Maintaining your conviction when every headline promises a shortcut.
Written by Maxx Burman | Illustrations by Érik Guarisco
There we were, sitting in our WeWork office in late 2019, listening to the esports team down the hall celebrate their $40 million Series A round. We had become friends with their legal team, and they had shared their pitch deck with us a few weeks earlier. We studied it to see how we might position KitBash to receive some of the money flowing from venture capital into the startups all around us.
Our growth was strong. We had doubled revenue every year for three years, maintained a healthy profit margin, and had plenty of ambitions for what we wanted to build next. We believed we could sustain that growth for years to come, and we were excited about what more capital could make possible.
Much to our surprise, the VCs we met with were unimpressed. They told us profit didn’t matter, and that 100% growth wasn’t enough. We needed to go for 1,000%.
We were upfront that we didn’t know how that was possible with our market and products, especially in the timeframe they were asking for. Again and again, we were told to just increase the numbers in our projections. No one was actually going to hold us to them, they said, but they needed those numbers to get the deal approved by their investment committees.
That’s where they lost us.
We weren’t comfortable making a commitment we didn’t believe we could keep. At the same time, it was really hard to trust that judgment when people with much more experience were telling us to go down this path.
Then our first advisor told us: if we believed in what we were building, forget about venture capital and keep building. One person we respected sharing our conviction was enough for us to hold strong, turn down millions of dollars, and find another way to finance our dream.
When venture funding tightened a few years later, we watched peers who had raised money struggle to reach their growth targets, unable to raise another round and without profitable businesses to sustain them. Some shut down, while others sold for pennies on the dollar.
Venture capital was one of many shiny objects we encountered while building KitBash. Some were new markets that everyone seemed to be rushing into, and others were shortcuts that promised to accelerate our growth. Each made us question whether we should keep pursuing our vision or change direction to chase the opportunity.
Whether it’s a business, a product, or a brand, our efforts need a chance to compound, and along the way we’ll encounter opportunities promising faster results and bigger rewards.
Great things take time to build, and staying committed means resisting the distractions that tempt us to abandon our ideas before they’ve had a chance to succeed.
Every day I look online, I feel like I’m falling behind. I read about someone building a company around a technological breakthrough, making a fortune in a market I don’t understand, or building a huge audience seemingly overnight. It’s hard to watch those things without wondering whether I’m barking up the wrong tree.
Am I playing this game on hard mode? Should I be putting my time and effort somewhere else? What do these people understand that I don’t?
The temptation gets stronger when my own progress feels slow. A new opportunity offers excitement, possibility, and relief from problems I’ve been working through for years.
Then I remind myself that I don’t know the full story behind someone else’s success. We see the announcement, the sale, the millionth view. We don’t see the daily work between those milestones, the years it took to get there, or all of the attempts that failed.
This is how shortcuts seduce us. We see the winners and the rewards, while overlooking the work and the failures. We start to believe the same success is waiting for us, like we’ve found a way to outsmart the system and we’re among the lucky few who are in on the secret.
Chasing that promise takes time and attention away from what we’re already building. When the results don’t come as quickly as we hoped, we’re tempted by the next opportunity. We can spend years moving from one idea to another without giving any of them a chance to succeed.
It’s fun to imagine ourselves enjoying the harvest without working the field, but lasting value comes from planting seeds and giving them time to grow.
“Strong opinions, loosely held” is a principle I look for in everyone I work with. It means believing in an idea enough to defend it and put your full effort behind it, while being willing to let it go when new evidence gives you a reason to change your mind. The challenge is telling the difference between new evidence and new enthusiasm.
Evidence teaches us something about what we’re building. Customers might show us that a different approach would serve them better, or an experiment might reveal that our plan won’t work. Those discoveries can change how we pursue our vision, and sometimes they give us a reason to reconsider the vision itself.
Enthusiasm changes how an opportunity feels. A funding announcement, a viral trend, or someone else’s extraordinary success can make another direction look more promising without telling us anything new about our own. We can feel less confident in our work even though the reasons we believed in it haven’t changed.
Before changing direction, we need to ask what we’ve actually learned. Has something challenged our assumptions or shown us a better way forward? Or has the excitement around another opportunity made us less patient with the work in front of us?
Enthusiasm comes in waves. If we let it dictate what we pursue, we’ll always be changing direction and end up going nowhere. We need to enjoy the energy it gives us when it’s there and have the discipline to keep building when it isn’t.
When people ask how we built KitBash, the most honest answer is that we kept putting our effort toward the same vision. Every morning, I wrote a list of things I thought would improve the company, then did as many of them as I could before the workday ended. The people around me did the same, and we showed up like that for ten years.
The opportunities we passed on left us with time and attention to invest in that work. While other paths promised faster results, we kept improving our products, learning from our customers, and building our team. Maintaining conviction meant choosing to continue that work even when something else looked more exciting.
In the beginning, there were three of us in a garage moving things forward little by little each week. That progress allowed us to bring in more people, whose contributions helped us build more than we could before. Ten years later, there were almost a hundred people around the world putting their skills and experience toward the same vision.
The rewards of that focus were real. The products we built gave customers a reason to try the next one, the relationships we developed opened new doors, and the experience we gained helped us make better decisions. Each year, we had more to build on, and more people capable of helping us move forward.
Had we chased every shiny object, we would have kept starting over, putting our effort into a new direction before the last one had a chance to grow. Instead, we stayed focused on our vision and allowed each year’s work to build on the year before. That required us to say no to exciting opportunities, change our approach only when the evidence called for it, and keep going when enthusiasm alone made another path look better.
It’s hard to maintain conviction when people you respect are moving in a different direction. Building something great takes years, and during those years we’re constantly tempted by opportunities promising faster results and bigger rewards. Can we keep showing up when no one’s looking? Can we keep doing the work when no one seems to care? Can we stay focused when our enthusiasm fades?
To those in the headlines today who stayed with their work long enough to see it pay off, congratulations! I can only imagine what it took to get here, and I hope you can savor this moment before climbing the next mountain.
And to those of you in between the press releases, I know how much one other person’s words of encouragement can mean. My advisor was that voice for me when I was questioning our direction. Today, I want to pass that encouragement on to you.
If you believe in what you’re building, keep going, and beware of shiny objects.