🔗 Pattern matching 20 habits of exceptional startups

I have been fortunate enough to work for 3 exceptional startups, invest in a few more, interview several on our podcast, and over the last 3 weeks, attend the board meetings of 4.

A few things are very clear to me.

Exceptional startups do things very differently from the median startup (and of course the median startup is a failure), and once you see how different an exceptional startup is, you won’t settle for working for, investing in, or joining anything less.

A large part of my job is to study what makes these startups exceptional, and then do all I can to be good enough to attract them and invest in them. I have written a bunch about these types of startups. First I shared 5 elements of exceptional startups. Then I shared the #1 trait of an exceptional startup (intensity).

Today I want to expand on these two posts and share 20 habits these startups tend to have.

Exceptional Startups:

1. Beat and raise expectations.
2. Recruit top talent obsessively.
3. Ship product incredibly fast.
4. Obsess over product quality.
5. Are allergic to bureaucracy.
6. Work long hours.
7. Don’t waste time at useless events.
8. Don’t burn money inefficiently, if at all.
9. Create enduring enterprise value.
10. Have healthy conflict.
11. Have a beautiful websites and pitch decks.
12. Write clear copy.
13. Fire fast.
14. Have cult-like employee enthusiasm.
15. CEO replies instantly.
16. CEO is directly talking to many customers every week.
17. Leaders aren’t empty suit executives.
18. Have competitive, aggressive engineers.
19. Turn crisis into momentum.
20. Are intense.

A few sentences on each of these below.