Archive for the ‘meaningful failure’ Category

« Older Entries

You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take

December 15, 2009

Something I have just loved about being in the venture capital business is the people I’ve met, running businesses I did not fund.  And of those there are a few I found so relevant to my own interests, and with founders who had such passion and integrity, that I continued to meet with them well after saying “no.”  Trying to be a productive sounding board, making introductions, passing along knowledge or experience where it seemed helpful.

It’s always been such a pleasure to get the updates from these CEOs, they arrive when you least expect them and it’s exciting to see how things are developing, where the connection is no longer the possibility of financing, but a genuine interest in the business and a relationship with the CEO/team.

Dustin Hubbard of Paperspine is one of these.  His company offered a subscription service for books.  Physical books.  He  had the idea for his company after finishing a book, and having no room for it in his already jammed bedside table.  So, he planned and planned, left his job at Microsoft, started and ran Paperspine out of his garage.

Paperspine worked really well, and solved problems that people cared about.  It probably saved my family hundreds of dollars, just with my 16 year-old daughter, a voracious reader, and who routinely dropped tens of dollars at bookstores, only to read the books once.  She loved Paperspine.  She was on a five book out at once subscription at one point, and it enabled more massive reading without bankrupting her.

And while Dustin had gotten Paperspine off the ground with funding from friends and family, he couldn’t raise his next round of financing – in a market where raising money is almost impossible anyway.  But he applied himself to solving this problem with every ethical means imaginable.  Cut costs to get to break even, went back to work at Microsoft, tried to expand into ebook rentals.

Dustin and I spoke every 45-60 days, where he would walk me through his latest set of challenges, his ideas to address them, and we’d then spend the next hour testing his assumptions, plans, and brainstorm solutions.  But he always arrived prepared and ready to dive into a meaningful discussion, and sometimes I could help, other times I think he just valued the opportunity to have someone outside the company to run his thinking by.

But for many reasons, some within in his control, many outside it, he was unable to get his next round of financing.  And he seemed to be reaching the limit of how much this business was encroaching on his life, quality of life, and family.

So, last night I was truly saddened but not necessarily surprised to receive an email from Dustin, saying that he was closing the doors.  I can only imagine how hard this was for him, how heartbreaking.

And he closed off his dreams for Paperspine with the kind of grace and thoughtfulness that we should all take note of, and admire.  You should read his final blog entry, a real fitting testimonial to a worthy business, and an incredibly decent founder.  And you can see pictures of his “warehouse” in his garage, and learn more about how he took his idea and brought it to life.

His wife framed this so well, reminding him that “you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.”

That phrase captures the essence of what it means to take an idea that crossed your mind, and have the courage to start a company to bring that idea to life.  And you bring it to life focused on why it will and should succeed, while also keeping, in a separate place, the knowledge that there are many reasons why it could fail.

Dustin, you should be very proud of what you accomplished and learned these past two years, but you should also be very proud of how you ran your company, and how you finished.  Well done, not painless, but well done, indeed.

Tags:,
Posted in Business planning, chicken killer, fear of not succeeding, meaningful failure, Success, Venture capital | 2 Comments »

Dealing with equality, invisibility

November 10, 2009

In the past two weeks I’ve had a series of conversations with friends and colleagues about women in the technology workforce, provoked by of all things, water pollution.  The commonality being we’ve moved past the point where the problem is what is visible, and where we’re now facing the challenge of what you can’t see.

Here’s the water pollution angle:  A week or so ago I heard an interview with Charles Duhigg of the NY Times about how the cleanliness of the nation’s water supply is perhaps at greater risk than it’s ever been.  More so than back in the ‘70s, where the pollution was severe: rivers that caught fire, bore multi-colored hues of industrial waste, had detritus floating in them.

Today’s water pollution is microscopic, requiring sophisticated filtering that’s too expensive for water utilities to install.  Charles suggested the most practicable solution is for people to filter their own water, and take personal responsibility to ensure it’s clean and safe. 

