The Great Temptation

You're seeing it when a company that hasn't fully captured its core market launches a second product line. The new initiative isn't wrong — it's premature.

You're seeing it when a founder splits time between the company and angel investing, advisory roles, or speaking circuits. Each commitment is defensible; the aggregate is dilution.

You're seeing it when the roadmap expands to serve adjacent use cases before the core use case is dominant. Feature breadth replaces feature depth.

Build a "not now" list for attractive opportunities that don't serve the current priority. Review it quarterly. The discipline isn't rejecting bad ideas — it's deferring good ones until the core opportunity is fully exploited.

Jobs' return to Apple in 1997 is the canonical case study in resisting the great temptation — or rather, reversing it. He inherited a company that had succumbed: dozens of product lines, scattered focus, diluted engineering talent. His first move was killing 70% of the product portfolio, reducing Apple to four products on a simple 2x2 grid. The great temptation had nearly destroyed the company; focus saved it. Jobs later described his proudest contribution not as the products he built but as the thousands of things he said no to. For founders, the lesson is structural: the great temptation doesn't look like a mistake at the time — each expansion is individually defensible. The damage is cumulative. Attention, engineering hours, and brand clarity degrade slowly, then suddenly. Jobs' discipline was treating focus as the strategy, not a constraint on it.