Chapter 17
A Portfolio, Not a Business
My father could not build the Christmas present.
It was a Big Wheel, the plastic tricycle with the oversized front wheel, and it came in a box in pieces, and he had got as far as opening it and stopped. On Christmas Eve he came and got me, quietly, and took me out to the garage to build it with him.
I was small enough that I could not read the instructions. I looked at the picture on the box and laid the parts out in the order they had to go.
I do not think my mother knows to this day.
I have been building things from pictures since before I could read the instructions. Forty-something years later, that was becoming a problem.
At one point I could have sat you down and shown you dozens of domains I owned, and explained exactly why each one mattered.
I want to be clear that I could really do this. It was not a hoard. Every property had a reason. This one owned an idea I did not want somebody else to own. This one was the natural home for a particular kind of reader. This one existed because a term was going to matter in two years and it was cheap now. If you had challenged any single one of them I would have had an answer, and the answer would have been decent.
That was the problem.
The reasoning was fine at the level of each decision and catastrophic at the level of the whole. I had not built a company. I had built a portfolio, and I had done it the way most founders do, which is one entirely defensible choice at a time over several years.
Here is what I eventually noticed, and I noticed it late.
I was organizing the company around things I had built. Websites are outputs. They are the residue of work, not the structure of a business, and when you arrange a company around its outputs you end up with a company whose shape is a record of your own history rather than a description of what it does for anyone.
The question I had been asking was where does this domain fit. It is a reasonable question and it has an answer for everything, which is why it is dangerous. Any asset can be made to fit somewhere if you are motivated.
The question that fixed it was which system does this strengthen.
That one has a lot of no in it. Under that question most of what I owned did not have a job. It had a personality, which is different, and a personality is not something a customer can use.
It simplified fast after that, and the sentence I still use for it is that the websites finally had jobs instead of personalities. One educates. One explains the behavioral model. One assesses where a business actually stands. One takes responsibility for the outcome. One measures and improves. If a property could not answer which of those it was doing, it was not load-bearing, and it went quiet.
I am not going to tell you that was painless. Some of those were ideas I liked.