So here’s where women in the technology workforce comes in.  Much visible change has happened.  Women are in the workforce, and are increasingly taking leadership positions.  Just not enough.  And what is the right number?  I have no idea, I’d like to think it’s the number that exists when everyone selected for a job is done so on the basis of merit.  The whole point is that it’s the product of an ongoing balancing act. 

I have faith that women’s pay will increase as more and more compensation and performance review processes are made transparent.  But unless they are listened to as equals, then all the process in the world still won’t address this fundamental form of discrimination, affecting the information that feeds performance reviews.  Will women ever get to parity unless their ideas are considered on an equal basis as men’s?

In the technology sector, ideas are what fuels business, so unless women’s ideas are given the same consideration as men’s, they will suffer when it comes time for reviews, and that will affect their compensation.  It won’t address why the women make $0.77 compared to every $1 their male counterparts make, but it won’t hurt.

So, who’s responsible to fix this?   We all are, and we fix it in the moment, calling it out and challenging it in the moment, when it happens. 

I was involved as a member of the board of a public-private entity where we were trying to determine the site of a new facility.  We’d spent weeks and weeks trying to figure out how to secure a really great site, and were running into all sorts of problems.  It was getting frustrating, and I made a suggestion about putting it in a less attractive, but more pragmatic location, which we quickly agreed to do. 

A female staff member pulled me aside after the meeting to thank me, saying she’d been making the same suggestion for weeks, but her superiors hadn’t listened to her.  I can tell you my suggestion was not all that insightful or magnificently made, but I was the male and it was listened to.

Rather than call this out, I spoke to her separately.  I was concerned about creating conflict between her and her superior.  So I let her know I realized how frustrated she must have been to not be listened to, and that at least I saw this.  How will the other male members of this board know how to listen differently if they aren’t shown where they haven’t done so?  I didn’t correct this in the moment, and in doing so I failed the woman who thanked me. 

And this is where the water analogy comes back.  The way to deal with this is to take personal responsibility, and to make what is invisible, visible. 

It is as much women’s responsibility to be louder and less convenient as it is men’s responsibilities to listen more actively.  In either case, everyone has an obligation to call out inequality when they see it.  And it won’t be convenient. 

That’s where I screwed up, and won’t do that again.

A sizable share of the readers of my blog are women.  What’s your experience?

Tags:, , ,
Posted in Failure, Intellectual curiosity, meaningful failure, Self-knowledge, Values | 6 Comments »

Startup advice brilliance

October 21, 2009

A friend pointed me to a superb summary of advice for startups, specifically calling out the ways that advice can be flawed, along with some perceptive insights into how to identify advice that’s actionable and useful.  The post is by Eric Reis, and is appropriately titled The 10 Ways Startup Advice is Flawed

Eric’s pov is appropriately snarky, and at a macro level he calls out various ways that being lucky and being smart are frequently confused with each other.  Snarkiness aside, the really valuable point he makes is how important it is to be a critical thinker, in general.  The value of making your own assessment of the information you’re consuming, and not just accepting it.

I especially liked his point #6: Maybe the thing they did used to work, but it doesn’t anymore

I think about that a lot in my own context.  I was at RealNetworks back when it truly was pioneering this new phenomena of sending audio and video over the internet, and we owned that market.  In public we said we had 85%+ share of the market, but in reality it was closer to 95% for a good long time.

We called the shots, named the prices, dictated terms.  We muscled into and out of markets we cared about, aligned ourselves with titans of the technology landscape.

And then Microsoft showed up and we fought them tooth and nail.  It was a hard and ugly fight, which they eventually won (once they started paying attention).

Well, they won, sort of.  It was epic, and in a start-up kind of way, it was epic fun.  I remember picking a big fight with the Windows Media team on an internet media list-serve, where I’d just published some user research showing how people preferred our new video to Windows Media’s.

And Microsoft’s head of a/v technology posted to the list, accusing us of fluffing up the research, and he included a three page outline of the ways you could falsify/skew consumer surveys.  And it was so much fun to respond to the list , asking “how was it that Microsoft knew of so many ways to distort research?”

