samar

someone somewhere in a garage

The Scarcest Resource at Startups is Management Bandwidth

When you work inside a startup with lots of clever and motivated staff you’re never short of good ideas that you can implement.

It’s tempting to take on new projects, new features, new geographies, new speaking opportunities, whatever. Each one incrementally sounds like a good idea, yet collectively they end up punishing undisciplined teams. I like to counsel that the best teams are often defined by what they choose not to do.

Let me explain.

As a VC I regularly meet with companies and listen to their plans. It’s a very common occurrence that a young startup with sub 20 staff and sub $2m in financing is racing around doing too many things. This level of complexity always worries me. A significant number of the companies I meet with get some form of feedback from me that:

“I’m a bit worried that you’re doing too many THINGS. You run the risk of being a mile wide and an inch deep. It’s hard enough to do X really well and succeed. I’m not sure how you do all these other things and yet I think they may end up being a distraction to X.”

I already know your response. Trust me. I hear it every week

“Yeah, but I’m just going to execute this [channel sales deal, international license of my product, new industry, new operating system, biz dev deal] and then it will pretty much run itself.”

It never does. That channel deal that you thought would take no times ends up burning scarce calories. The 3rd-party tries to sell your software – they just need your help with tech assistance to close the deal. They just need you to update your marketing materials. They got your last version working but since your latest release they couldn’t get it to work. That test you did on launching a RIM version of your product – it was only beta – now has 20 users who need a patch because it’s not working properly.

Every extra set of features that you added that served one narrow use case end up being features you need to support in future releases adding complexity to future development, usability testing, regression testing, etc.

Every team I fund comes across as laser focused on their core mission.

My advice?

I always tell teams I meet with, “The scarcest resource in your company is management bandwidth. Spend it wisely.”

Every company is built by a team and every team member matters. But as you know, a few key people in any business have disproportionate impact on the company’s ultimate success.  And nobody is more important in this regard than senior management. These people need need to be hyper focused on those things that matter the most to the company’s success. It’s why I don’t invest in Conference Ho’s.

Examples from discussions I’ve had this month that might resonate with your internal debates about how to prioritize

  • We are giving a version of our product to a team in Europe who will start selling our product internationally
  • We are signing up a channel partner to sell our product since we haven’t scaled our internal telesales team yet [yes, we know that they don’t have experience selling IT, but they have customer relationships]
  • We’re going to put a guy on the ground in the UK to address early leads we’re getting from ad agencies there [true, we haven’t thought about employment laws, taxation, currency management, etc.]
  • I know our product seems complex but we felt we needed to test lots of features to be sure we knew what would resonate with users … or … we aren’t committed to features x, y, z yet but we know our competitors are planning to so we wanted to be first to market
  • We need to hire a team in financial services now to address the needs of that industry [yeah, I know we don’t yet have big customers there. ok, I know our product isn’t yet verticalized. still, we need to start now or we’ll be behind.]

And so on. Trust me – each additional complexity you add before you’re ready decreases your probability of being truly excellent at the things you want to do extraordinarily well.

Instagram didn’t rush to Android. They also didn’t do video. They were truly excellent at what they did do.

What do you want to excel at? How will today’s “toe in the water” initiatives distract you or take your management’s time or attention off of your core business? How likely is your, “won’t take too much time” initiative to come back and bite you in the butt?

Beware. The best teams are hyper focused.

Image courtesy of Fotolia

** A note to readers. Sorry if you received an email with a draft version of this post. I had some problems with my hosting company. They were testing out what the problem was and accidentally hit publish on a draft post.

Focus is Overrated

Whenever I have tried to focus on one thing by cutting down on others, it has ended badly. Probably because, I am a chaotic person by nature. I think about many things at a time, I keep getting ideas and I am distracted. Later thing I want to do is to fight it. This has always been my biggest strength, allowing me to get new ideas to solve problems and many times surprise myself by my own energy.

But there is a huge downside. I am a terrible manager. I keep ignoring small but important things, I don’t follow patterns very well. Things that are important when running a company.

I am sure there are many like me and I thought of writing something for such folks. Here are a few things you should do:

1. Don’t try to change who you are, rather find out your strengths and stick to them. If you are the guy who can solve problems well then do that, not many people can do that well. If you are the guy everyone comes for ideas for the upcoming campaign, just float ideas, let the meticulous kinds implement them. The team will be better off in the end.

