recruiters arrived as the company learned where the money actually was.

That suggests a working rule. Be stubborn about the problem and about who has it. Be flexible about the product, the price, the channel and the order in which things are built. A vision stated at the level of “professionals will manage their careers online” can survive a dozen product changes. A vision stated as a specific feature cannot survive the first contact with users.

The rule is harder to follow than it sounds, because a failing company produces plenty of evidence for both readings. Slow growth may mean the idea is early or that it is wrong. Persistence can keep a dead company walking for years.

One defence is to decide in advance what would change the founder’s mind. A number of users, a level of retention, a date. If it is written down before the results arrive, the founder cannot quietly move the target later. Without that, persistence and flexibility both become names for whatever the founder already wanted to do.