Founders/CEOs, 

Get your 2024 plan in place before your team takes time off for the holidays.

One effective strategy to help you get there: Implementing a lightweight approach to annual planning.

Operating Partner & Head of Crypto Startup School 
@a16zcrypto. 25 years working on frontier tech. 2X CEO, 4 exits & most recently VP Subscriptions at Google.

2. What needs to get done in order to make your vision a reality?
- What features and capabilities do you need to ship? 
- What key deals do you need to win? 
- Who do you need to hire? 
- What processes do you need to create or optimize in order to increase company velocity, efficiency and quality?

3. Share your thinking with the smartest folks on your team.
Don’t worry about their level or role in the company, optimize for intellect and creative problem solving. Ask your team to deconstruct your plan and make it better. I promise you’ll be inspired and amazed by the resulting insights and unlocks.

4. Assemble the team and encourage vigorous debate.
Discuss, debate and analyze the various points of view until you’ve forged your original thinking into an actionable plan with prioritized projects.

5. Essential additional step if you’re building in crypto: Engage your ecosystem
One of the most powerful capabilities of blockchain networks is the ability to align and incentivize decentralized teams and individuals towards a common goal.

A good planning process includes explicit thinking around how best to engage your community and ecosystem. 

Executing well in this area will very likely amplify and accelerate the impact of your plan. Failure to account for the needs of your community can result in loss of momentum, infighting and worse.

6. Return from the holidays and commence relentless execution of the plan.
Improving execution even 3% month over month results in an incredible compounding level of success over time. At the end of each quarter, reflect on what worked well and identify opportunities for improvement.

Building and leading a team that’s focused, mission-aligned and aggressively executing is the goal and the dream. 

If you want to give this a try, hit me back with questions. I’d love to help!

Here’s the tried and true approach that worked best for me:

1. Where do you want the company to be a year from now?
Think about this across each of the key company dimensions: Product, org, quality, brand, key deals and customer wins, etc. Write this down.