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Lesson #5: Discipline Yourself and Learn To Say No

Article Overview: “We were resolute to do what our users wanted,” says DeWolfe. “Having discipline and saying no is why we ended up being so successful.”

Lesson #5: Discipline Yourself and Learn To Say No

“We were resolute to do what our users wanted,” says DeWolfe. “Having discipline and saying no is why we ended up being so successful.”

Anderson and DeWolfe witnessed it in other companies time and time again, and they were determined to avoid the same fates. One of the biggest traps entrepreneurs fall into, says DeWolfe, is “when you start to grow and there is a little bit of success.” Then, “people get on the soapbox, like pundits and venture capitalists, who tell you how to run your business.”

MySpace had its fair share of pundits in its early days, and still does. There were those who thought the site should implement pop-up ads. There were others who thought that members who wanted to use MySpace for commercial purposes should be charged a fee. Finally, there were those who thought that allowing individuals to design their own profile pages was just plain bad common sense. “It’s important to be very disciplined in terms of not listening to them,” says DeWolfe.

“For the most part everyone doubted we were a real company and a real site because we weren't in the Silicon Valley,” he continues. “And we didn't do things like everyone else. We had ten different features on our site. They considered that to be unfocused. The user interface wasn't pretty. We weren't using Linux operating system but off-the-shelf Microsoft products, which was unheard of.”

“So we are not doing what everyone else is doing,” says Anderson. “When we were getting popular, people were saying, ‘Why aren’t you doing this or that?’ I thought they were ridiculous, and they thought I was ridiculous.”

One of the most major criticisms of MySpace in its early days was that Anderson and DeWolfe were trying to accomplish too much. Was it a site for music? Instant messaging? Blogs? Nobody could quite figure it out. They told Anderson and DeWolfe to scale back their operations. “That was the antithesis of what we aimed to do,” says DeWolfe. “Most of the sites that did that became boring after awhile.”

That being said, however, the duo does understand the importance of focus. They just did not want other people telling them what that focus should be. “Others try to do too many things at one given time,” says DeWolfe. “At any one time, we focus our developers on the top three to four initiatives and don’t get distracted with what others tell us we ought to do.”

They also understand the importance of having a trusted team of advisors around them, who they seek advice from even if they choose not to listen. “Continuity with senior management is very important,” says DeWolfe. “It’s been one of the reasons why we’ve won.”

But no matter who is around them, at the end of the day the final decisions always came back to DeWolfe and Anderson, who says, “In a way, it’s our lack of experience that helps.” It was their lack of experience that let them do what they did not know they could not do.

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Article Tags: antithesis, commercial purposes, common sense, discipline, fair share, fates, instant messaging, linux, little bit, microsoft, microsoft products, myspace, operating system, pop up ads, pundits, silicon valley, soapbox, traps, user interface, venture capitalists



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