But I digress.

We each became so obsessed with each other we quit paying attention to what Macromedia was doing with Flash and what Apple was doing with the tight coupling of iTunes and the iPod.  So, while we were both wrestling in the mud pit, Apple and Macromedia left the building and started more interesting and lucrative businesses elsewhere.  And until that point the thing we did at RealNetworks really did used to work.

Eric’s “ten ways” are simple and insightful.  The hard part is putting them into action, in the moment.  My experience at RealNetworks is valuable to the startups I work with and talk to if and only if both of us are cognizant of its context.  And it takes discipline and a good dose of humility to walk the talk Eric is alluding to.

I know there’s a ton of stuff I did that was a product of luck and timing, and a lot that was a result of deliberate hard work and applied intelligence.  The hard part is being honest enough with myself to examine where those boundary lines are, to strip out the specific circumstantial knowledge from the generalized, truly durable knowledge.

So, let’s all get a good laugh out of Eric’s list, but also remember how hard it is to actually do what he’s suggesting.

Tags:, , ,
Posted in Business planning, Failure, fear of not succeeding, Intellectual curiosity, meaningful failure, Self-knowledge, Success | 2 Comments »

Performance and an opportunity to explore it

October 2, 2009

The underpinning principle of this blog is “meaningful failure”, and what you can learn when you examine this critical juncture of where you fail and embrace what you can learn through that failure.

I’ve been seeking out others who share this interest, and last year I discovered Ross Bentley who runs a consulting business, Bentley Performance Systems, that focuses on improving performance for executives and interestingly, professional race car drivers.  That latter constituency intrigued me.  Failure on a race track has specific tangible implications that failure in business does not:  bent metal, physical harm, or worse.

Ross spends his time working with his clients on very personal elements of improving performance, along with more straightforward tools and techniques of planning and analysis.  His focus on who you are as a person I find interesting, the examination about what emotionally or psychologically may be holding someone back from achieving their potential is an area like failure where people are less comfortable speaking plainly and openly.

In the case of the racers and the executives the conversation goes in the same direction:  how can you best prepare yourself to be constantly improving, learning from success and failure?  He engages them in relevant and specific conversations focused on getting them to do to what they do differently and better.

And after this discussion, examination, and hard work the racers go to the track and the CEOs go to their offices.  In both cases they’re in environments where the information is flowing by, fast, and they need to make decisions and situation assessments rapidly.  And each ends up with a quantifiable data set telling them how well they performed: lap times & finish order, income statements & balance sheets.

Ross and I got together yesterday so he could share a research project he’s starting called Performance in the Workplace. He wants to to better understand how executives assess their own performance, and what affects their performance over time.

The research is nice and simple:  he’s asking them to fill out a short survey, once a week, and tell him how well they feel they’ve performed, and why.  You can participate in the project by signing up here.

What I like about his approach is that he’s not defining “performance” for the participants.  He’s letting them define it for themselves.  When he first told me about this my reaction was “that’s pretty subjective, why not quantify performance with metrics”?”.  But then I realized, that really misses the point.  When you’re trying to help people do better every day, metrics are the product of your performance, not the measure of it.

We run businesses based on a set of milestones, KPIs (key performance indicators) – “dashboards” – and these are important measures of the recent past.  And they’re critical – I’ve written about why a well documented operating plan and the corresponding assumptions are essential to managing your business.

But executives spend their days making decisions, asking questions, analyzing and assessing – and of course this results in metric-based results.  But not in the moment.  How do you assess the effectiveness of your performance while you’re making those decisions, asking those questions, digging into those numbers?

I think Ross is onto an interesting topic here.  What causes you to feel you’re performing well one day, and not so well the next?  Will the act of self-assessing performance help you, in and of itself, to become more effective and cause you to be closer to the top of your game?

I’m going to participate, because in my business, at best I get monthly or quarterly metrics from my companies in terms of valuations I can apply to rates of return – on paper – and it takes years to get to the point where you can convert the paper value to cash or stock you can sell for cash.  Daily performance is not at all quantifiable with metrics, but matters oh so much.

