How to fall in love with constraints

Let’s take a quick journey back in time.

In 1974, a young director named Steven Spielberg was at Martha’s Vineyard filming the story of a great white shark that was attacking beachgoers.

Three months into filming, however, Spielberg was over budget, behind schedule and dealing with a $250,000 mechanical shark that just wasn’t that convincing.

He needed a different approach.

“I had no choice but to figure out how to tell the story without the shark,” Spielberg said. “It’s what we don’t see which is truly frightening.”

It’s been decades since I saw the film, but I still remember the suspense of seeing the fin charging through the water and then arms flailing as the water turned red.

Letting audiences use the power of imagination was way more powerful than showing all the gory details, and Jaws went on to make a record-breaking $260 million and win three Oscars.

As a deep tech founder, you too have plenty of constraints — money, time, laws of physics.

Here are three ways they can be your best friend:

Constraints cut through inertia. Attractive as they may seem, limitless options leave us paralyzed by choice.

Architect Frank Gehry said his greatest challenge was designing a house when there were zero constraints: “I had a horrible time with it,” he said. “It’s better to have some problem to work on,” he explained. “I think we turn those constraints into action.”

Constraints help you get to the essence. Dan Watson is the founder and CEO of SafetyNet Technologies, a precision-fishing deep tech startup.

One mistake he and his design engineers made, he told me, was spending too much money and time over-designing their first product, building it from scratch:

“It was beautiful, with loads of nuances and touches to make it user-friendly but we should have built an MVP way quicker. Just gotten a box, shoved some LED lights in it, built 10 of them, put them in a net [and asked potential users], does this work for you?”

Constraints make you more innovative. Intuit, on the other hand, has plenty of resources. When building a solution for farmers in India, it could have easily thrown lots of people and money at it.

Instead, they sent three engineers there for three weeks. One day, these engineers happened to talk to some farmers at a bus shelter during a torrential downpour and learned that there was no transparency around commodity prices.

And for the next few months, the engineers simply texted the prices of commodities to the farmers to better understand what they needed to build.

Having this self-imposed constraint allowed them to innovate in a truly meaningful way, helping millions of farmers in India increase their revenues.

What are your constraints? How can you use them as a tool of creation?

When you’re ready to level up your leadership, here’s how I can help:

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