The Imperative Practice of Relaxing Constraints

The Imperative Practice of Relaxing Constraints

Founders are always told to "think big," but it's not always clear how or where to begin. First Round Capital co-founder Howard Morgan challenges founding teams to start by relaxing four key constraints.

Howard Morgan got node 50 on ARPAnet in 1972. Forty-six years later, he watched MemSQL demo a database that processed a trillion records per second. Few technologists can claim either of those experiences. The more one gets to know Morgan, the more he morphs into tech’s Most Interesting Man in the World.

The professor, former CEO, longtime investor, and co-founder of First Round Capital has been at the forefront of startups since before they got that name. After years teaching at Cornell, CalTech, and the University of Pennsylvania, he became a founder himself in the ‘80s with Interactive Systems, the first commercial Unix licensee. Around that same time, he began investing, and he’s been a fixture in the venture world since. He’s a founding investor at Idealab and launched First Round with Josh Kopelman in 2004.

Morgan’s had a hand in many noteworthy companies along the way, and learned lessons from each of them. There was GoTo, which became Overture and was the first paid search company at Idealab; CarsDirect, which became Internet Brands; and Savage Beast, which became Pandora. He saw the dangers of the dot-com bubble’s inflated valuations with eToys, which eventually went under.

Simply put, he’s an encyclopedia of tech history and startup lessons. In this exclusive interview, we dig into the practice Morgan has seen differentiate good founders from great founders: the ability to relax constraints. Here, he explains how leaders should look into the future—and how casting off limitations can be your smartest strategy.

If you can’t think out of the box, make the box bigger. Start by relaxing constraints.

THE HABIT OF RELAXING CONSTRAINTS

Relaxing constraints isn’t a one-and-done proposition; it’s a habit, a regular practice of analyzing what’s limiting your vision. Startups evolve quickly. “To the extent that you can think about what might constrain you as you grow and understand where you might want to get to, you can do things that will make that growth easier,” says Morgan.

Take a simple one. “The one constraint that none of us human beings can fix is time. The question then is, ‘How do you use it effectively?’" Because while you can’t change time, you can relax how much that constraint impacts you by consciously making space for your most important work. As an investor, Morgan urges his partners and founders to put an hour of “me time” on their calendars each day for focused thought work.

Technology itself can become a constraint, too, if you let it. It’s a rapidly changing landscape, and if you get stuck in today’s trends and capabilities, you’ll feel ahead but can quickly be left behind.

If you relax the constraint in your mind, you can build for it — and better circumvent it later.

THE FOUR MAJOR CONSTRAINTS TO RELAX

Wherever you are in your startup’s life cycle, there are four common types of constraints that Morgan urges founders to revisit. Relax these constraints, and you’ll be best able to expand your thinking, maximize your opportunity, and grow your product.

TECHNICAL CONSTRAINTS

“When we were building internet companies at Idealab in '96 through 2000, the bandwidth that was available to most people was 56k dial-up. But to build interesting user interfaces, you had to assume broadband,” says Morgan...

Questions to ask to relax technical constraints:

COST CONSTRAINTS

Looking past cost constraints is crucial for two reasons: first, it will ensure that you’re developing the best product, not the most feasible. And, second, it will prevent you from investing time in a product that plummeting costs will make obsolete as soon as it launches.

Questions to ask to relax cost constraints:

KNOWLEDGE CONSTRAINTS

When it comes to developing solutions to previously unsolvable problems, founders will also come up against the limitation of what is currently known, or knowable.

Questions to ask to relax knowledge constraints:

TIME CONSTRAINTS

The goal post for what a meaningful customer base looks like has moved too.

Questions to ask to relax time constraints:

STARTUP INFLECTION POINTS TO TAKE STOCK AND RELAX CONSTRAINTS

Founders need to develop this muscle—this habit of assessing and relaxing constraints—at every stage of their companies’ growth. But Morgan shares a few pivotal company-building points, in particular, where he’s seen it make all the difference.

At ideation, don’t limit yourself to the current reality.

As your company scales, don’t become the hiring bottleneck.

With customer acquisition, don’t rely on a single channel (no matter how effective).

To achieve lasting success, reimagine what your company might look like in the long-term.

WHEN FOUNDERS BECOME THE CONSTRAINT

There’s one last constraint that comes up again and again, and it’s perhaps the hardest to see: the limitations of founders themselves.

Founders have to relax the constraint that they're controlling and doing everything.

Whether it’s a business model or a business leader, the exercise is the same: what happens when you see each opportunity and constraint as a variable — and remove it? If it’s a company, that might be technical, cost, knowledge, or time constraints. Founders must also not hold themselves as sacred if they truly want to build something enduring.

“Part of this skill is to explicitly think about constraints once every so often, whether that's once a week or once a month. Really explicitly take some time, 10 minutes to an hour, every month and say, ‘What am I doing that I feel constrained by? What could I relax that could make things much faster, better, and more scalable?" says Morgan.