I’m sure I can learn something from this, and am eager to see how what he finds.

Tags:, , ,
Posted in Business planning, Failure, Intellectual curiosity, meaningful failure, Self-knowledge, Values | Leave a Comment »

Offsite complete, re-entry, hiatus

September 3, 2009

Well, my adventure came to a rather fitting and comfortable close on Monday August 24th, at about 10:45 in the morning, when I arrived at the Onion Valley trailhead, and met my longtime friend, Miles, who graciously spirited me away to one of his relatives’ condos at Mammoth Mountain, so I could take a well deserved, and very much needed hot shower.  We then spent the next eight or so hours catching up as we made our way back to San Francisco, where I caught a flight back home on Tuesday morning.

The trip was just spectacular.  No disappointments really, of any kind.  An enormous number of small and large pleasant surprises along the way, and a steady stream of incredibly kind and generous people I met along the trail.  I ended up doing about what I had set out to do, mileage-wise (170+ miles, 60,000+ feet of climbing and descending), but had to adjust both the beginning of the trip (started a few days later than I had planned) and the end (decided not to do the 28 miles in two days to Shepherd’s Pass, and left the trail at Kearsarge Pass instead).

I began the trip with two close friends from high school (Ernie and Duane), and was able to end the trip meeting three other close friends from high school and college (Brian, Steve, and Mark)…all of whom I’ve been backpacking with in much of this same country for many years.  And in between I had plenty of time on my own, some days not seeing a single person on the trail, and camping at some lakes where I was the only person there – and perhaps for many miles around.  But I was never lonely, or lacking for something wonderful to look at, think about, or explore.

Two people I met really made warm and lasting impressions.  The first was Patt, the 81 year-old woman who ran the Muir Trail Ranch backpacker resupply station, and whose heart was both huge and warm.  She was charmed with what my thirteen year-old, Ben, wrote on the outside of my resupply package (actually a 5 gallon plastic bucket):  “By opening this bucket, you hereby agree to buy your thirteen year-old son a kitten”.  Ben loves cats, and she and I had a nice long laugh about his wit and seemingly foolproof plan.  Ben, sorry, that contract was not binding in California.

The second was a 20 year-old Cal Poly junior, Ryan, who I crossed paths with for two days, as he was on his way to attempting the entire John Muir Trail (all 221 miles), in nine days.  Ryan has maturity and ambition beyond his years, and carried a good dose of humility as well.  He had failed to do this same adventure in June, went home, figured out what had gone wrong, and came back to do it again.  Meaningful failure in action.  He posted a comment here on my blog when he returned, letting me know he did in fact finish in nine days.

I collected a set of photos and made an online slide show of my trip (using some slick web technology from our company, Smilebox), and it should be on this side of not too long and hopefully not boring:

Click to play this Smilebox slideshow: JMT slide show
Create your own slideshow - Powered by Smilebox
Make a Smilebox slideshow

Thanks to so many of you for your encouragement and support.  I am deeply grateful I had this opportunity, and appreciated as well as valued every moment I was in the Sierras.

And as some of you may have noticed, I have changed the masthead photo, to one I took of Upper Kearsarge Lake on August 24, in the early morning.  A fitting photo, and it will be nice to have this frame my blog for the coming year.

It’s been a challenging “re-entry” process getting back up to speed on life at home and work, and I wanted this post to also let you know that I will be taking a hiatus from posting here, to focus attention on these areas.  I hope to resume again later in the fall.

Tags:,
Posted in fear of not succeeding, Intellectual curiosity, meaningful failure, Networking, Values | 7 Comments »

My John Muir Trail adventure

August 8, 2009

Many of you know I’m about to make my trek down most of the John Muir Trail, and that I will be “off the grid” from today (August 8th) and on the trail until I emerge at the Symmes Creek Trailhead (near Independence, CA) on Monday August 25th.

This is a trip I’ve been planning for the better part of a year, and has been a life-long goal of mine.

