Fred Wilson has an interesting post on saying NO as a VC.  I think it’s even more important to manage the loaded N word in business when you’re an entrepreneur.  As an entrepreneur, you want to build the baddest (in a good way), biggest, boldest company imaginable.  Invariably, it means taking risks and having an open mind.

But, you can also kill your company by being too open minded and saying YES to everything.  As a stateman, you always want to please and say YES to people because you aim to please… but truth is, once you start a company, you have to be very careful when you say YES.  In fact, you should always defer saying yes until you mean it, which is obvious but not easy.  I’ll follow up this post at a later date with managing the word YES because I’ve learned that with all stakeholders, once YES is out there, there’s really no retracting.

However, if you say NO, there’s always the chance of going back and saying YES if the conditions change, you have the resources etc.

The main areas where you need to manage the Yes/No issue are:

- Growth Plans and Internal Discussions

- External inquiries and proposals for new partnerships

- Personal demands and requests

- Things pertaining to culture, perks, environment.

Man, I wish I could say YES to everything, but no one wants to be a YES man, after all…  Jokes aside, I think that is the ultimate entrepreneur dilemma…

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