This blog post originally appeared on Medium.

tl;dr: Most companies are at war. Find your allies and fight the good fight 

In The Hard Thing About Hard Things and elsewhere, Ben Horowitz writes about the difference between peacetime and wartime for companies. Peacetime is when when a company is on top, profitable, and is dominating an industry, like Microsoft in the 1990s or Google in the 2000s. But the reality is that most businesses, especially technology startups, are in a continual state of war. The company is fighting for its life. Fighting for relevance in the marketplace. Fighting against the competition. Fighting for talent. Nothing comes easily, and focus and determination are the main predictors of success. 
 
In this post I’d like to share my two best tips for surviving the war: 
  • Accept you’re already at war 
  • Find allies wherever you can 

The First Rule of Wartime 

The first rule of wartime is to accept you’re at war. The early stages of a business where you’re developing technology, acquiring new users, and refining the idea, can feel like peacetime. But this is a false sense of security. Many of the failures I’ve seen at startups stem from the founders never developing an urgency about their situation as a small company that no one has heard of and therefore no one cares about.
 
Walking onto the battlefield not knowing you’re at war is the fastest way to lose. Accept that your early stage company is at war, first and foremost with its own irrelevance. Know that it may spend its entire life, regardless of how it grows or how successful it is, fighting this war. The business history books are filled with cautionary tales of large businesses that didn’t know they were at war. Blockbuster, Radio Shack, Kodak, Blackberry, and many others lost their wars after long periods of peacetime. 
 

Finding Allies 

In my time in the trenches I’ve learned that being at war doesn’t mean you can’t have allies. In fact, they’re one of the main strengths you can develop. 
 
In reality, the war that you’re fighting is not against a well-defined enemy — it’s against not mattering. One of our great advisors Jed Carlson of ReverbNation and AdWerx talks about the importance of ‘becoming important’ to your users and to your industry. Allies—people who believe you matter, you are important, and that you should exist—are one of your best weapons in your war against inconsequence and irrelevance. 

 

Fight the Good Fight 

So to any early stage entrepreneur reading this post, I hope hearing how important allies have been to Trinket’s success convince you to look for your own. Your users, your industry landscape, open source projects, and even your competitors know that you’re important and can help convince others that you matter. The wonderful thing about the technology industry is that we get to make new things that wouldn’t exist without us. Our shared challenge is to convince others, especially our users, that the things that we make are important and should exist. 
 
So, fellow tech entrepreneurs, here’s my message to you from the trenches: yes, we’re all in wartime most of the time. But we’re fighting the same enemy—irrelevance—so let’s team up and win this war.