Thanks to the generosity of some dear friends from high school who I bacpack with every summer, I will be carrying with me a “FindMeSpot” GPS unit, which will transmit my location to a google map embedded in a web page, so you can track my progress along the way.

The device is setup to broadcast my location every ten minutes, so you really can follow me as I go – think of it as a back-to-nature variant of twitter.

There will also be a little footprint corresponding to where I pressed my “update” button each day, which you can click on to get the time stamp and GPS coordinates.

You can check my progress and see where I am along the way.

That said, for those of you who know me well, I might end up forgetting to make a daily update, so if you don’t see an update on any one day, don’t assume something dire has happened. This GPS device also has a button I can press to summon the rangers, so it will also serve as an emergency beacon if I need it to, but we all know I won’t.

I may be able to update my blog when I resupply on the 14th or 15th, but am not counting on it.

Look for an update for sure sometime after I complete my trip, on the 26th or 27th.

Thanks everyone for your support and enthusiasm, I have much to reflect on, especially recently, relating to the core theme of this blog – meaningful failure.

I will surely have a wonderful experience, and am deeply grateful for the opportunity to make this journey.

Posted from my iPhone, at 7,800 feet near the Red’s Meadow trailhead. Updated from ‘small un-named lake’ next to the John Muir Trail, at 9,260 feet, where for good or bad, I have 3G reception.

Tags:,
Posted in fear of not succeeding, Intellectual curiosity, meaningful failure, Self-knowledge, Values | 1 Comment »

Preparation for a long offsite

July 23, 2009

I’ll be hiking the John Muir Trail in the Sierra Nevada mountains in California next month, which is something I’ve wanted to do my entire adult life.  The Sierras and backpacking really took root with me in high school, where a core group my friends went every summer, and continued through college and a few years beyond before losing the thread to careers and starting families.

Three years ago we restarted these annual trips, and about then I realized how much I enjoy being up in the mountains, away from all forms of electronic communication, as a way to get some perspective and some balance.

So this year I leave on August 4, and my friends and I will start down the John Muir Trail, five days later they’ll leave the trail at Red’s Meadow, and I’ll resupply there and continue on, on my own.  I’ll finish near Mt. Whitney, two weeks and 170 miles later.

And I’ve been doing a lot of reading to prepare for the trip.  Mostly trail guides, even a book on the geology of the Sierras (ensuring I will be the most boring person at the next cocktail party I go to).  But one that’s proven particularly helpful is a book called High Sierra by Phil Arnot, and it’s been great at providing detail on side trips I can make along the way.

300+ pages of detailed route descriptions, elevation changes, permit locations…in short a bunch of data and information about as “touchy feely” as the phone book.  It even has a section on “Hiking Solo” with a set of very pragmatic preparation guidelines regarding safety.   But then it went in a direction I didn’t expect, with the following passage:

“So, in a way the wilderness experience may be catalytic in bringing us to face, really face, the most important questions we can ever ask ourselves:  Am I really living the life I want to live?  Am I fulfilled in my work?  Are my relationships based on sharing and intimacy or are they primarily obligatory?  What do I really want to do with my life?”

Well, for those of us who love backpacking and being in the mountains, that set of questions told me the author truly knows his subject.  For me, these are the questions my mind gets drawn to when my “job” for the day is to traverse six or eight miles (or more) of trail at 10,000 feet, and what separates you from the beginning and end of the hike is a lot of time to walk and think.

Take the “fulfilled in my work” question.  That one’s easy.  I love my job as a venture capitalist.  I love that it requires that you think hard about strategy and equally hard about operations and execution.  You’re on a constant learning curve looking at new businesses and needing to quickly get to their essence to make a funding decision.  And when you find a business you want to fund, you get to go deep with it, for years, to help it (hopefully) succeed and grow.

But that’s the “work” part of this, and what makes my job truly fulfilling is who I work with.  Through equal parts self-selection and deliberate effort, my partners and I have created the kind of transparent, friction-free, trust-based working relationship that up until this point I had only read about.

