My guest post on TechFlash

May 6, 2009

John Cook was kind enough to let me guest post on TechFlash today, on a theme which turned out to be quite timely given Amazon’s introduction of the new Kindle DX.  The post is about how mobile consumer devices like the Kindle and the iPhone have finally wrested the grip of the mobile phone networks from the device itself.

To me it’s a rare instance where you can witness an industry transformation occur before your eyes.  Or perhaps watch a train wreck occur in slow motion.  The carriers will never be the same, but holy cow, we’re all in for some great new mobile products and experiences as a result.

You can find my post here:  The Kindle, the iPhone and the wireless carrier as commodity

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Posted in geopolitics, meaningful failure, Strategy | 2 Comments »

A-players hire A-players, B-players hire C-players

April 28, 2009

This is one of those sayings in the startup world that is so accepted that it’s crossed the border of familiarity and become a full-time resident of the land of trite.  

Guess who coined it?  Steve Jobs.  That’s right, Steve Jobs, when he was getting the Macintosh off the ground.  It’s a phrase we used at RealNetworks a lot, and one that my partners and I use as a result. 

But that it’s trite doesn’t mean it isn’t relevant or true.  It is.  Absolutely. 

And it’s a subtle but important concept to really understand.  What do A-players do for you?  Everything.  Most important, it’s the tone they set in the organization and their influence on the behavior and performance of others. The hiring is critical too, but that’s a byproduct of everything else.

  • A-players are at the top of their game.  This means they know the difference between good and great.  In the work they do, and in the standards they set for those around them and those in their organizations.
  • A-players aren’t threatened by someone better than they are.   Rather, they’re relieved.  That stuff they were struggling with?  They’re happy to get that into the hands of someone who can run with it, faster and more nimbly.  How liberating.
  • A-players know what they don’t know.  A corollary to the point above is that A-players know when they don’t know something, and ask questions.  They have the security to not need to know the answer to every question, and know how valuable intellectual curiosity is.
  • A-players can’t tolerate C-players.  So they make sure the C-players are replaced.  And guess what? The rest of the organization is relieved and inspired.  They know who the C-players are, and have felt the drag on performance.  It may sound harsh, but it’s true.

To me the most essential capability A-players bring to an organization is the tone they set for it.  Their definition of “good” is so much greater than a B or a C player’s, it’s as if they’re speaking a different language.  In fact they are, and it’s critical the organization you’re in all speak the same language. 

This is why starting up companies is so liberating for A-players.  I remember when I was at LSI Logic in the early days, fresh out of college with my head spinning in this startup.  The CEO, Wilf Corrigan, made a comment to me once about why he loved being CEO of LSI Logic so much more than being CEO of Fairchild Semiconductor (which he had been before founding LSI).  He said “because I created a company with only people I wanted to have there, not ones I inherited.”  At the time the answer sounded sensible, but now I realize what he meant was he could hire A-players from the start. 

But don’t get me wrong.  A-players are not a homogenous bunch.  There’s a huge, huge spectrum of abilities and characteristics among them.  Some can be incredibly thoughtful and compassionate, others can be intellectual bullies and seemingly heartless.  But the connective tissue that binds them all together?  They know where to set the bar/standard and how to hold themselves and everyone around them to it.

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Posted in chicken killer, Empathy, fear of not succeeding, Intellectual curiosity, Self-knowledge, Values | 4 Comments »

Lots of low cost experiments

April 22, 2009

The really interesting improvements companies make come from takings risks, but in a lot of cases risk-taking can be held hostage by needing data to support every decision.  Being conservative and careful across the board may be safe, but it’s not where breakthrough learning happens.

This is where I see a lot of startups struggle:  confronting the tension that is created between knowing when to apply disciplined fact-based decision making to avoid failure, and when to be disciplined about making decisions where failure is accepted as a likely outcome.

The best companies create a culture that can foster two seemingly conflicting organization abilities: precision and failure.  In fact, you need both to reliably profit from your mistakes.

