Do More Faster: TechStars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startup

Chapter 11. Avoid Tunnel Vision

Bijan Sabet

Bijan is a general partner at Spark Capital in Boston. He is one of the founders of TechStars in Boston, and has been a TechStars mentor since 2009.

In the world of startups, big ideas are one thing but execution is everything. The best entrepreneurs I know execute well by doing several things.

• Develop passion and vision for the problem they are trying to solve.

• Identify and understand what they have to do to make it happen.

• Combine sheer will, determination, and focus to make it happen with a healthy sense of urgency.

• Have perspective that things rarely go as planned.

I think the first three are straightforward, but the last one can be incredibly challenging.

When I'm mentoring companies during TechStars, entrepreneurs often nail the first three items on the list, as these are the raw materials of a typical TechStars company. The difficulty is making sure that they recognize that having tunnel vision can be deadly.

Let me share a specific example. The founders of Boxee (boxee.tv)—a company I'm on the board of—have a vision and passion to bring the open Web to television. When they started the company, their vision for doing this was to develop an open source media application and tie it to a web service and a smooth user interface made for a TV remote control rather than a mouse and keyboard.

At first, they believed the best way to do this was to ...