Is it reasonable to pivot your company to capture an “opportunity” like caronavirus?

As a startup and as a founder, it’s critical to respond to day-to-day opportunities in an agile way. Your company must be able to flex and pivot to leverage unexpected moments (yes, including coronavirus) to capture new users/opportunities. These flexes, however, should be...

A. Relatively minor deviations from the existing product/product priorities (as it is, not as you wish it to be)

B. Aligned with the long term strategy of the product and business (not locking you into a new/different path)

C. Executed by an effective, hungry, happy team (not add to any existing burnout).

Rationalizing complexity in an irrational world is, in and of itself

Rationalizing complexity in an irrational world is, in and of itself, value creation.

It's also essential if you're creating a 2 sided marketplace.

Building a marketplace takes the following broad steps, in the following order.

1. Rationalization

2. Liquidity (increasing supply and demand)

3. Rapid (ideally instant!) Matching

What complexity have you taken out of the world and how?

Product can't be built in-house

The closer you get to true product (with polish, scale, support, fault-tolerance, simple UX, analytics, etc) the further the question (from your potential customers) of "why can't we build this ourselves' gets in the rear-view mirror.

Try to argue well

Whenever two or more people collaborate, differences of opinion and perspective will always happen. We each see the world from our own particular vantage point. Often that’s the very point of the collaboration!

For this reason, being able to have good arguments with your cofounder, peers and/or significant other is a priceless superpower that can be the difference between failure, mediocrity or a raging success.

So when you inevitably argue...

Be careful of repeating the same arguments and patterns over and over again.

Try to avoid recrimination (you meant to hurt me!), exaggeration (fine! Then I’ll never complain again), straw man arguments (you just want me to do whatever you say), martyrdom (ok, fine, you’re always right) and other patterns that undermine a constructive argument.

Try to listen, use “I feel” instead of “you always...” and keep your eye on the true goal of any debate:

To form a new, true, durable consensus based on a deeper understanding of the world from multiple perspectives.

Dig deeper into the details to drive better, faster results from your team

Do you feel like your team is continuously in firefighting mode? Are your customers always unhappy because you're not delivering on the promises your sales team has made? Is your app crashing all the time? Does it feel like weeks and months pass by but no meaningful progress gets made?

These are usually symptoms of a lack of proper product discipline and focus within your company. A wide range of reasons might cause this kind of problem. 

A common reason I've come across a lot lately is that your team might be conflating multiple different use-cases together.

For example, you might be in the "widget" business. If any customer asks for widgets, your sales team jumps on the opportunity, sells a big account, and then hands it off to the product and engineering team to customize your widgets to handle the customer's needs.

The problem is there are many kinds of widgets. Small widgets, medium widgets, and large widgets. Widgets for lawn mowers and widgets for sports cars. Widgets for ceiling fans and widgets for windmills.

If your company is responding to everyone who wants a widget, then you're never going to be able to specialize and scale. And. Specializing and scaling is the only way to capture a market and, when you're ready, introduce new categories of widgets to expand your way to world domination.

If you can't tell the differences between the use-cases (widgets) you're selling, then you need to dig deeper into the details. The details matter a lot.

The chances are high that you will find differences and distinctions in those details.

If not, dig deeper until you do. Then...

1. Pick one of the use-cases. Typically one that is easy and simple to start with and can that be expanded into logical adjacencies over time.

2. Help create the space for your product and engineering team to build it in small but meaningful iterations.

3. Insist that your sales and marketing team sells nothing else until there is an intentional decision to support new use-cases over time.

If you don't do this, you risk building a messy tech stack that does nothing very well. Worse, you might end up selling a broad vision to a lot of big customers who will demand that you deliver on your promises - pancaking your team and choking off possibilities to scale your business with a polished self-serve product.

How should your company deal with the Coronavirus?

Read this important artcile from Seqoia…

Coronavirus: The Black Swan of 2020

Dear Founders & CEOs, Coronavirus is the black swan of 2020. Some of you (and some of us) have already been personally impacted by the virus. We know the stress you are under and are here to help. With lives at risk, we hope that conditions improve as quickly as possible. In the interim, we should brace ourselves for turbulence and have a prepared mindset for the scenarios that may play out. Read the article.