The key is understanding where in your business you can afford to routinely experience failure, and where failure has more costly significance.  You need internal processes that measure performance, coupled with a culture that has a pretty solid foundation of trust – where anyone and everyone feels comfortable taking a risk, and reporting the results as data.  I wrote on this earlier, it’s a culture where bad news has got to travel faster than good news.

Steve Blank wrote a pithy essay on how to navigate this decision making quandry and I love the quote he referenced from General Patton: “A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan next week.”  This is a variant (or perhaps the inspiration) for another saying “the perfect is the enemy of the good.”

To me they drive home the value of action and experience placed on par with the value of planning and data.  Patton would never go into battle without a well thought through and justified plan, but he speaks to how perfecting the plan is different from winning the battle.

The same is true in startups.  It’s critical that they operate with a well thought through plan supported by data, but it’s equally important that they understand when the plan is no longer as important as what the real world is telling you.  It’s another way of understanding why the numbers in your operating plan are wrong, and is in fact healthy.

Steve talks about a simple heuristic, that decisions have two states: reversible and irreversible.  With the reversible decisions you can liberally experiment, and should.  This is where you can create significant breakthroughs for your company by being highly creative, and surprise yourself by taking risks, and failing, perhaps a lot.  If you’re wrong, re-load and try again.  For me the construct is learning to try “lots of low cost experiments”.

He makes an even more interesting observation about tempo.  It’s not sufficient to be able to take risks with reversible decisions, it’s to do so at a brisk tempo.  Quick, responsive, hungry.

Where this comes in especially handy is with sales and marketing performance and new product development.  In both cases you’re in a race to discover what works, and then what works on a repeatable, scalable basis.  I forwarded Steve Blank’s article to one my CEO’s who is focused on improving her sales and marketing team’s pace and performance.

Jenny Hall also made a similar observation in her post about what she learned as CEO of Trendi.com when it failed.  For her it was “if it won’t matter in three months, don’t spend too much time on it.”

She’s got the necessary ingredients: a culture of trust within the company, data-driven decision making, and performance measurement processes.  When she first arrived, these ingredients weren’t as prevalent, and she worked hard to put them in place, and placed a priority on reducing errors and increasing predictability.  But that was then, this is now, and she’s making the transition to fostering more appropriate risk taking as a way to increase performance.

Lots of low cost experiments combined with a brisk tempo supported by a disciplined acceptance of failure.  That sounds like a lot of fun.  Try it.

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Posted in Business planning, Failure, fear of not succeeding, Intellectual curiosity, meaningful failure, Strategy, Success | Leave a Comment »

The iPhone – Virtualizing enterprise market share

April 8, 2009

It’s always good to state the obvious:  there is no way Apple will ever make a dent in overall PC market share, much less get into the enterprise desktop or server business in a way that’s relevant.  The reasons are so obvious most people don’t realize it.

The Mac will never duke it out at the low end, much less hang out with the netbook crowd because the lower margins don’t work with Apple’s business model.  HP, Dell, Lenovo – they get to have all the “fun” sorting out the volume/margin voodoo.  Lucky for Apple there’s a large enough segment that will gladly pay a premium for an elegant, integrated, and stable computing experience. 

And guess what?  Apple gets nicely rewarded:  in the fourth quarter of 2008 Apple’s operating profit was 11% while HP’s was 5% (for their personal systems division). 

But what about the corporate market?  What about all those enterprise customers who you can build lucrative, durable, “sticky” relationships with?  Businesses built from hard-fought battles over market share, premised on whoever sells the most laptops/desktops/servers to corporations reaps the rewards of valuable added services that run on them.  Has Apple really just punted on this?

No, they’re smarter than that.  They’ve realized in a world of cloud computing and web delivered applications, their leverage into this market doesn’t come from desktop unit volume.  It comes from inserting the iPhone into the information flow between businesses and their workers. 

But hasn’t every big mobile device supplier tried this already?  Didn’t Nokia bet a huge part of their farm on this with various “Communicator” handsets? 

