When I started my first company 15 years ago, I didn't know who Steve Jobs was, that Silicon Valley was a place or that an early stage business run by naïve optimists you would call a “startup”. It was my co-founders now who brought me into the group. We were part of an ecosystem where “new markets” and “disruption” were taught as the foundations of innovation. It took a trip through venture capital hell to dispel these misconceptions.

To understand what I mean, consider a magic trick. A magician holding a deck of cards asks you to name a card in the deck. You name the ace of spades. The magician shuffles the deck and after a significant pause, asks you to reach into your pocket. You draw the ace of spades.
You may have some idea how this trick is executed, but you don't know for sure, and you probably don't care. You are simply surprised and pleased with the result. This happiness is the result of months spent refining an old method to reduce the error rate and perfect the result. This is real magic.

Innovation in business is rarely a technological breakthrough, rather it is an innovation in process. Great businesses build products where these innovations are taken for granted. I like to call this “boring magic”.

In a world where 75% of startups failI've learned that if you're excited about the boring stuff, you can build better products, run a more sustainable business, and of course innovate.

These are the areas of your business, the pieces of boring magic, that will help you succeed long-term as a founder.

Related: Define your short-term goals with these 3 components for long-term success

1. Fall in love with boring problems

Living in New York is a daily reminder of humanity's bewildering engineering prowess. On the Brooklyn Bridge, an enigma of steel and stone, cars move thousands of people from one island to another. I find myself fixated on the piers of the bridge and think that who makes bridge bearings is the true innovator behind the design of a bridge.

I find it helpful to think of software as a bridge. Whenever a new foundational technology emerges and becomes widely accessible, like AI, very few operators have the discipline to think practically about how it can improve the experience for those who use it. You absolutely have to think about how to use off the shelf AI tools in your company, but my recommendation is to use AI more as a bridge holder, rather than making it a product. I will give you an example.

At some point, many businesses need to ingest data from various sources and convert that data into a specific format. Large language models (LLMs) represent an operational goldmine for this. Forget emergent AI. LLMs are amazing at taking data and turning that information into a format of your own design – a process called data normalization. This used to take months, but with the LLM, it can be done in seconds and with fewer engineering resources.

Most people won't be excited about data normalization, but they will be impressed by the reduction in burn rate and the number of new customers you gain by optimizing your product.

2. Think big but be boring

One of the biggest mistakes I see founders make is designing their business as if they've already done it. They over-invest in a management team before the market pulls in, over-invest in product features when no one knows they exist or worse, over-invest in small benefits such as free first meals and snacks because they are fascinated with the “startup” life.

If you invest too much and fail to run a healthy business, you will regret it.

Before you decide to launch a new product, you should do three things:

• Rate yours cash balance.
• Build a budget and determine how much time and money you are willing to spend on building the new product.
• Then, create a product strategy based on those decisions.

It's amazing how many companies don't have an answer to “what's your budget?” or don't know the basics of creating one. And if they do, they usually haven't thought beyond the initial investment money they received. To build one long term budgetyou need to consider the ongoing maintenance of the product and project your costs according to the scale of your services.

All of these decisions have huge downstream impacts on who you are able to hire, how you build your teams, and as a result, how quickly you are able to move. If you focus on how much money will be needed not only to build your product, but to build the business around it, your customers and your bank balance will see the benefits.

Related: How to structure and build a team for long-term success

3. Invest in your people; they are your magic

A year after starting my first business, the other founders and I realized that our pipeline would not support paying our staff for the next month. We had assumed that the next project would always be around the corner, and it would never have been considered i doubt in our model. But when you're responsible for people being able to feed themselves and their families, it's a big wake-up call. We decided that the founders would not receive a salary for two months. We paid our men and got back on track.

This is the foundation of every culture I help create as a leader: we don't take a month of income for granted. We never take people for granted. We have a deep understanding of our responsibility and how important it is to live up to it.

I never want to relive the experience of not being able to make payroll and it forces me to only hire if I'm sure I can afford the person in a month. It forces me to be boring about how I run my business. Even when you get a big cash injection, you still need it hire with purpose. You need to think strategically about where you are as a business and where you want to go next. Hire the people who will help you get there, move on quickly if the fit isn't right, and make sure you're at the next stage of growth before adding additional roles.

Most founders don't want to spend time on “boring” stuff. But if you want your company to not only survive, but continue to grow throughout the years, boring magic is table stakes. It's the silver bullet you need for longevity.