[A word of caution! This is a long post. I posted it on the day I quite my job to remember why! It is a story full of heartfelt moments. Do me a favor and stop reading if you hate long blog posts!]
And now, the tale of three interviews that led me to quit my job ... Until September 30th, 2016 I spent all of my professional life in the corporate world. To be a bit more exact, I lived and breathed corporate life for 13 years; net of the 2 years of my MBA program when I counted every minute until I went back to my corporate life. For the majority of those years, I was a member of an employee segment that I'd like to call "Brilliant Miserable". This particular segment of the employee population, as their name suggests, are extremely talented. That sharp, fast-growing analyst who everybody wants to have on their team. That mid-level manager that 1 out of 2 strategic meetings happening in the company, either she is in the meeting, or is the one who built the deck for it. These creatures are naturally talented, readily assume leadership, work long hours, and most of the time are the ones who get things done no matter what! They are of course brilliant, but they also have a dark side. They are miserable in their corporate lives. They listen to Steve Job's famous graduation speech three times a week. They wake up every morning knowing if that day was their last day on earth, they would not have done what they were about to do. Login to their outlook, and get cracking at solving the corporate problems they have become numb to and build the deck, do the analysis, and go to the meetings they do not care for. And yet still, they show up brilliantly and perform magnificently. Year after year, they get just enough recognition, just enough promotion, and just enough retention packages that they still stay with their brilliant miserable lives of corporate. For the past 13 years, I was a miserable yet brilliant corporate soul! Why miserable, is a story for another post. The cause varies by the context but the root cause is always the same. The brilliant miserable employees want to be just brilliant and not miserable. Like all my comrades, my brilliance didn't stop at my work. I did an outstanding job at staying current with the job market. Built a network of well-connected people across two countries (or three), stayed connected with my school's alumni network, maintained a masterpiece of a resume, supported other people's careers (karma), went to conferences, presented as a speaker, connected people for their own good, checked my worth in the job market frequently (a.k.a interviewing for the right opportunities when they presented themselves), and never stopped believing that any minute now the white-knight of a company will emerge at the horizon of the next interview and finally I could retire the "miserable" portion of my self-proclaimed title, and just "keep" the brilliant part. Albeit, the knight never arrived. In search of that ultimate company, while keeping my job, I interviewed with many companies, of which three made a long-lasting impression on me, and ultimately forced me to let go of the fairy tale of finding the company where brilliant people can just go to work and not be miserable. I quite my job and started on my own. The three interviews that made me do the deed and quit, were particularly heartbreaking, nail-biting, and inspiring. Each one nudged me a bit more toward quitting my job. Each one thought me one core principal about happiness in corporate life and maybe even in life. Amazon - Story of Amazon is the heartbreaking part. It taught me not everything in life can be achieved through hard-work and passion. You can write a case study for MBA students about how to get your dream job based on my Amazon interview story. That's how perfect it was, except that I did not get the job (Anti-climax soundtrack). For those who know me, they know how I feel about Amazon. It is a company I adore and admire. From its CEO (helloooo Jeff Bezos!) to its Prime customer experience, everything about Amazon makes me smile. At the time of the interview, I had no other desire in my life rather than working for Amazon. I was in corporate-love! The interview had started more than a year before there was even a job posting. I reached out to the head of a division of Amazon where I had a good level of experience in the field. This division was in a field where you wouldn't normally find many people with industry expertise and as such, I was particularly sure that my experience would give me a head-start. We exchanged emails on Linkedin, and I stayed in touch. Sent frequent but not too frequent email check-ins with interesting articles and reports. One year passed and my phone finally rang. It was him with a job posting. To say I was happy does not do justice to how I felt. I was like an athlete who practiced for the Olympics for four years, and now was standing at the entrance to the Olympic opening ceremony. I was happy, nervous, joyful, and anxious at the same time. We spoke on the phone, I also talked to another team member. The recruiter called and told me they were flying me to Seattle. The Olympic ceremony night went well, the matches were about to start! Days before the interview I read everything there was to read about Amazon's notorious interview days. I answered any and every question there was on Glassdoor. I spoke with two people I knew working at Amazon about their interview experiences. I made note cards, practiced my pitch, looked-up the interviewers background, imagined working at Amazon, tried out several outfits and chose the one that made me look powerful and confident, Packed my bags and flew to Seattle. More interview question practice during the flight. Landed and walked around Amazon campus, fantasized about living in Seattle. The day of the interview got my hair done professionally (not too fancy, just brushing, didn't want to scare them off as the girl who looked like a bride at the interview). Walked in with confidence, smiled, spoke friendly, drew charts on the board, showed off my knowledge, asked