The fact that we had all worked together before getting into this business helped, but over the past five years we’ve had to make our way through uncomfortable, difficult conversations that required egos to be set aside, and personalities to be parsed from the logic and data.  Everybody talks about this, it’s the first time I’ve experienced it first-hand.

That’s great, but actually making money in this business is getting incredibly hard.  The whole industry is in a state of transition and transformation.  Fred Wilson has done a good job explaining this, but in short, it’s taking longer to get companies sold, the IPO market is dead, and the median valuations at sale have been declining for years.  In order to generate the returns institutional investors need, you’ve got to as a firm perform well above median.

It’s daunting.  We’re doing well as VCs, but looking at the whole industry it gives you pause.  This business will be getting smaller before it gets larger, and as I’ve written in an earlier post, the old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place in industries who are in a state of transition.  And this is an industry in transition.

But that’s where the exciting part of this job is.  Transitions create no shortage of opportunity, and challenge.  I’m grateful I have the chance to put some more thought into this, during my long offsite.

Between now and when I “go off the grid” on the 4th, I’ll be posting on some related topics.

Tags:, ,
Posted in fear of not succeeding, meaningful failure, Self-knowledge, Strategy, Success, Values, Venture capital | 4 Comments »

A Blockbuster closing

July 9, 2009

The Blockbuster closed in our town last week, in the “out of business” sense.  I heard a lot of folks attribute this to the popularity of Netflix.

About a year ago our post office (looks like the one in Mayberry RFD) put a sign above their “Out of town” mail slot, saying “Please put Netflix envelopes in the “Packages” drop box.”  Apparently Netflix has gotten so popular that the post office has had to make an adaptation just to handle the volume, and the reflection of the shift in consumer behavior couldn’t have been written more plainly.

But the more I think about it, Netflix didn’t single-handedly kill our Blockbuster.

About six months ago our (only) supermarket got one of those “Redbox” DVD rental kiosks, and slowly it’s taken over the activity at the front of the store.

People are lined up at it all the time, and when I thought it was just a stand-alone machine, I didn’t consider it all that novel until I realized that you can reserve movies, at an individual machine, over the internet. That’s when I thought “this is really cool.”  No wonder folks are jammed there, they’re going to the store anyway, and they can get their movie too, and reserve what they want.  Wow.

So, I did a quick Google search on “Redbox Netflix” and this was the third citation, the headline says it all: Blockbuster CEO: Redbox, Netflix “Not On Radar Screen” as Competition.  The article was from December.  And this is a publicly traded company.  How in the world does someone say this?  What detachment from the customer (and reality) does that broadcast?  It certainly provides a more grounded understanding of why our local Blockbuster went down the drain.

But while Netflix may have pushed Blockbuster to the brink, Redbox may have sent them over the edge.  Not because Redbox was targeting Blockbuster: they were collateral damage.  It’s Netflix who’s in the cross-hairs of Redbox.  And the best part?  Netflix paved the way for Redbox to hollow them out.

How?  Netflix fundamentally changed consumer behavior.  Until they arrived you were at the mercy of your local video store: you had to actually make a separate trip there, choose from their inventory,  and had to remember what you came in there for.

Netflix created a whole new behavioral model of how you rent and experience movies and tv shows.  Infinite inventory to choose from, your own queue on a website, and they mail your movie to you.  How simple, how convenient.  And as I wrote earlier, a change in behavior like this takes time – like a decade.

Convenience is nice, but where Netflix really grabbed hold of people was by also embracing people’s existing behavior: they don’t return movies on time.  Eliminating late fees was the rallying cry that created incredible word of mouth.  And started that hollowing effect for Blockbuster.

So how does this apply to Redbox?  Well, they just applied Netflix’s playbook:  focus on consumer behavior and where the economic leverage is.  They recognized most people rent the current releases, and thanks to Netflix, they also expect to be able to use the web to choose as well as know they’ll get what they want.  Critically, they also realized that having the movie mailed to you meant for many consumers just not having to make a separate trip to get  it.