What about Microsoft with Windows Mobile?  Wasn’t that supposed to provide the worker/enterprise tether?  It was but it never did.  It neither generates significant revenue for Microsoft, nor has it gotten durable traction with business users.  Dan Frommer of Silicon Alley Insider does a great job explaining why it’s a tweener in the worst way.  I can tell you that my two years using a Motorola Q were the longest mobile “computing” years of my life.  One of my partners compared it and an iPhone to “showing up on horseback (Q) when everyone else is arriving by jetpack (iPhone)”.

And as Network World pointed out, Blackberries are great at corporate email and “legacy” enterprise applications but are not great mobile internet experiences.

These companies forget that it’s not about them and protecting their business franchises, it’s about the user experience.  Apple is the first company to get the complete mobile internet user experience right.  Microsoft, Nokia, even Blackberry/RIM probably have done a better job getting mobile computing right, but in a world of web services, I think the operative term is “internet”, not “computing”. 

So how does Apple become relevant in the enterprise?  By virtualizing its market share.  The battles to be fought in enterprise computing over the next 5+ years won’t be over email and ERP, they’ll be around cloud-based services, web-delivered applications and mobile interactions with them.  Market share leverage will be measured in mobile devices, not desktops. 

And until the iPhone arrived, no one had a compelling mobile internet experience.  Hundreds of millions of other phones shipped, and they all suck at the mobile internet.

In an April 2008 report, Gartner found the iPhone is clearly having an impact on IT strategy.  Of their survey respondents, 65% were responsible for supporting, managing and/or provisioning enterprise mobile solutions.  Of these, 13% said they either currently supported the iPhone or had planned for it, 64% said they were currently researching/evaluating support for the iPhone. 

This is brilliant.  By having major corporations enable iPhone support Apple can get a meaningful share of enterprise users without having to sell a single desktop, laptop, or server:  13% share of mobile support is 10x+ Apple’s share of enterprise desktops.

No one is focused on this, and it makes me wonder if Apple likes it that way.  Keep the “iPhone is a consumer product” head-fake going long enough to get a strong foothold with enterprise users.  And if Apple can instill in those users the loyalty they’ve instilled in consumer iPhone and Mac users, well this could be brand new territory in enterprise business.

The reasons are so obvious most people don’t realize it..

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Posted in Business planning, fear of not succeeding, geopolitics, Intellectual curiosity, Strategy | Leave a Comment »

The next big thing

April 7, 2009

“What’s the next big thing?” I get asked this a lot, and a lot of VCs get asked the same question too about what’s the next big trend/device/web-service/… and that always makes for an awkward detour in whatever conversation preceded the question.  The truth is “I don’t know.” And it’s a great answer, because none of us do. 

The next big fill in the blank only becomes apparent in hindsight.  It’s not that I’m not smart nor anyone else who gets asked this question, it’s just that you can’t really tell.  Sure, I’ve got favorites (twitter is now at the top of my list, but I wouldn’t have said that a year ago). 

Remember when Google actually was in beta, in 2000?  It began appearing on people’s desktops where I worked at RealNetworks.  We thought it was cool and efficient, but there were ZERO people talking about it being the next big thing.

Last Thursday’s NY Times had an interesting article about the rising popularity of “netbook” computers, and how these are a big emerging phenomena enabled by a structural technology shift in the computing landscape: we no longer need Microsoft, and probably Intel.  The next big thing?  Maybe.  More on that in a second.  Let’s look at newspapers.

Clay Shirky did a phenomenal job explaining the collapse of the newspaper industry on his blog, pointing out it too results from a structural technology shift – the internet.  Clay references Elizabeth Eisenstein’s book, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, where she observes that during these technological transformations the only obvious effect in the moment is the destruction of the status quo.  What transcends the status quo takes time to emerge.  Clay sums this up well: “That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place.”

In the case of netbooks, we’re about to see a lot of old stuff get broken, but it’s not clear if netbooks are the transcendent replacement, or just one of the convulsions of the revolution.

But netbooks are significant because they’re exploiting the growing vulnerabilities of Intel (price, performance) and Microsoft (price, legacy support, integration) at the low end in the same way that Apple is (more elegantly) exploiting them at the high end.

