100-Hour Rule

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You may have heard of the 10,000-hour rule, which talks about the time it takes to master a field. This rule has several meanings:

• 1. Because it takes so long (3 hours a day would take 10 years), people can only master a few things in their lifetime.
• 2. You can't speed up your process of becoming proficient because time passes at the same rate for everyone. If you master something (such as sales, programming, or product management) and your competitors don't, you have a huge competitive advantage.
• 3. Because it requires too much effort, many people feel daunted and give up early - or don't even dare to try. Behind every violin master, there are a lot of people who give up after a few lessons, and even more people who have never even picked up a violin.

Being good at different disciplines is very important for startups. A typical startup has many areas to handle, such as software engineering, user experience design, product strategy, sales and marketing, recruiting, etc. Getting any one of these areas wrong is enough to cause the company to fail. For example, if the founders can't effectively recruit a good team, they will not have the resources to realize their plans, no matter how brilliant those plans are. Or, although the founders can build a very useful product, if it is not user-friendly or aesthetically pleasing, it will often be difficult for the product to gain momentum. Of course, there are some exceptions (such as Craigslist and its antiquated UI), but they are just exceptions.

Here's the dilemma: few teams are able to master the 5-10 areas that are critical to success, but mastery takes a long time.

How to solve it? Try the 100-hour rule:

Most disciplines only require 100 hours of active study to become much more competitive than an absolute novice.

For example:

• Cooking: It takes years to become a great chef, but 100 hours of cooking lessons plus deliberate practice can make you a better cook than most of your friends.
• Programming: It takes years of study and practice to become a strong software engineer, but taking a few courses on Codecademy or Udacity is enough to let you write many basic applications.
• Sales: It takes years of experience to become a master salesperson, but reading a few key books and a few hours studying with seasoned salespeople can help you learn enough to avoid common/dangerous sales traps.

I personally experienced the sales example. Before becoming a VC, I was a software engineer with 10 years of experience. I had never dealt with sales and knew nothing about this field. After I became an investor, I soon discovered that the bottleneck of most companies was sales/marketing/customer acquisition rather than technology. Therefore, I began to try to teach myself sales and related fields. I read books like "Traction" and attended conferences like SalesConf. I invested about 50 to 100 hours in sales. The result? Although I am still a green hand compared to experienced people, I know more than enough compared to many non-sales people. Now I know that most software products should be priced according to value rather than cost, it is better to talk about benefits rather than features, and the most important part of sales is to listen to what customers want, not to tell them what you have. If the conversion rate of sales experts is 80% and that of novices is only 10%, my current level is about 30-40%. It is still far behind experts, but it has opened up a gap with novices. If you look at it based on 1-2 weeks of full-time study, the ROI is already very high.

Some observations on the 100-hour rule:

• Although 100 is an easy-to-remember round number, it is only a rough estimate. Some fields may require only 10 or 20 hours to reach a moderate level of competence, while others may require hundreds of hours. In any case, it is much less than the 10,000 hours required to achieve mastery.
• The 10,000-hour rule is based on absolute knowledge—it takes that long to master a field thoroughly. The 100-hour rule is based on relative knowledge. Since more than 95% of people know nothing about most fields, it only takes a short time to jump from the "naive 95%" to the 96th percentile. It takes a long time to jump from the 96th percentile to the 99.9th percentile.
• Just like the 10,000-hour rule, learning must be active and deliberate. That is, you can’t just read the book without thinking, and you can’t practice half-heartedly. Your reading and practice must have a carefully considered learning and improvement goal.

How do you combine these observations with entrepreneurship? Start by making a list of areas you need to excel in to ensure your company's success (sales, observation, UI design, domain-specific knowledge, etc.). If your team lacks experience in some of these areas, don't expect to wing it and get the best results. Invest some time to learn and master basic competencies so that you don't get crippled by some rookie mistakes. In the long run you will need to find some experts, but in the short term invest enough time to learn enough to fill any critical gaps.