---

My thoughts on the article above and the Coronavirus generally…

While the entire letter I linked above is important to read and act on, these are the most interesting parts of the letter to me...

"Could you turn a challenging situation into an opportunity to set yourself up for enduring success? Many of the most iconic companies were forged and shaped during difficult times. We partnered with Cisco shortly after Black Monday in 1987. Google and PayPal soldiered through the aftermath of the dot-com bust. More recently, Airbnb, Square, and Stripe were founded in the midst of the Global Financial Crisis. Constraints focus the mind and provide fertile ground for creativity."
...
"Having weathered every business downturn for nearly fifty years, we’ve learned an important lesson — nobody ever regrets making fast and decisive adjustments to changing circumstances. In downturns, revenue and cash levels always fall faster than expenses. In some ways, business mirrors biology. As Darwin surmised, those who survive “are not the strongest or the most intelligent, but the most adaptable to change.”"

I couldn't agree more with the statements I've highlighted above.

In particular, this one:

"Constraints focus the mind and provide fertile ground for creativity."

During a happy status-quo, it's easy to power through in rather ineffective or inefficient ways without really feeling the consequences because a rising tide floats all boats.

During times of distress, however, you need to focus, spend every dollar wisely and make every action count.

Now is the time to remove dead weight from your team, drop ineffective workstreams, and insist on a higher level of execution quality and speed from your org.

Those that navigate through this period will come out stronger than their competitors and in a position to win the market.

Presenting to leadership can be hard, but necessary and valuable

I used to resent creating presentations for “higher” authorities (VCs, Execs, Board etc). I felt like it was just a necessary and painful evil trying to get them to understand what I already knew. A distraction. It didn't help that my anxiety made such reporting extremely difficult for me personally.

I came to realize, however, that ensuring that you think through your tactics and strategy through the lens of a good leadership team forces you to get very clear (in your own mind, and amongst the operational team) about what you're doing, why you're doing it, what you're measuring and the cadence at which you're executing.

Done correctly, it can ensure that…

a) You don't get caught doing too many urgent things at the expense of important things

b) Your efforts ladder up to a larger strategic vision that drives the right business outcomes.

c) Your team has clarity about what's going on and why - helping them make the right day-to-day decisions as part of the larger context.

So embrace the accountability and discipline that comes from having a strong board or executive team. Lean into the process - not just as one of satisfying leadership, but rather as one that helps you to crystalize and clarify everyone's thinking for shared success.

How leaders can best support builders

In my early career, I used to have crystal clear visions in my head for the products I wanted to build.

I learned the hard way, however, that there's a big, big gap between vision and reality.

It takes countless tiny little decisions executed very, very well to turn potentialities into realities. Further, what might be clear in your head from 40,000 feet, can often actually be little more than a rough sketch when you get up close.

In actuality, the people who have to execute your vision (including you) need to figure out (or at least internalize) a lot of very important details to make it happen.

Therefore, be sure to place proper value on the effort (and the people) it takes to turn exciting high-level vision into fully-fleshed out operational plans, products, and programs.

Said another way: There's a big difference between dreaming up an Airline, and designing the blueprints and construction process for a plane, developing booking systems and establishing safety procedures, hiring and leading operations teams etc, etc.

Placing proper value includes...

1. Meeting with the execution team regularly

2. Helping them to get alignment and make decisions quickly

3. Giving them the appropriate amount of time to do a good job

4. Trusting the people you hire to make decisions and be accountable

5. Asking tough questions - particularly to help them find the hidden assumptions, complexities, and edge cases

6. Demand excellence and look for rapid iteration/learning

Strategists…

Strategists... “take complexity and simplify it, so it becomes actionable”.

I love this.

So many people add so much unnecessary complexity. Very often, with my advisory work, I’m simply helping them clear the noise and focus on the essential things that matter.

Read the article

Warning: Startups can trigger an existential crisis

It's been said that founding and building Startups is a fantastic personal growth exercise disguised as a business endeavor.

It's so true. Startups force you to think about who you are, what you really care about, what you are uniquely suited to contribute, where your limitations are and what your blind spots are.

Unlike a job where you have a defined job description and managers and peers who will tell you what to do and how you're doing, a Startup forces you to march to the beat of your own drum and gives you nowhere to hide from your faults and insecurities.