So Redbox embraced this existing behavior in a clever way.  They just  rent the top movies from a vending machine located in a supermarket.  You can reserve your movie over the web.  So you get what you want, with no special trip.

And the fact it’s a kiosk also means expectations are automatically set that the selection is limited.  This reflects a nuanced understanding of consumer psyches, while dramatically reducing the complexity of inventory management.

And while convenience is nice, where Redbox really gets its leverage is with the economics, just like Netflix did with Blockbuster.  $1 per movie.  Sure there are late fees, but at this price it makes Netflix seem expensive and really tough for digitally delivered movies to pencil out from a margin perspective.  Ouch.

So, against this backdrop, it’s hard to fathom the statement from the Blockbuster CEO.  He’s right, Netflix and Redbox really weren’t on his radar screen.  He wasn’t even in the same business, wasn’t even in the fight.

And if I were Netflix, I’d be working my bankers, hard, to figure out how to acquire Redbox.

Tags:, , ,
Posted in geopolitics, meaningful failure, Strategy | 1 Comment »

The vulnerability of a big idea

June 15, 2009

As Twitter approaches mainstream relevance, it’s also entering a period of strategic and operational vulnerability that startup companies with big ideas run into. 

By going mainstream it’s exposing the structural opportunity its founders saw years ago, but back then, only the founders and the investors were in on the secret.  There had to be a slide in the Series A deck that said  “Here’s the opportunity” and it wasn’t about building a small, derivative business.  It was about building a disruptive, billion dollar kind of company.

In Twitter’s case it’s the opportunity to redefine how people communicate, and shaping how the economics flow in and around this new communication.  It involves getting to scale, developing a third party “ecosystem” of other companies integrating with and depending on Twitter for their own success, and then monetizing all this in a compelling, huge way.  This is really hard, and the folks at Twitter are still struggling a bit with the exact business model that will do all this.

Eighteen months ago, only people in the echo chamber were exposed to the nature of the opportunity.  But today, with Twitter’s explosive growth and visibility, everyone can begin to comprehend the potential.  When Ashton Kutcher gets petulant about his million followers, when Dell trumpets that they’ve sold $3 million of products to their Twitter followers, the incumbent titans in the internet and advertising sectors, well they notice too, and they notice “threat” ahead of “opportunity.”

You saw this first with the Facebook redesign that provided a real-time status update feed a la Twitter.  A classic “fast follower” approach to someone else’s innovation. Facebook already owns a lot of people’s mindshare and time online, so the fact that they’re tracking Twitter tells you how significant the threat appears to them.  By the way, Facebook is also struggling with business model and opportunity vulnerability too, they just are further along the scale path.

How does Twitter keep eyeballs and session times growing if Facebook is just going to “fast follow” them, treating them like outsourced R&D?  This will be really hard, but let’s assume Twitter wins this round of the battle, gets to scale with a loyal and large audience for their new medium of tweets.  Do they jump out of the frying pan and into the fire?

What’s differentiated about tweets is that they flow in real-time, and finding out what’s interesting and relevant instantly has got to be worth something, and it’s so different from the problem Google solves.  Google crawls the web at a frequency measured at best in minutes, more frequently hours or days, so you could envision Twitter creating a new category Google can’t participate in. 

But what if “instant” isn’t in the end all that important.  The NY Times dug into this a bit, looking into  why Google isn’t Twitter.  And they observed that real-time search is hard and neither Twitter nor Google are currently architected to do this efficiently, or well. 

What became clear is that if you need anything other than instant, real-time search, Google can give you “close enough” search, and get closer and closer over time due to their scale.  We can all figure out who will reap the revenue rewards if all Twitter’s creates is another type of page Google can place ads on.

This kind of battle doesn’t result from incremental thinking, from safe bets.  Twitter’s vulnerabilities are proof of the significance of the idea, and what Twitter’s investors funded.  But it doesn’t mean it will have a happy ending. 

And there’s food for thought here for anyone running a startup.  Expect that you will become vulnerable to the incumbents just when you’re hitting your stride, just when people acknowledge your value and relevance.  The presence of that vulnerability is your ticket to the next round of the fight, validation that you’re headed in a worthy direction.