Netbooks have traction because they focus on where people spend the majority of their computing time: web-based documents and services, and the consumption of digital media.  That’s it. 

Whether or not someone buys one, netbooks educate the average citizen that GoogleDocs and a browser are all you need, and that MS Office is both irrelevant and overpriced.  My belief is the impact of netbooks will not be felt so much in unit volumes, but as catalysts speeding the unraveling the Office franchise. 

But wait, there’s more.  How much distance will separate the Office franchise “unraveling” from prying MS’s grip off the operating system?  Apple can’t do it, and is smart enough to steer clear of this outcome.  Will Android and Linux be good enough at the low end?

We’ve already seen the indifference that’s greeted Windows7, and the reluctance to even adopt Vista, with people scrambling to stick with XP.  My family did exactly this in February when our five year-old XP home computer died, and we scrambled to find someone who could sell us a new XP machine (we succeeded).  It was an intelligence test.  XP or Vista…hmmm.

Maybe this reveals a nuance to Clay’s “revolution” observation.  Perhaps the path to destruction takes you through the terrain of irrelevance.  What netbooks show us is how irrelevant the once mighty Microsoft and Intel platforms are to the needs of people today.  They may be lucrative businesses but they just no longer point to the future like they used to.  They’ve become what’s broken in the revolution. 

It’ll be exciting to see the new stuff that’s put in place.  I’ll be sure to blog about it, after we all see what it is.

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Posted in Business planning, Failure, meaningful failure, Success | 1 Comment »

Man On Wire – Best Startup Movie Ever?

April 1, 2009

I saw Man On Wire for the first time in February; I’d read a snippet somewhere about this being the story of the man who tight-rope walked between the two World Trade Center towers in 1974.  And at a certain level, that’s exactly what this movie is about.  It’s exquisite.  The tight-rope walker, Philippe Petit is almost a caricature, his vision and ambition equal parts boundless and focused.  I’ve seen the movie three times now, and each time it’s more revealing.

What viscerally strikes me is how it tells the story of starting up a company.  This is all about having an idea so audacious it’s almost not believable to someone who hasn’t drunk your kool-aid, yet.  It’s about staying focused on the one reason why you will succeed and not the 10,000 reasons why you will fail.

Man On Wire reveals four super-compelling principles that underscore what it’s like to be in a startup, and if you haven’t been in one, it’s a wonderful way to get a sense for what it feels like to be there:

  • A meticulously constructed plan, discarded.  Philippe Petit spent six years planning this act, including building scale models of the towers’s roofs, constructing a tight-rope the same length as the towers in a field, and on and on.  And guess what?  The day of the “coup” huge elements of the plan had to be thrown out, the real world just didn’t cooperate.  This is “why the numbers in your operation plan are wrong” writ larger than life.
  • Repeated visualizations of the outcome.  This is one of the critical mechanisms to ensuring you’re focused on why you will succeed.  Philippe from the moment he learned of the Towers construction, visualized walking between them.  For years and years visualized walking that wire, how he would do it and succeed. This is critical when you only get one shot at an opportunity, like he had. 
  • Significant emotional toll.  Getting something done that’s ambitious, with a visionary leader means you will do things that are difficult and way outside your comfort zone.  You will find out who the chicken killers are, who can be relied on and who can’t, and most importantly what you can rely upon yourself for.  It’s messy and painful, and you will be different as a result of this experience.
  • The fear of not succeeding.  Philippe’s obsession was on success.  Startups are all about being laser focused on why you will succeed, and your only fear is success NOT happening.  I just can’t say this enough.  People who are afraid of failure may very well get great things done, but just not at startups.

For me the most piercing and fiercely honest confession of the entire movie is when Philippe describes the moment when he committed himself to walking that wire.  A simple shifting of weight from the foot resting on the tower to the foot resting on the wire.  Silent and internally deliberate. 