Become a founder, and you might just find yourself receiving years worth of therapy in the space of months.

Some Q&A

Today I had a PR person ask me some questions for a press release. Thought I’d share the questions and answer here for posterity.

Q: What capabilities does a student entrepreneur need?

A: Curiosity, grit, high tolerance for risk, hustle, an open mind, an ability to formulate and articulate clear plans to build alignment between stakeholders both internal and external

Q: What are your thoughts on Brisbane’s entrepreneurship ecosystem?

A: It's small and inexperienced, but passionate and engaged. Rich ground for great experimentation and, eventually, a growing number of big success stories.

Q: Is entrepreneurship important as businesses face disruption? If so, why?

A: It's essential. The disruption is coming from entrepreneurs and from tools, technologies, and attitudes that build on each other at ever-increasing speeds. As the rate of change accelerates in the world, large companies and slow, organic execution are too slow to catch up or keep up with the problems and opportunities in the world.

Q: Who is it you turn to for advice? And what advice do you offer, given your time at Uber?

A: I look for those more experienced than me - ideally, those who have tried and failed and learned their lessons well. Even better if they have then turned around and succeeded in the end.

My advice coming out of Silicon Valley and Uber is: Go faster, ship more, and get more users. Stop worrying about external validation from the media, government, and academia. The only validation that matters is user growth and then revenue growth.

Q: A report by the Foundation for Young Australians indicates a young person will have five career changes and an average of 17 jobs in their lifetime – do you have any thoughts regarding that?

A: Careers are an anachronistic construct. We are all free-agents. We live, we learn, we identify bigger and more complex problems we can help with, and we help. When we solve real problems people pay us for our contribution. Rinse and repeat.

Q: What’s the best job you’ve ever had?

A: My current job. Advising startups so they can avoid the key mistakes and fast forward to the best answers as fast as possible. Nothing beats seeing the eyes of an entrepreneur light up when you help them avoid a mistake or expand their thinking.

A good example of product polish

I just spent over an hour with a great startup (including the founder, lead engineer and UX designer) just to design and add one feature/checkbox.

This, is product polish.

Take your time, think it through, polish until you can see your own reflection. That’s the difference between building tech and building beautiful products.

Strategy is about collapsing potentialities into realities.

Strategy is about collapsing potentialities into realities.

Said more pragmatically, it requires you to make hard choices and close doors of potential tangential opportunity as you execute small tactical steps to capture specific value along a predetermined (but correctable) trajectory.

If you’re constantly floating along where the wind takes you ineffectually grabbing at what passes by you’ll never actually capture a segment, a market or any kind of sustained growth.

So when you’re looking at others with resentment or confusion about why they achieved something that you didn’t, it might be because they made hard, effective choices that you were unable or unwilling to make. In this case, to pick a hard but valuable path - and stick with it.

Apps are not businesses

Business requires a clear mission, target market, brand and brand voice, go-to-market strategy, business and pricing model, customer journey, user experience and more.

These things need to align and work as a system over a sustained period of time and iteration to produce a successful result.

This requires that your team and its leadership are collectively explicitly aware of these key decisions and work in alignment to execute them well. It might even require that you create a new business unit or business!

If you can’t get alignment, someone needs to be the final decision maker and the others need to disagree and commit.

Sometimes the decision is made by leadership. Sometimes the leadership trusts the operations team of domain experts they assembled. But it needs to get made and the others need to commit.

The decision should be fully informed (with all the facts and best thinking) and fully committed (even by those who disagree) - or a team struggle will persist, undermining morale and effective execution of anything.

If you just ship an App, or a new feature, without aligning the business properly, it will fail.

The clearest example I can think of in recent memory is the Taxi industry, In response to the threat of Uber, many of the Taxi companies released or started more heavily promoting an App. What they failed to do, however, is understand that Uber's entire business model was totally different and more efficient than theirs.

Peer-to-peer supply without pre-determined shifts (meaning a more elastic supply with less scarcity), lightweight enablement of drivers via mobile phones (vs. 100k fit-outs of the Taxis with cages, livery, proprietary meters and other in-car tech, etc), mutual accountability with ratings (vs. unaccountable drivers and riders doing unaccountable things) and yes, massive subsidies powered by a global high-growth, venture capital based business plan (vs. regional, revenue-based model).