I dearly hope Twitter pulls this off.  I love to see the status quo up-ended, I love the mental image of apples spilling all through the marketplace as someone with a bold and compelling idea runs through, knocking the carts over along the way.

Tags:, , ,
Posted in Business planning, fundraising, meaningful failure, Strategy, Venture capital | Leave a Comment »

Truth is relative and changes with perspective

June 4, 2009

My post about ambiguity and alignment provoked some really interesting comments, which I wanted to circle back to.  One comment in particular got my attention

It was an observation that truth is relative and it changes with perspective.  At a certain level that makes sense to me.  Truth can seem to be defined by the winners of the battles, by the dominant doctrine, by the loudest voice. 

The person commenting also observed that because of the relative nature of truth “good people can make poor choices at the crossroads.”

And this brought me to realizing that not only is truth relative, it quickly gets intertwined with morality.

In startup companies I think this is super important.  We’re battling the dominant doctrine of the market, striving to fight or become the loudest voice, working so hard to win.  And we’re doing so under enormous, constant pressure.  Keeping hold of what you believe is true and right can be difficult when it seems like survival is the order of the day, every day.

So you might find yourself in an environment where the pressure is explicit and relentless to place your company’s interests ahead of your customer’s, or your investors.  What is true then?  Well, the Entellium duo felt it was true that if they missed their revenue forecast they’d be fired, and made some really poor choices at that crossroad.  The truth was certainly relative for them.

But the more I talked to my friends about this “truth is relative” conundrum, the more I seemed to be saying there is no real truth.  I was explaining it away.  And it shocked me.  My initial reaction was that the last place you want to go is to say there is no absolute truth.  But actually the more I think about it that’s where I do end up.  The truth in your daily life is completely relative, it’s not absolute.  Except that what it’s relative to is what’s true to you.

When I was at LSI Logic in the early days as a product manager I remember going on a sales call at the end of the quarter to help a salesperson close a huge deal.  We found ourselves seated across from the purchasing manager, who was the wife of the founder,  reviewing the terms of our proposal only to hear her ask for a gift.  She said “I’d like a Gucci purse”.  I heard it as a non-sequitur.  Maybe her birthday was around the corner.  I tried to keep the conversation moving, but it quickly dawned on me that the gift was separating us from this order.I looked over at the salesperson, and we exchanged nervous, and puzzled looks.   

The salesperson and I ended the conversation as quickly as we could, got up and left, I called my boss (using my spiffy “car phone”) and relayed what had happened.  I was in a turbulent state of mind.  We needed this order, and I just made the call to walk away from it.  He was disappointed, really disappoint we lost the deal but supported the decision to walk.  I was relieved to be in a company where we shared this same sense of right and wrong.

I’ve told this story a lot, to me it’s a pure ethics example – it’s the one I put on my business school applications (they all had a question like “Describe an ethical dilemma you’ve encountered and how you handled it”). 

Except I’ve repeated it to people I have first hand experience with and know to be people of solid integrity and had them say “Hmmm…not sure if I wouldn’t have just gotten the purse, and the order.”  And it made me realize I made my choice based on my personal “truths” and these people would have made different choices for their own.  And each of us would have felt like the choice was aligned with our morals.

Another friend told me this topic sent her to look up the meaning of “moral relativism” – that moral/ethical propositions are measured relative to their circumstances.  More important, that only personal subjective morality expresses true authenticity.  Your personal sense of truth = the authentic you.  The other person looking back at you in the mirror.

That means you have to know that person in the mirror really well to remove the ambiguity in what happens at the crossroads.  You need to have an intimate and unabashed knowledge of what you yourself believe to be true about yourself.  If you lack that, well the easier it will be for you to be seduced by or succumb to the loud voices, the accepted doctrines, the winners of the battles.

Tags:, ,
Posted in Failure, Intellectual curiosity, meaningful failure, Self-knowledge, Values | 2 Comments »

« Older Entries
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.