Compare/contrast this with the article in this April’s Outside Magazine about why people participate in risky sports, and profiles BASE-jumper Ted Davenport.  Neuroscientist Russell Poldrack asserts that there are three ingredients to risk taking: desire for adventure, relative disregard for harm, and acting on your desires without fully thinking them through.  That last factor strays way, way too far into the landscape of recklessness and separates Philippe from Ted.  There was nothing reckless about Philippe Petit.  Deliberate, honest, ambitious, meticulous.

So see this movie for the reasons I outline above.  Also, let yourself ask the other questions.  Like “how can someone afford to spend six years planning this”?  How “real world” is that?  We’re not getting the full story here, but it sure is enjoyable. 

Before your Netflix delivery arrives watch Philippe break Stephen Colbert out of character on the Colbert Report, and you’ll hear Philippe describe that moment when he shifted his weight onto the wire.  Mesmerizing.

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Posted in Business planning, chicken killer, Failure, fear of not succeeding, Intellectual curiosity, meaningful failure, Self-knowledge, Success, Values | 1 Comment »

Slide decks and spreadsheets

March 26, 2009

This morning I came across an article in mocoNews.net about how Charmin is using a wiki to create a community cataloging the locations of public toilets in ten countries.  As the article points out, it’s not so much the magnitude of the initiative, but the direction it points for how a large CPG organization thinks about its customers and how best to engage them in a conversation about one of its brands.  It’s easy to see when they “get” this transformation and when they don’t.

There’s been a lot written about how brands should be thinking about social media, and our portfolio companies like Wetpaint, Smilebox, and Icebreaker are all deeply engaged in developing products or services enabling a richer interaction between consumers and brands.  I spend a lot of time digging deeply into the trends and subtleties driving and enabling this broader opportunity space, and understanding how important the “understanding of the audience” is to this space.

So a while ago I was asked to guest lecture at a “Top 25” university MBA program on the subject of venture capital and entrepreneurship.  It was at a time when I was travelling a lot, and was really, really busy (which is a cop-out, when are any of us not busy?).  I prepared my talk from a very “inside-out” perspective:  my observations, my points of view, my experiences.  What I didn’t do was spend time examining the course syllabus – admittedly, a brain-dead and inexcusable lapse in not just effectiveness and basic marketing but also common courtesy.

About half way through my talk I made an observation that my job was basically one of digesting information, and that it came in two formats:  slide decks (PowerPoint presentations) and spreadsheets.  I mentioned that between these two documents, you really get the essential information you need from the company, before you dig into the really useful information to help make a funding decision – your own research, your own contacts, your own scar tissue.  

A hand was raised.  The question?  What about business plans? 

I told these students that not only do I rarely come across these, when I do, it’s usually a sign that the entrepreneurs are first-time entrepreneurs, are “old school” in a not good way.  That extracting the salient information from within all that prose takes more time, and in my world, time is a  hard commodity to come by.  I thought this was a useful and helpful piece of “real world” insight.

Except that the class I was speaking to was a few weeks into learning how to write business plans. 

How was it that I was standing in front of 75 MBA students delivering a message that wasn’t “wrong” but clearly was not effective given the context.  Well, with the same arrogance and ignorance large brands who just “don’t get” social media have.

I had completely failed to understand my market and audience.  I hadn’t thought through my objectives for the talk from a perspective any other than my own. I wasn’t thinking “conversation” I was thinking “talking.”

I’m headed back to the same class to lecture again in two weeks.  I know how I will approach the development of my message: a clear set of objectives and a set of messages informed from my point of view and the context of the students and the syllabus.

But back to slide decks and spreadsheets.  As true as it may be that this business is all about digesting information, getting to the point quickly, and that business plans are no longer the mechanism to do this, communication is about by listening, not talking – whether you’re a brand engaging consumers or just someone talking to a group of students. 

I wish Charmin well; that’s not an obvious tactic they’ve chosen, and I hope it’s one based on listening, a lot.  I think it’s brilliant, and reveals an understanding of the audience, the medium, and thier brand.  I plan to be listening, a lot, when I’m in front of those students in two weeks.

