A few nights ago I caught up with a friend / investor / technology executive traveling through NYC.

We had a great chat about business and the merits of building something truly huge (home run) versus a series of well executed, but smaller businesses / projects / deals (doubles or triples).  It’s hard for most of us to get excited about building something small, but we all realize there are factors beyond our control when a business breaks out and becomes truly huge.

He made the point that when he invests in a person or a company, he goes for the group that favors getting things done and has a history of doing so.  This statement really caused me to reflect because I think most of us aim to build something big.  It wasn’t until this conversation that I realized the two can go hand in hand.

While you can aspire to build a business the size of Google, Microsoft or Facebook, there are just too many variables out of your control.  You can obviously assess market opportunity and inspect revenues of the companies you aim to disrupt, but even the most thoughtful business plans require a significant amount of luck to change an industry.  What is much more realistic to plan for area building a series of successful businesses that solve a concrete problem.  In the process of building your more modest business, it’s possible luck and other variables will fall your way and it can turn big.  The point is you don’t give up the possibility of building a huge business while working on your perfectly executed, yet slightly smaller idea.

My takeaway from this is to think about the tradeoff of velocity vs magnitude.  The more I think about it, velocity tends to trump magnitude aside from a few outliers (which, ironically are the businesses we all tend to obsess about).