Parashat Matot

This is #Snapchatorah for where Hillel Fuld takes the Torah portion, learns some lessons and apply them to entrepreneurship and startups.

Usually I focus on a story in the portion or a section of the portion. Here I want to talk about four words. The first section of this week’s Torah portion talks about promises and commitments and the four words are  כְּכָל־הַיֹּצֵ֥א מִפִּ֖יו יַֽעֲשֶֽׂה  Everything you say do. The context of those four words in the portion is when you make a promise and you can’t keep it, how you need to behave and what you need to do. We are going to talk about something else.

I have talked about the importance of communication in the past, but I don’t think any of us understand how powerful words can be. Setting expectations for good and for bad. Hard times in a startup are magnified exponentially by a lack of communication. And the same applies to good times.

You have a PR campaign, don’t use superlatives to oversell what you are doing. Just tell me what you are doing. Overpromising under delivering is a recipe for disaster. Like the Torah tells us, once you guarantee something, once you promise something once you commit to something, you must deliver. And that applies even more so to startups

Of course this principle applies externally when it comes to PR, when it comes to Social. But it applies internally in your company   over communication all the more so. Of course we are all tempted to oversell and make it seem bigger than it really is. But fight that temptation. Because big promises create big expectation. We’ve all heard the stories about the companies the startups, that raises millions, hundreds of millions dollars, with big launches and big splashes, and big noise, and then crashed and burned

Trust me I am the last person to tell you not to make noise not to do PR. But just make sure your promises align with your deliverables. That’s all. The Torah teaches us that despite what you might think, that it’s just a word right. I just said something I didn’t actually do anything, it’s nothing tangible. No. Words are very powerful. Commitments are everything

The Torah then talks about the detailed and long process you need to go thru once you make a commitment and a promise and can’t deliver upon it. Same goes for startups long process.

כְּכָל־הַיֹּצֵ֥א מִפִּ֖יו יַֽעֲשֶֽׂה  Everything you say do. And if you can’t do it, then don’t say it

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Hillel is a Co-Founder at ZCastApp, mentor at Google, Microsoft, and many other accelerators across Israel. Add Hillel on Snapchat and Twitter