🧰 Rotate Your Tires
Dad Wisdom for Founders
Welcome to Startup ROI!
I’m Kyle O'Brien (that’s me 👇🏼)
This newsletter has seen many iterations over the years. TL;DR: I’m an American living in Paris. I write about tech, startups, investing and some learnings along the way. Historically, I’ve written long-form deep dives; in 2024, I plan to share more of my personal journey in more regular, short-form pieces.
Aside from writing this, I do a few other things:
Co-founding an early-stage deep tech fund with
Rand Hindi— if you want to read more about our work, check out _Unit Testing
Hosting monthly dinner parties for the Parisian/European tech & venture scene: The DM Dinner Club (subscribe to our event calendar)
Interviewing founders and investors about the our impossibly cool future via video podcast: _Unit Testing
My DMs are dangerously open on LinkedIn & Twitter. Hit me up!
Now onto our regularly scheduled programming…
Dad Jokes
Much to the chagrin of my teenage self, I will most likely inherit many of the Dad traits my own father possesses. By and large, this is a good thing: I’m lucky to have a great Dad. But I can’t help but feel — viscerally — the condescending smirk of 14-year-old me traveling forward through time to ridicule the various jokes, expressions and truisms I will surely, though inadvertently, adopt as my own.
I’m starting to believe that a lot of these phrases take life experience to really register. Coincidentally, I think I’m on the cusp of that threshold which is resulting in flashbacks to things my Dad once said that now, seemingly all of a sudden, appear to make sense. In what can only be described as a cosmic joke, a fairly common phrase I used to detest has become all too relevant in my daily life.
Volvo XC90
I went to High School in the Midwest (USA) which meant getting a car at age 16 was somewhat of a necessity if you wanted to go anywhere beyond your immediate surroundings. You may recall MTVs My Super Sweet Sixteen glamorizing this adolescent right of passage with detached parents bestowing Beamers, Benz’s and Bentley’s with red bows on them to their spoiled children.
This was not my case (thankfully), but I was fortunate enough to get a sensible, sturdy and safe vehicle (Volvo is always crushing the safety ratings). Voici, my Volvo XC90:
My 2005 edition (see above) is a little boxier than the newest versions, but it got me from point A to point B. The major difference between my car and the one picture above was a giant gash on the passenger side door from a hit & run incident (to this day an unsolved mystery). Despite the blemishes (and shameless #soccermom vibes) I took pride in my first car. I kept it clean, filled it with premium gasoline, and drove defensively — but my sense of ownership ended when it came time to visit the mechanic.
Did you rotate the tires this month? This became a common refrain from my Dad once I was granted the privilege of driving. Surely, it wasn’t on a monthly basis but it definitely felt like it (it’s recommended to get this done every 5-10K miles, or when you get your oil changed). I understood that maintenance was important to extend the lifetime/quality of the vehicle but wtf did rotating your tires actually do? Why was he bothering me so much to get it done? And why so often? I was stubborn, pubescent and generally impatient so the regular reminders didn’t sit so well. I actually never took the time to look into why someone might rotate their tires, I just did it so he’d stop bothering me.
As it turns out, rotating your tires is, in fact, relatively low on the priority list for car owners. It can even out the wear and tear on your tire treads, make for a smoother ride and extend the lifetime of your tires — but it’s not quite as critical as getting the brakes checked, your oil changed or ensuring your airbags actually work. Upon learning this, my instinct was to jump out of my seat and say AHA it never really mattered that much at all! But there’s a lesson in this…
Sometimes you have to do the shitty, relatively low-value maintenance work. Little things add up. And things that add up, tend to compound over time. What’s the startup equivalent of rotating your tires? I’ll give you some examples:
Organizing your Google Drive: Nobody wants to bother with that until three years later your accountant asks you for a company registration doc that turns out to be hidden in a Box folder from three emails ago (you’ve since pivoted the company name twice).
Writing Down & Maintaining Internal Processes: Things work until they don’t. You have no idea how much transferrable knowledge is stored in the heads of your employees until someone leaves. You can delegate process creation, but you better make sure someone writes it down. Once Jake from Customer Success takes a job at your competitor, it’s up and vanished.
Tracking & Reporting Your Goals: Everybody likes to set lofty goals, few like to actually report on them. The dreaded OKR reviews can be pain-free if you don’t scramble 24hours in advance to scrounge up loose data points. Plus, celebrating your wins with teammates is good for morale.
There are infinite examples here. What’s the moral of the story? Take care of the small things and the big things will come naturally. Startup success begins with a good idea, followed by a good team followed by years of flawless execution across the board. If you want to fire on all cylinders you sure as hell better rotate your goddamn tires!