questions, socialized and not just interviewed, ate launch, and left exhausted but feeling accomplished. What was left was the judges score on my gold-worthy performance. I returned back home with a promise for a 3-day turnaround time by the nice recruiter. And the heart-breaking wait started! Three days turned to seven before I lost my patience and reached out to the recruiter. All days at work, I read more about Seattle and Amazon. I prepared my plan of action for the first 30 days working at Amazon while checking my email every 5 minutes for another seven days. On the seventh day the recruited finally got back to me saying that the interviewers haven't had a chance to meet and discuss my interview yet. I was so confused! How could the best company on earth fail on the promise of 3-day turnaround time! But I stayed hopeful. Seven days became 2 weeks and a weekend phone call with the recruiter brought me the doom! The team loved me but felt I was not data-driven enough. Although when asked about KPIs, I had the answers, but I did not start my sentences with data. My first reaction was "do not cry! you will live!". My second thought was how could I be not data-driven. I have a sign on my desk given to me by my current manager reading "I dig data". I measure everything in my life, from calories I eat, to minutes I sleep, to dollars I spend. The heart was broken, not only my professional heart but also I was hurt at a perosnal level. Looking back at that experience, I learned that hard-work and passion is not enough to achieve what you desire. Okta - Story of Okta is the nail-biting part. It taught me that I might never find a perfect company. It may not be in my cards! Awe, Okta! The unicorn of security industry. The beautiful offices in the SoMa. The hip CEO who does Crossfit. The rapid growth beyond control, the long hours, the need for mission-focused team, the sense of community, the passion for success, the desire to go place. The one step left to an IPO... I wanted it and I wanted it all. Okta was my Silicon Valley corporate-crush. Yet again, my brilliance came into effect. I knew what they needed, and I was qualified to help them out. Over the course of 3-4 weeks, I met with them 12 times. From an analyst to the SVP of Sales I had a chat with them all. I say chat, because by the time I was interviewing with Okta, I didn't believe in interviewing anymore. Interview is one sided, questions flowing from the recruiter toward the candidate. The balance of power does not exist and that is usually a bad sign. A chat on the other hand, is a two-sided flow of information. Confident and knowledgeable about what they needed, I made an excellent impression. You know when the interviewer starts selling the company to you at the end of the interview, that's what you want. That's how you want to close any interview and that only comes from a two-way chat. Ten out of twelve chats with the Okta team ended where I wanted. One interviewer asked me at the end of the meeting when are you starting! With that, I was pretty much sure I nailed it. This white-knight of a company will be mine! And so the nail-biting started. Unlike what you would expect they didn't go dark. They kept sending emails and notes saying how they are interested and still working on getting me in for more interviews. Three weeks past, and there was no 13th to the interviews. The nice recruiter delivered the message. They never told me what went wrong, however I have an educated speculation. I concluded that everything in life is a sales campaign. You won't close a deal until all decision makers sign off. And in the case of Okta, someone from the ring of power didn't sign me off. The lesson was, there is a possibility that I might never close the deal with a company where I could just be brilliant and retire the miserable portion of my title. ThoughtSpot - Story of ThoughtSpot is the inspiring one. It taught me being miserable is not a function of working for a company, it is the result of not believing in what you do. ThoughtSpot came to me at the time I was living at the center of camp miserable brilliants. I was getting ready to start my own company. I believed it was the time for me to leave the corporate life, take my brilliance with me and leave the miserable part to the corporate life. I was 100% convinced no company will ever excite me and I was only a fool to hang around for as much as I did. And then there it was, another company, with a product that will revolutionize its industry. Just like that, the hope to build something amazing washed away all sadness. I was willing to give up my dream of starting something great on my own, to join a team and an idea that was brilliant. Why I didn't join ThoughtSpot is not as much important as what I learned. In search of happiness, I waited for a perfect company to arrive for a long time, and when it didn't, I gave up hope to find one. I concluded that I could never be just brilliant while I am working for someone else and I was ready to go on with my life and start on my own in order to drop the miserable part of of my self proclaimed title. But then a chance to join ThoughtSpot proved it all wrong. Being miserable is not a function of working for a not-so-perfect company, it is the state of mind that you fall into when what you do itself does not justify staying. Sure people at ThoughtSpot or companies like that, have miserable moments but I think what they do justifies staying. At the end, I decided to quit and start Invest Groove, but for the right reason. For many years I wanted to quit because I was a miserable brilliant in search of a perfect company and a perfect team. The interviews at Amazon, Okta, and ThoughtSpot proved that belief wrong. Starting a company or working for one doesn't matter as long as you believe and are excited about what you do. Only start a company if you have something you believe in, otherwise no matter where you are and how brilliant you are, you will still feel miserable. May all miserable brilliants become just brilliant. Here I come Invest Groove, with you I will be just brilliant!