These were the things they were really fighting - not just an app.

Product Management can sometimes feel like magic

Product management is a little bit like magic. It's like making wishes about what you want to see in the world (in the form of PRDs) and they come true a few weeks or months later.

Of course, those wishes take the amazing craftsmanship of designers and engineers who turn thoughts into reality.

The elements of a basic marketing site

A basic marketing web page should not be complicated or vague...

1. One sentence "Who are we"

   Explain the problem and the solution (Ideally includes an explainer video).
   E.g. "We help fishermen catch more fish with better tackle and fishing rods"
   

2. How it works (No more than 3-4)

   E.g.

   a) We make amazing tackle that glows in the dark

   b) Our custom fishing rods make the tackle move like a fish

   c) Bigger fish love to come eat it - and get hooked!
   

3. Benefits (No more than 3-4)

   E.g.

   a) Spend less time sitting and more time grabbing fish out of the water

   b) Eat bigger, healthier fish

   c) Look like a hero!
   

4. Who already loves us (Case studies/testimonials).

   E.g. John from Florida loves us - look at this picture of him holding up a huge fish!
   

5. How to get involved (including pricing, next steps).

   E.g. Small: $10, Medium: $15, Large $20. Buy now!
   

Remember to keep everything visual. Big headers for each feature/benefit with 1 or 2 sentences to explain each.

How do you judge your actions?

I try to judge my actions by the question "Is it effective?".

Or more specifically: Do my priorities, communication style, actions, reactions, personal narrative, personal brand, location, media consumption, things I focus on etc, get me to an outcome that is moving my life (and the life of the people I love) up and to the right with as little thrash and delay as possible?

How to spot a toxic person

When you encounter people who are regularly badmouthing others and constantly surrounded by drama that “isn’t their fault” - you can usually be rest assured that they are the source of the problems in their life.

It’s pretty easy to tell how they operate, though, because as part of their bad mouthing, they are typically reflecting their worst traits onto others. Just listen. Whatever they’re blaming others for is exactly what they themselves have done.

Historically the small tech community has hesitated to call these kind of people out because we don’t want blow back. But many of us know who they are. I think it would help a lot of founders if we collectively made a stand against these people more swiftly.

Sometimes it’s extra hard because these people, at times, appear to add a lot of value. But really it’s like an abusive relationship. As a friend of mine once said, the juice isn’t worth the squeeze.

Etiquette for Scheduling and Attending Meetings using a Calendar

1. Check the availability of the other guests before sending the invite (Unless sending it as a tentative hold)
   

2. Be sure to invite everyone directly by adding them to the calendar event so they can see changes that might occur (i.e. don't forward invite emails)
   

3. Unless there's a good reason, make the event editable by guests so they can add details or move it in a pinch
   

4. Try to include any related materials/instructions in the notes field so that everyone has the resources they need to participate
   

5. Make sure you accurately update your RSVP status to any events you're attending/invited to
   

6. If you indicated that you're going to make it, show up on time
   

7. If you can't make it, try to give maximum notice via email and update your RSVP status
   

8. If you're running the meeting: If you can, try to end the meeting on time, because attendees likely have other meetings scheduled straight after that one

Etiquette for getting a warm intro

When there's someone you know (first-degree connection) that knows someone you WANT to know (new contact)...

1. Talk to/pitch the first-degree connection - get them interested (or better, excited).

2. If they express enthusiasm, let them know you'd like to an intro to the person you're trying to reach and ask them if they'd be open to receiving a forwardable email request for an intro.

3. Email them a short thank you for the meeting with some key bullets recapping your conversation, asking for the intro to the person you’re trying to reach.

4. They should reply to you, copying in the person you’re trying to reach with a short intro for each of you.

5. Reply all, move the first-degree connection to BCC and start your email with “Thanks [first degree’s first name], moving you to bcc to save your inbox. Great to meet you [new contact's name]”. Proceed with your email asking for whatever consideration you need (keep it short).
   
   In this way a) you have some credibly with the new contact bestowed by your contact b) your contact knows you’ve picked up the ball but is not inundated with a continuing conversation they don’t want to see c) your contact will get some social capital if the intro generates value.

6. The new connection will hopefully reply/continue the discussion without flooding your mutual connections inbox with the rest of the chain