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Posted in Business planning, Empathy, Failure, Intellectual curiosity, Self-knowledge, Venture capital | 2 Comments »

Effective networking – as easy as public speaking

March 19, 2009

Over the past few weeks I’ve had a series of conversations with people about what makes an effective networker, and following up my post about the Seattle 2.0 Awards event, “networking” seems like a timely/relevant topic.

To me networking is the ability to develop a real and sincere personal relationship with someone around a topic that the two of us find interesting, relevant, and important.  It’s bidirectional, about giving and getting.

No surprise it has nothing to do with LinkedIn or Facebook.  Just look at the About LinkedIn page: “We believe that in a global connected economy, your success as a professional and your competitiveness as a company depends upon faster access to insight and resources you can trust.”  This is under the heading Relationships Matter.

Wait a second, this is about stuff for you, it’s not about relationships. 

Networking is about taking “what goes around comes around” to heart, and focusing on what you give to someone, beginning with an understanding of that other person.  It’s creating some durable residual value through a conversation, and the goal is to produce a lasting memory of you and your talent/intellect.  Along the way they’ll learn about you, but that’s secondary; it’s the byproduct.

OK, but this can be scary to do.  You are going to reach out to someone you don’t know or know well and ask for something.  In some aspects, this puts you in a situation similar to public speaking (and we all know how comfortable that can be for people).  You need to “perform” and expose some vulnerabilities.  It gets a lot less scary for me when I don’t view this as networking, and instead view this as a way to form and nurture a personal relationship.

Perhaps in this first conversation you do have a favor to ask, or maybe you just want to establish the relationship, or have this person keep an eye out for a role or opportunity relevant to you.  It’s this slice of memory that will provoke them to make the introduction you just asked for, remember your name and repeat it to a relevant contact, or to take your call and grant you a favor someday later when you ask it.

I do this all the time for people, and I don’t mind it one bit.  As a matter of fact, I love it.  I just did it while writing this post.  Someone I know has taken on an ambitious consulting project, and a former colleague of mine who has since become a rock-star marketing exec could help her out.  I loved connecting them, a good fit of two thoughtful, talented people –  who I have real and sincere personal relationships with.

This is taking your values as a person and applying them in a professional context (something I touched on in an earlier post) and doing this in an interpersonally “deliberate” manner. 

And then I thought, well there is networking I hate and am not comfortable with.  It’s the “forced” networking of work-related events – when you’re in a crowd and making the small talk that on occasion produces an interesting and memorable discussion.  This is perverse because in my role as a VC a big part of my job is to get out into the market, to attend events, and to “network.”  I am horrible at small talk, and I admire people who can establish ease and comfort quickly with someone new, and find some common ground.  I am still learning here.

But I approach this in the same way I had to learn to speak in public.  It doesn’t mean I’m always comfortable, it just means I’ve trained myself to do it.  And there are a lot of conversations along the way that just seem to fill space and time, but there are also those moments when I meet someone where we can establish an actual, meaningful conversation.  And then I’m right back in my comfort zone.

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Posted in chicken killer, Empathy, fear of not succeeding, Intellectual curiosity, Self-knowledge, Values | 2 Comments »

Seattle 2.0 Awards – Be Selfish

March 17, 2009

There are a lot of conferences in Seattle right now, and that’s a good sign – it means there’s a lot going on here in the technology sector; it means there’s enough “there” there to justify lots of organizations vying for our collective attention. 

But there are few organizations that focus just on the startup landscape, and the ecosystem that sustains and grows it, from within which we all build our businesses.

Seattle 2.0 is one of the groups that’s focused on startups.  It’s emerged organically like a startup, and it’s filling a void and meeting the needs of a defined target market:  people starting up and growing technology companies in Seattle.

It’s an organization that helps bring people together, helps foster the sharing information.  It helps shine a light on the startup “experience” – a term which was viscerally defined for me by John Jarve of Menlo Ventures as ‘the disaster that doesn’t kill you’.  Yes, experiences get shared, and that just speeds the process of company formation and growth.  A really good thing for us here.

