Startups Don’t Fail From a Lack of Tactics. They Fail From a Lack of Strategy.

“Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” Sun Tzu, The Art of War

If you’re a startup founder obsessing over your GTM, your MVP, or your next growth hack, let me ask you one thing: what’s your actual strategy?

I don’t mean your mission statement.

I don’t mean your product roadmap.

I don’t mean your traction slide.

I don't mean GTM.

I mean your real strategy. The kind that makes decisive, evidence-based choices about where you will play, how you will win, and what capabilities you need to build a sustainable advantage.

Because here’s the uncomfortable truth: most founders confuse motion with momentum. And that confusion kills more startups than bad luck, bad timing, or even bad products.

I have met with over 450 founders in the past 2 years. Sadly, only 2 had a strategy!

GTM Is Not a Strategy

“Go to Market” is everywhere in founder pitch decks. But GTM, by definition, is tactical. It answers how you’ll reach a customer. Not whether you’ve chosen the right customer, product, or market in the first place.

Building a funnel without knowing who it’s for, what real pain you’re solving, or why you have the right to win is like running headlong into a battlefield with no map, no plan, and no idea who your enemy even is.

Execution without strategy is just noise. And noise burns runway. 

The Myth of the ‘Just Ship It’ Culture

There’s a glorified myth in startup land: “Just build it. Ship it fast. Learn and pivot.”

It’s catchy. It’s lean. It sounds courageous. But in reality? It’s often lazy and promoted by accelerators. And it's wrong.

It assumes that failure is your teacher, rather than doing the hard work of thinking, of testing assumptions, validating real demand, and defining a strategy based on more than hope and hustle. 

As Lafley and Martin put it in Playing to Win, strategy is not a goal or a plan. It’s a set of integrated, cascading choices. Without those choices, your product is a shot in the dark. 

Strategy Is About Saying No

Real strategy is uncomfortable. It requires founders to make hard choices:

• To choose a specific customer and ignore others.
• To focus on one channel and kill the others.
• To develop a core capability and avoid spreading thin.
• To define what winning actually looks like, and not move the goalposts with every shiny new opportunity.

No choice? No strategy.

No strategy? No victory.

Global Examples: Strategy vs. Tactics in Action

Let’s take a look at some well-known examples:

• Airbnb (Early Strategy): Their winning aspiration wasn’t “be the biggest accommodation provider.” It was to help people belong anywhere. They chose to play in urban markets ignored by hotels, win by building trust with reviews and design, and scale by creating a host-focused platform. Their strategy shaped every tactic — from photography standards to verification processes.
• Juicero (Failure by Tactics): Juicero raised $120M for a beautifully designed juice machine. It had the GTM plan, the design, the hype. But there was no strategy. No clear value proposition, no cost advantage, and a product nobody actually needed. It became the poster child of “tactics without strategy.”
• WhatsApp (Early Strategy): They ignored flashy features. Their strategy was laser-focused: deliver fast, secure, reliable messaging on slow global networks. That meant choosing what not to do (ads, group chat, gifs) until their growth gave them the right to expand.

Why Dreamoro Starts With Strategy

At Dreamoro, we’ve seen it time and time again. Founders who treat strategy as an afterthought end up chasing funding to cover mistakes that could’ve been avoided with clear thinking up front.

That’s why we teach and use the Playing to Win framework with every founder we back. It forces real decisions:

1. What’s your winning aspiration?
2. Where will you play?
3. How will you win?
4. What capabilities must be in place?
5. What systems are needed to support it all?

These aren’t theoretical. They’re practical, cascading, and testable. In fact, our “What Must Be True?” process turns strategy into a series of assumptions you can validate, so you avoid building on a house of cards.

Stop Mistaking Activity for Progress

Founders love to move fast. But movement isn’t progress. And tactics alone are just motion without meaning.

Before you launch your next campaign, hire your next BDM, or ship your next release, ask yourself:

• Do I know exactly who I am building for?
• Do I know how I will win in this market, not just survive?
• Have I made clear, evidence-based choices? Or am I reacting to pressure?

The battlefield of startups is littered with beautiful products, smart people, and hard work, all wasted because the team never stopped to answer why this, for whom, and how do we win?

Final Thought: Why Founders Deserve Better From VCs

Too many VCs push GTM, ARR and growth targets without helping founders build the strategic backbone that enables scale. 

That’s why I created Dreamoro Ventures and Dreamoro Studio. As experienced founders ourselves, we understand the impact a strategic approach can make. And we think it’s incumbent on every VC to help founders build one. Not just fund their tactics.

Because at the end of the day, it’s not the smartest founders who win.

It’s the ones who choose where to play, how to win, and what must be true to make it happen.