Scaffolding and Infrastructure - the BORING of starting a company
from the very beginning, bbs!
Good morning!
What’s the plan today?
I’ve been thinking..Money loves strong containers. If you are going to receive money in any form, whether that is revenue from customers, a loan from the bank, or funds from investors, you need the structure in place to hold it before it arrives. Most founders don't build that structure until they are scrambling or running out of resources, and that really sucks. I know this because in the past four years, I’ve been walking into young companies that could raise money and fund their ideas, but had very little business infrastructure to hold them up.
I swear I’m not a total Adam Grant stan, but his work is hitting home lately since I designed and started putting The Coach 1.0 into the world. He is anti-astrology, and we all know how I feel about astrology..I mean, I do plan launch dates around the astro.
The two books that I have read to inspire this love letter are How Infrastructure Works, by Deb Chachra, and Hidden Potential, by Adam Grant. To prep for this letter, I re-listened to a snippet of Adam’s book to get my brain in the mood. The first line of Part II more or less:
Internal barriers often take an internal toll - we begin to wonder if we can bounce back.
In the last newsletter, we talked about nervous systems and the impacts on our goals when we’re in situations and/or on teams where we feel safe. Ten years ago, these would have been considered soft skills, as much as “collaboration” was considered a soft skill, and data, anything would have been the hard skill. But imo - having a sturdy nervous system is the hardest skill you can develop ESPECIALLY when you’re trying to bring your idea to life and EARN A LIVING or more than a living from that idea. I dig that more and more business leaders and creators care about sturdy nervous systems.
Scaffolding is a temporary support structure that helps us build resilience that threatens to overwhelm us and limit our growth. It helps people scale heights they can’t reach on their own, but it is not permanent.
Here’s what I’m learning about scaffolding, and its four key features:
Scaffolding generally comes from other people - peers, mentors, advisors, coaches, role models, mentees, team members, and friends who’ve been where you have not.
Scaffolding is tailored to the obstacle and specific challenges in your path.
Scaffolding is applied at pivotal moments that trigger you, and the critical period is the 24 hours after the event. “If you wait longer, the memory has already consolidated,” and can cause flashbacks.
Scaffolding is temporary - then it goes away when you don’t need it anymore.
The type of scaffolding we need varies from one day to the next (loving this) because with the right support at the right times, overcoming obstacles to growth is possible. Very possible.
One moment in Hidden Potential that stood out is when Adam shared a story about his diving coach, Eric Best. Grant was a springboard diver and struggled with perfectionism - it’s me, hi! He’d freeze on the board (I’ve literally been in pitch competitions where I froze in front of 300 investors - not fun), obsessing over errors and avoiding hard dives. Coach Best reframed the goal for young Adam:
Aim for “excellence” (ie..specific scores), not perfection.
Eric taught Adam that a “10” means excellence, not flawless. That reframing was the scaffolding. It was temporary, it was tailored to Grant’s specific block (perfectionism), and it permitted him to attempt difficult dives that were “good enough” to create space for growth.
Here’s the learning: Eric Best didn’t dive for Adam. He gave him a temporary structure (the mindset reframe, the scoring targets) that let Adam build the skill himself. Then the scaffolding came down, and Adam could stand on his own as a diver. That’s what The Coach 1.0 does for entrepreneurs and people who are starting companies and businesses. It doesn’t build the company for them; it gives them the temporary structure to build the sturdy infrastructure themselves and build it early.
Now for nerdy book #2 - How Infrastructure Works by Deb Chachra.
This was one of those books that came into my life at the right time. I had left a consulting job, and while I worked my tail off to create infrastructure, the team had ZERO interest in investing time and energy into getting to understand how infrastructure is incorporated into their everyday lives. Let’s just say they’d rather work in the business, not on the business. Little did they understand and integrate - the business is always building you.
Starting to read Deb’s book was like being a little kid in a science museum. She was right in saying that once you read the book, you’ll walk around and look at everything differently in your community. You’ll understand the little markers in the sidewalk, or electric lines, differently, and how our everyday lives are made easy for us, and we never think of how it all comes together. Infrastructure, to me, in starting and building and scaling companies, is the suture that holds the tissues together to heal.
Deb’s core argument is that infrastructure is the physical manifestation of our social contract. It’s the collective systems that make modern life possible. And, communities that are already marginalized bear the brunt when infrastructure fails. Apply that to the people I wrote the coach for - women, Black founders, Brown and POC founders, Queer and trans founders - we bear the brunt when infrastructure fails.
Let me walk in further, because basically, I am a total stan for Chachra’s equity argument. She argues that infrastructure isn’t neutral; it is built by people with power for people with power. Um, hello VC funding. Deb believes the communities that benefit most from infrastructure are the ones that already have had a seat at the table when it was designed. Hence, the communities that suffer most when infrastructure fails are the ones that were never consulted in the first place.
For instance, when the power grid goes down in LA, wealthy neighborhoods get restored first. When the water system is contaminated in Flint, the city suffers, not the suburbs. Infrastructure reflects who matters to the people who built it originally.
NYC is a great example right now in the U.S., where the first Muslim and Asian American, who is a young, smart mayor, is stepping in and leading by updating the city’s infrastructure and systems to work for all New Yorkers, not just the 1%. Go, Mamdani!
Applied to entrepreneurs, and why Section 4: Infrastructure is the heart of The Coach 1.0 framework. The infrastructure of starting a company (how to incorporate, how to set up finances, how to build a team, how to raise money, how to structure equity, how to find advisors, etc..) was built by and for a very specific founder: educated, networked, usually male, usually white, usually from money or proximity to money. 1When designing The Coach, this section was really important to me because it was all the work that I had to learn without much scaffolding back in 2015 and 2016. That is when The Mother Love started accelerating, and finding scaffolding to support my growth was challenging.
Every time I talk to a new founder, they say, “I have my business plan,” and I say, “Great, do you have infrastructure? Do you have a network that will back you - emotionally, physically, financially, mentally, and even spiritually? Do you have a lawyer or two you love? Will you need help patenting and trademarking? Are you running a clinical trial?...” and tbh, The Coach 1.0’s infrastructure section is not dense - it is approachable and more like scaffolding because I acknowledge you build real company infrastructure when you are scaling. But this is scaffolding that turns into infrastructure as you grow your company up, and it doesn’t come with a big price tag like an MBA or even attending accelerators.
So, if there is one takeaway from today - scaffolding is temporary, and comes down. It can come back around in the form of advisors, mentors, etc., but it is designed to come down when the structure is built. Infrastructure is permanent; it is the structure. It is invisible when it works, and catastrophic when it fails.
Questions for you - What scaffolding do you wish you’d had a year or two into scaling your company? What infrastructure did you (or are you still) skip?
Enjoy your day! See you soon.
xox,
Becca
Resources + Footnotes:
Grant, Adam (2023). Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things. Viking. Part II: Structures for Motivation.
Chachra, Deb (2023). How Infrastructure Works: Inside the Systems That Shape Our World. Riverhead Books.
Filby, Eliza (2024). Inheritocracy: It’s Time to Talk About the Bank of Mum and Dad. Biteback Publishing.