What is your startup's most valuable asset?
The answer is something that most founders abuse
What is your startup’s most valuable asset?
Most CEOs would say it is their team. There is no question that this is a massive factor. Unless you have a factory producing widgets, your company equals your team.
The right hire can change the game. The wrong hire can set you back.
But I would argue that your team is not your most valuable asset.
Perhaps your most valuable asset is your product.
Look at the impact that disruptive products have. ChatGPT and Claude have completely changed the game. I use these products every day. I find myself thinking both that this is science fiction and that “How did I ever live without it?”
The most powerful marketing is a disruptive product. Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is experiencing unprecedented growth. It’s not because they’re great at sales and marketing. In fact, apparently, they have one marketing person. It’s because their product is so incredibly powerful.
Still, I would argue that your product is not your most valuable asset.
The most valuable asset in a startup or scale-up is the founder’s energy.
Look at the biggest outcomes in tech. Meta, Airbnb, Tesla, Shopify, Stripe, Canva…. what do these companies have in common? They are still founder-led.
There is a 100% correlation between your performance and your company's outcome.
Over 90% of startups fail. Out of all that carnage, lost venture capital dollars, and lost dreams, emerge a few gigantic winners. This is why VCs keep investing and why founders keep dreaming.
I remind my CEOs all the time: “Everyone you admire was once a nobody.” They weren’t special or different. They were not better than you. Yes, they benefited from luck and timing. But mostly they just executed hard and well. They nailed the product, nailed the distribution, and moved fast.
Move fast and break things…
For years, this was Facebook’s motto. It has become a rallying cry for the entire tech industry.
There’s no question that speed matters. All else being equal, getting to the same place faster than your competition makes you more valuable. This is especially important in winner-take-all or winner-take-most markets, such as consumer and large enterprise markets.
However, in the quest for speed, most founders burn out and hit a wall. Yes, they created speed. Lots of speed. They were sprinting a marathon, which is why they never finished. This is why 90% of startups fail.
No matter what you do to optimize your schedule and your productivity, it is never enough. There will always be more email, more Slack messages, more meeting requests, more demands on your time.
It is a losing battle to attack this linearly. It is a fool’s errand to think that if you cut back on sleep, skip the gym, eat mindlessly during your meetings, and let work take over every waking moment of your life, that you will somehow win, that you will somehow get on top of it all.
Work expands to fill all available time. That is the nature of work. If you allocate ten hours a day, you will have ten hours of work every single day. If you allocate eight hours, everything will get done in two hours less.
If you think you can “outwork” work, the thing that will break in your quest to move fast is you.
The Limitless way to lead (and live)
You can’t win or survive if you deal with the demands of the CEO role head-on. You need to play a different game, an infinite, limitless game. You do this by putting yourself first rather than sacrificing yourself.
While most founders drain themselves and their energy, living in a state of constant fight-or-flight, limitless Founders preserve and grow their energy.
They do this by prioritizing physical health:
Getting enough sleep
Exercising
Eating real food
Having healthy boundaries
From this strong physical foundation, they train their minds:
Meditation,
Creating space in their schedule for creativity and inspiration.
Rather than sacrificing themselves, they prioritize physical, mental, and spiritual health. This gives them more energy, clarity, and inspiration. They direct all of that to accelerating revenue growth.
Revenue growth is a magnet. It is the single biggest driver of your company’s valuation. It is the magnet that attracts investors, ambitious talent, customers looking for the market leader, and ultimately strategic acquirers who are scared of you.
Revenue growth is also an unlimited source of energy.
When you put all of this together, I hope it becomes clear. The most valuable asset in your company is your energy.
When you focus on harnessing and maximizing your energy, you completely change the game. You go from playing a finite, zero-sum game to playing an infinite, limitless one. This is what enables founders to keep growing faster than their companies year after year. This is how you become limitless.
Where is your energy at? Where are you leaking? Where are you thriving?
Take my free founder energy assessment quiz to find out.
Limitless is the only performance community built specifically for tech CEOs & founders who want to scale their company without sacrificing their health, relationships, or sanity.