Lessons From an Almost-Storm
Entrepreneur Office Hours - Issue #316
Inside the Office
Like most of the East Coast, over here in Durham we spent last week collectively bracing for what meteorologists were generally calling a once-in-a-however-many-years snowstorm. The forecasts were ominous, so, naturally, the grocery stores got cleaned out, schools shut down in advance, events were canceled/rescheduled, and so on. The entire city went into full “better safe than sorry” mode.
And then… the storm mostly missed us by a few miles.
Durham ended up with some freezing rain and a light dusting of snow, while Duke’s campus looked more inconvenienced than crippled. By the time you’re reading this on Tuesday morning, things will mostly be back to normal. No harm. No foul.
In these types of moments, the tempting thing to do is look back and say, “Well, that was an overreaction.” Heck, if I’m being honest, my first instinct in these scenarios is to roll my eyes and complain about the “giant nothing.” But then I have to remind myself of the very real challenge of making decisions inside of uncertainty.
The decision to shut things down wasn’t made because people knew the storm would be devastating. It was made because they didn’t know, and because the consequences of being wrong weren’t evenly distributed.
If the storm had hit as predicted and the region hadn’t prepared, the downside would have been enormous: stranded people, unsafe conditions, real harm. If the storm missed — as it did — the downside was relatively small: inconvenience, rescheduling, and a few days of mild embarrassment.
When you stop to actually think about the scenario, you realize what happened wasn’t poor decision-making. It was good risk management. And good risk management is a tricky skill.
In fact, entrepreneurs struggle with this exact dynamic all the time. We tend to evaluate decisions based on outcomes instead of information. If something works, we call it smart. If it fails, we call it stupid. But that’s the bias of hindsight.
Real entrepreneurship happens before outcomes are known, which means, effective entrepreneurs have to evaluate questions like:
What’s the worst case if I’m wrong?
What’s the cost of acting too early versus too late?
Which mistake is survivable?
In other words, the latest non-storm-of-the century (where I’m writing this from, obviously not for people farther north) is a helpful reminder that sometimes the right move looks like an overreaction only because things turned out okay. And sometimes success isn’t avoiding disruption — it’s choosing the kind of disruption you can live with.
That’s not a weather lesson. That’s an entrepreneurship one.
Worth Your Time
I've fully drunk the Kool-Aid on the importance of storytelling. I literally teach the course for Duke's I&E Graduate Certificate (“Narrative Design”). So of course I was thrilled to see this recent article highlighting the importance of storytelling in the WSJ — “Companies Are Desperately Seeking Storytellers.”
AI is making it cheaper and easier to build (yay!) and simultaneously is generating a tremendous amount of slop (less yay!). So at the exact moment there are tons of new innovations, the world is getting far noisier. Getting attention for your great idea / startup / innovation is just going to get harder. Your best chance of being heard is by crafting a story that's yours and yours alone, grabs our attention, holds it long enough to help us become believers, and pays it back in the end with value. Good luck to us all!
Tools We’re Tinkering With
Editor’s note: All resources suggested in this section are based on our opinions. These aren’t affiliate promotions and we don’t generate commissions.
Lummi is AI-based stock photography. You probably read that and thought, “Why do I need someone else to use AI to create photos for me when I can just ask my AI platform of choice to create images for free?”
However, if you’ve ever tried using those tools to create your own images, you know creating high quality outputs isn’t as easy as it seems. And it’s a particularly frustrating problem when you’re looking for the perfect image to drop into another piece of content (like, for example, this newsletter, or a pitch deck, or on a landing page), and you find yourself spending more time trying to create the perfect image than you spent creating the content where you’re using it.
That’s where Lummi becomes incredibly helpful. It’s high quality AI stock photos. It gives you a broader range of options than traditional stock photo sites (for example, a dog wearing glasses), but great quality without spending hours tweaking your prompt.
So if you use lots of stock photos (like, say, professors trying to spruce up your lecture slides), but you’re tired of the same old sites, Lummi could be your answer.