2. Find cofounders or team mates who are complimentary to you. Respect them for their diligence and they will love you for your creativity.

3. Change is good. All that energy can make you feel trapped if you stick to one thing for too long. Keep changing things in your life if it keeps you happy.

If you are the diligent kind, thanks for being there. You have my back. :)

Usability. What usability??

P36 P35
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So I wanted to book a hotel in Jaipur from my iPhone, nothing fancy. I like cleartip usually for their clean interface so I typed in clear trip on google and a click-to-call ad showed up in top. I clicked it and the phone was unreachable from my Vodafone connection. I tried another phone but number didn’t work.
I went to mobile version of cleartrip and no option for booking hotels at all.

I searched for makemytrip, same click-to-call ad and this time the phone rang but I hung up after a few minutes. If I am calling to give my money to someone, they better take it quickly otherwise I will go to the next one in line.
Their mobile website too had no option for hotel bookings. It’s not that they would make the interface cluttered by giving an option there, just some twisted logic.

Finally, I booked the hotel via cleartrip’s desktop website. But I am amazed that
1. Cleartrip is giving click-to-call ads when most people can’t call through to that number.
2. Both the major websites don’t have an option to book hotels from mobile website, how tough can it be, we (click labs) can do it in half a day.

Forces that affect whether a large company will buy your product (according to Marc Andreessen)

starChris Dixon
December 15, 2011 9:08 AM
by chris

Forces that affect whether a large company will buy your product (according to Marc Andreessen)

From Marc Andreessen’s “Moby Dick Theory of Big Companies“:

You can count on there being a whole host of impinging forces that will affect the dynamic of decision-making on any issue at a big company.

The consensus building process, trade-offs, quids pro quo, politics, rivalries, arguments, mentorships, revenge for past wrongs, turf-building, engineering groups, product managers, product marketers, sales, corporate marketing, finance, HR, legal, channels, business development, the strategy team, the international divisions, investors, Wall Street analysts, industry analysts, good press, bad press, press articles being written that you don’t know about, customers, prospects, lost sales, prospects on the fence, partners, this quarter’s sales numbers, this quarter’s margins, the bond rating, the planning meeting that happened last week, the planning meeting that got cancelled this week, bonus programs, people joining the company, people leaving the company, people getting fired by the company, people getting promoted, people getting sidelined, people getting demoted, who’s sleeping with whom, which dinner party the CEO went to last night, the guy who prepares the Powerpoint presentation for the staff meeting accidentally putting your startup’s name in too small a font to be read from the back of the conference room…

Man, I wish Marc still blogged.  (ht saul lieberman)

startups
Regards
Samar

The Apple Marketing Philosophy

Markkula wrote his principles in a one-page paper titled “The Apple
Marketing Philosophy” that stressed three points. The first was
empathy, an intimate connection with the feelings of the customer: “We
will truly understand their needs better than any other company.” The
second was focus: “In order to do a good job of those things that we
decide to do, we must eliminate all of the unimportant opportunities.”
The third and equally important principle, awkwardly named, was
impute. It emphasized that people form an opinion about a company or
product based on the signals that it conveys. “People DO judge a book
by its cover,” he wrote. “We may have the best product, the highest
quality, the most useful software etc.; if we present them in a
slipshod manner, they will be perceived as slipshod; if we present
them in a creative, professional manner, we will impute the desired
qualities.”

Just do it

As an entrepreneur you have to be comfortable with failure. You will realize at different points in your initial stages that the idea is not as good as it sounded a few months ago. At this point it’s really tough to keep going. The important thing to realize at this point is that if you keep going, you will be one step closer to getting that first hit. The failures will teach you how to make the most of the success when you finally get it.
I always had a simple logic to explain why I won’t ever take a job. In a job you have to do things right all the time and you have to be wrong only once to be fires and it’s the opposite in entrepreneurship, you can go wrong many times but hit the bullseye only once. In the hindsight it’s not as romantic as that in real life but I am glad I was an irrational kid.

PS: we are just missing as of now but we will hit the bullseye anytime now!

Let them win, have it your way

The easiest way to have things your way is to let people win. Most people care about winning but not what decision is taken. If you can make people believe that going with the decision you want taken is actually making them win, you will have things your way easily.
Swallow your pride, let others win the argument or whatever it is that they want to win.