But why should you care about the Seattle 2.0 Awards on May 7?  Well, because you should be selfish, it’s all about you and your startup for four really good reasons: 

  1. Seattle is a startup geography that matters.  We can debate the magnitude, but directionally it’s true.  We’ve created separation from Boston and Austin, and it’s now us and Silicon Valley.  You should want this to accelerate, to create a better talent pool to hire from, better ideas to exchange.  Better everything for you and for us. 
  2. VCs from the valley email me links to the Startup Index because they track it to be on top of the company formation and growth activity of our steadily strengthening technology sector.  You want them here, it’ll help you reduce risk and speed your company development.  More visibility overall, more visibility for you.  You want to be at these awards so you can meet them, you can both learn from each other.
  3. Events like this foster a network effect that’s critical to generating growth through friction-free information exchange.  It’s not just getting people together, it’s getting them together in the right context, with the right tone that enables the sharing of ideas.  Sharing ideas only strengthens them.  Get strong!
  4. And the awards matter precisely because it’s not really important who wins them, it’s the process that brings us all together that matters.  It’s asking you to nominate candidates, talking about them with your friends and colleagues, and then showing up at the event. 

So, you should go to this event, celebrate all the hard work and determination of the companies and people nominated for the awards.  But most importantly, go there to meet the other people like yourself, who are also working their butts off trying to get a company off the ground.  Go there to meet people who are eager for guidance, experience, or encouragement along the way. 

By the way, I have no vested interest, here.  I don’t know anyone at the Seattle 2.0 organization.  Never spoken to anyone over there.  I emailed them about my blog, and they were kind enough to list it, but that’s the sum total of my involvement with them.  They’re just there getting us all together, just letting the information flow.  And I like that.

I plan to be there, and I hope to run into some of you there too.  Register here

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Posted in Business planning, Intellectual curiosity, Networking, Venture capital | 2 Comments »

Failing in Style – Guest post by Jenny Hall, former CEO of Trendi.com

March 16, 2009

Jenny Hall has graciously agreed to a guest post.   Jenny was the CEO of Trendi.com, a social networking destination focused on young women’s fashion that was shut down in October of 2008, and discusses what she learned as a first-time CEO through the startup and eventual failure of Trendi.

This blog focuses on this juncture of success, failure, and finding the meaning from each.  I think you’ll enjoy what Jenny tells us through her first-hand experiences at Trendi.  Thank you, Jenny, for being OpenAmbition’s first guest writer.

——————-

I really don’t like failure, but I know it’s one of the best sources of learning. I learned a lot the past few years working at a startup, and I learned even more as a result of it failing.

I joined Trendi.com in March of 2007 as the head of marketing and I ended at Trendi in October of 2008 as the last employee and CEO. We had investors, a smart team, a fabulous domain name, a popular blog and so much more going for us- so many reasons to succeed– yet we failed. 

When people ask me “what happened?” I usually say we ran out of money. That’s the cop-out answer- running out of money is a symptom of the underlying issues. I think our underlying issues were communication related (unclear communication with each other, of expectations, and with our customers) and experience related (being young, excited, wanting to do it all and getting nothing done.)

I learned lessons from the mistakes we made as a company and my personal mistakes. Of the many lessons learned, these are the ones that stand out the most to me.

Your target audience should be so excited about your product that they’re pushing you to launch, even if it’s crappy when it launches.

I joined Trendi after the founder received funding for his idea. (I know- that never happens! We were lucky.) I talked to my target market occasionally, but didn’t seek their regular input for 2 reasons- 1) I trusted the investors and founder were right in their beliefs that the idea was a winner and 2) I was afraid of the reaction if I discovered we were wrong and proposed changing the concept.

I should have let my market share what they value, even if it differed from what we wanted to create. Sometimes we get caught up in what we’re building, fall in love with it, and fail to realize other people don’t see it the same way. It’s like parents with ugly babies (hey, there ARE ugly babies) that filter out all negative comments because they’re so in love with what they created. Trendi was, in some ways, my ugly baby.

