An Easy(-ish) Way to Make Hard Decisions for Your Startup
Entrepreneur Office Hours - Issue #343
Inside the Office
I had the same conversation twice in the last week with two different founders. Both are building geographically based service businesses. Both had traction in one market. Both wanted to know the same thing:
“How do we decide where to expand next?”
It’s one of those deceptively simple startup questions. If you could go anywhere, where do you go first?
I told them a story from my time at Moovit. We were building our global expansion strategy and borrowed a page from Waze’s playbook by asking ourselves one question: What would Uri do?
Uri Levine, Waze’s co-founder, has a superhuman talent for making complicated things feel extraordinarily simple and obvious. We knew that Waze had made a list of cities around the world and ranked them based on a handful of criteria to determine where to launch next. So we took the same approach.
From our seed round to Series C and beyond, there was a mega spreadsheet living on my Google Drive with some atrocious name like Global Expansion Plan Final FINAL DO NOT DELETE (3). It contained every city we were considering and, in many ways, became the roadmap for the company’s growth.
Uri’s framework was (un) surprisingly simple: Pick five criteria that actually matter. Three is too few. Ten is too many. Five-ish is just right.
For us, at the time, those criteria included things like population size, smartphone penetration, and public transit usage. For a different startup, the criteria will be different.
Once you have your criteria, score each city from 0 to 5 on each criteria.
And lastly (here comes the part that has stuck with me ever since): Multiply the scores. Don’t add them.
Why multiply?
Because if one of your essential factors gets a zero, the entire opportunity becomes a zero. You cannot addition your way out of that big round zero. One missing ingredient matters way more than four other strong ones.
Uri told us this was one of the biggest mistakes people make. They add everything together and end up convincing themselves that strengths compensate for missing fundamentals.
I’ve used this framework for far more than startup expansion.
When my husband and I were deciding where to move our family post-Covid, we built a similar spreadsheet. We listed cities. We chose the handful of things that mattered most to us: professional opportunities, quality of life, weather, proximity to family, and a few others. We scored each city on each criteria, multiplied the results, sorted by total score... and that’s the short version of how we ended up in Durham.
The point of the exercise was never to discover the “right” answer (there usually isn’t one!).
We just needed to create enough clarity to act.
In the game of entrepreneurship, and the game of life, we almost never have the luxury of complete information before we have to make big decisions. You don’t know which market will take off until you launch something. You don’t know whether you’ll find community in a new city until you live there.
Waiting for certainty feels more “responsible”, but more often it’s just another form of procrastination.
What would Uri do? He would likely tell you to get crystal clear on what matters, make the tradeoffs explicit, build a system, and then go take bold action.
But there’s one final step that’s just as important: when the spreadsheet gives you an answer, you must pay attention to how you feel.
Did you hope a different city would come out on top? Were you secretly disappointed? Relieved? That’s information too.
Spreadsheets can organize facts, but your gut reaction is based on pattern recognition grounded in lived experience (some might call this wisdom). Both are valuable.
After we finished our spreadsheet analysis, Uri sent us a note I’ll never forget that said something like:
“Hope you enjoyed the exercise. Now go launch in Brazil, Italy, Turkey, Mexico, and Chile.”
Sometimes years of pattern recognition earned the hard way are worth more than any spreadsheet. The trick is knowing when you need the spreadsheet to sharpen your thinking, and when you can just trust the part of yourself that already knows.
-Amy
Worth Your Time
A few months ago I was complaining to a friend about not having enough hours in the day to finish everything I needed to do. But instead of offering some clever productivity hack or recommending a fancy time-management app, he suggested I read Arnold Bennett’s How to Live on 24 Hours a Day.
I thanked him, bought the (short) book... and then, somewhat ironically, didn’t get around to reading it for several months.
Now that I finally have, I understand why he recommended it.
The book was published in 1908, but it feels surprisingly modern. Bennett’s argument isn’t that we need to cram more work into every waking moment. Instead, he challenges the assumption that our days simply “happen” to us. Time, he argues, is our most finite resource, and we tend to spend it far more passively than we’d ever tolerate spending our money.
If, like me, you’ve been feeling like your calendar has been running your life lately, I think you’ll find Bennett’s century-old advice surprisingly relevant. After all, the tools may have changed dramatically since 1908. But the number of hours in a day haven’t. We’ve still only got 24. Are you making the most of them?
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This is great and hit me at the exactly right time.