Launching a product your market is begging to use, even with a few rough edges, will have more success than a fully developed site that doesn’t add any value. Plus, you’ll tie your market emotionally to the product. They feel invested and valued and voila- you have your first product evangelists. Furthermore, their input is the ammunition needed when confronting a team, investors, or a board about why a major change needs to take place.

Keep the focus simple and narrow.

Once you know what your audience values, keep your focus only on the features you need. Trendi started out (on paper) as a simple 8-page design. We quickly escalated the site to include a robust back end, picture management system, full social network, etc.

Extra features added time to our launch, increased the burn rate and made the user experience…fragmented. We assumed the users would like what we built only to find out they didn’t like or use all the features and it was difficult for them to figure out the ‘point’ of the site when they arrived.

We over-built Trendi for one main reason: We didn’t have a plan.

Sure, we had some general milestones, but we didn’t have an actionable, communicated business plan. When there is no plan, startup employees turn into hormonal 13 year olds with severe ADD. Anything catches their attention and can change the intended course of action. What are the competitors doing? Why don’t we have this cool feature? Let’s make it pink! No grey! We need a YouTube video STAT! (Get the idea?)

People often ask where our board was during this process and I’m embarrassed to say we didn’t have a formal board. We had our investors who would give us time when they could and we had some friends we would call on informally…but no board to help us keep focus.

Don’t do it just because all the cool kids are doing it.

There were an onslaught of “social shopping” sites in 2006 and early 2007. We jumped onto that trend and while it’s important to know the trends and competitors, it’s more important to figure out what your substantive differentiation is, how that difference adds value and how to make money because of it.

This is a mistake businesses and people make all the time- doing something because everyone else is doing it. Why do we feel more comfortable when we’re doing what everyone else is doing?

I now know questioning the trends and value proposition needs to be done regularly- at least monthly- to ensure the choices made are in the best interest of the company.

Hire only when it’s absolutely needed.

Everyone should be fully utilized before anyone else is hired and increasing the number of employees doesn’t always speed up the launch. For a company like Trendi, we probably only needed a CEO, two developers, and a designer. Ideally the CEO would have been someone who deeply understood the target market, could raise money, inspire the team, and was a stellar marketer, writer or able to contribute another key skill.

Instead, we were almost a year into the project and 15 employees deep before our Angel (who owned the majority of Trendi at that point) stepped in and made a drastic change that involved laying off most of the employees.

Yowza. Hard lesson learned. The team stayed lean and more productive after that.

If it won’t matter in 3 months, don’t spend too much time on it.

We could spend a whole day talking about how our rating system would look or a week bantering back and forth about a press release. I should have asked myself – will this matter in 3 months? If it won’t matter then, why spend too much time on it now? Time is a precious commodity in a startup and should be spent on what matters the most- quickly building a product your customers love.

——-

Funny how our resumes show our successes and we take full credit, yet we leave off the failures and if they come up, we blame others. I wish I could blame Trendi’s failure on other people and circumstances, but I can’t. No startup has it perfect- we all deal with difficult employees, investors and economic strains. I have to accept that as a company we made mistakes, but I also have to look back and accept my personal contribution to those mistakes.

Accepting the personal mistakes hurt my ego. I screwed up and it made me question my ability to lead others, my knowledge as a marketer and my future ability to start another business. But somewhere in facing my failure and accepting these mistakes, I was able to learn how I can be a better leader, new things I can try as a marketer, and that I do have the strength to try again.

I always hope for success and aim high, but I now face failure with a humility and thankfulness I didn’t have before. Ignoring failure only hurts you later- you can stuff it away and try to pretend it didn’t happen, but it’ll bite you in the butt at some point. I know that if I face failure as a teacher (a harsh one, but still a teacher) I’ll become stronger and smarter.

I like tea, Thai food and good happy hours. If you want to join me in Seattle for any of these, email me at jennymhall@gmail.com.

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Posted in Business planning, chicken killer, Failure, fear of not succeeding, fundraising, meaningful failure, Self-knowledge, Success | 4 Comments »

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