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Designing a product to scale is hard! That's what I have in mind when I wake up, drive, drink coffee, read news, eat dinner, ... and ultimately go to bed. Why is it hard? Because, there is a lot to be done, and there are millions of ways to get them done! I think the most difficult part of building a product is scoping out what to do first! Not knowing what to do first, leads to doing many things at the same time, and doing things that are nice-to-have. You talk to people about your product rather than building it, you read your favorite blogs, you learn new things, and add more items to your to-do list. Ultimately, when things get hard, you start playing startup rather than being one! These past few weeks I had a feeling that we are just playing start-up! Somethings needed to change! As is usually the case, when we spin around for a couple of days (this time it has been weeks), we know that it is time to go back to the drawing board again. What are we making? Why are we making it? And, how do we measure our success? Let's remind us of our first six months goal: In our first six months, we will build a product that at least one person is willing to pay for it. How to design something to scale is the question that had us spinning! I got the idea from Elon Musk. In Q1 2016 quarterly analyst call, one of the analysts asked the question "what does make Tesla confident that it can deliver against its aggressive production plan per the promised volume?" Tesla's CFO responded and Elon elaborated that Model 3 is designed to scale from the get-go. It made me think if there are similarities between the production of a Tesla car and a De.Re. card (this the core product we produce at Invest Groove.) Both are technologically complex. A Tesla car is a complex hardware, while a De.Re. card is a complex analysis. Both need specialized know-how, multiple components that are sourced disparately, and are expensive to produce and iterate relative to the price customers are willing and can afford to pay. Iteration cost is especially an important factor for us. Because from one hand we are working with a version zero and we still expect to refine the product as we talk to our customers. On the other hand, we do not have a free-flow investment source running through our veins (remember, we do not plan to raise capital in our first six months). Elon and his lieutenant did not provide more details, but they certainly triggered the thought in our minds to explore the drivers of a scalable design. Here is what we learned from our research following Tesla's quarterly call: You can produce a product that is designed to scale through a process that has three components:
Although we knew the De.Re. card is our core product but after our research we were not 100% sure whether a De.Re. card is what we would want to sell as our product. Our plan for our product is evolving as we learn about how to design it to scale. Our long-term vision at Invest Groove is to give the investors the confidence to buy/sell/hold stocks. This vision does not mean we need to sell our core methodology to give our customers the confidence to invest in stocks. There are many ways we can develop a product to do just that. We can provide stock-picking services. We can create a fund that people invest in. We can create a newsletter that recommends a stock(s) on a regular basis. We can develop a rating system that scores and ranks stocks. We can teach people how to invest in stocks. We can offer creative new ways (like what ibillionaire has done) to give people a way to invest in stocks confidently. There are probably many other ways to go about it. Which one is our product? To be honest, we do not have a clear answer to this question. What we know is because we are designing a scalable product, we must sync our product development activities with the three characteristics of a scalable product development process that we talked about in this post. What does that mean? It means that as our first step we will break up the task of investing in stocks with confidence into the smallest components possible, and we will document every step and action into a roadmap. We expect the outcome to be a modularized construct that anyone could use to invest in stocks with confidence. The delivery model will be what I'd like to call a "teachable course." Primarily because the only way you truly break up a process into its smallest components is when you are ready to teach the process to someone else. I'm not sure whether this "course" is something we will ultimately monetize, but without it we certainly won't be able to achieve our design-for-scale outcome. We will be focusing our effort on developing a "teachable course" that allows us to break apart, document, and ultimately automate the process to buy/sell/hold a stock with confidence. Before I wrap up, a confession I have to make is that writing this post took me a week. When I started, I had no idea how and when I will finish the post. It reminded me of why I started this blog. This blog more than anything else is a diary of our journey to build our company and act as our formal drawing board where we can officially and in a structured manner think, evolve, and build our company. The only thing left is a shoutout to the one and only Alex Turnbull who inspired this blog (without knowing). I hope I could meet him in person one day (although I know he operates in a true remote / work-from-wherever fashion). Thank you Alex!
Bonus content: the first ever public sneak peak into our company's website and Twitter account! Drum roll ....In our last post, we talked about our 6-month plan to acquire one paying customer with a product that is designed to scale. In this post, we will go into the details of how we plan to acquire our first paying customer in the first six months. I see this post like a go-to-market plan for our first six months. It is of course a very crude go-to-market plan and stripped to its bare minimum. But I wanted to share with you the thought process we went through to decide how we will be acquiring our first paying customer. Usually, startups go through a resource-heavy product development phase (resource could be time, money, process, or a combination of all). In this phase, most product-developing startups are not clear about how they will make money with their product. They rarely spend any time on defining how to make money and rather focus on how to raise capital to fund their product development phase. We want to turn this model on its head. Our plan is to leverage the willingness of someone to pay us for our product (albeit version zero) as a signal that we are on the right track. The more paying customers we acquire, the more input we gather to understand how and to what extend our product is delivering value and how to enhance our product so that those paying customers spend more with us or convince their friends to become our customers. Question 1: Why would someone pay us for version zero of our product? This was really easy to answer. Because our version zero product solves a problem and delivers a specific value. As a matter of fact, our "value" is pretty simple and has been from the beginning. I realized that first time when I created our Twitter account. It was very easy for me to define who we are on our Twitter profile. " We are giving investors the confidence to buy/sell/hold Tech stocks". The real value is the confidence we give them to buy, sell, or hold a stock when they are investing their hard-earned cash in stocks market. I only edited it twice. Once I wrote it and the day after I went back and I added a small qualifier at the end "... with on demand analysis" and that was it. I think the "Twitter profile test" is actually a good way of gauging whether we know what problem we are solving. If only customers also engage with it and see it similarly (fingers are crossed!). I guess that's going to be one of the questions we need to get it answered when we start talking to our customers. Question 2: Do any such people exist?
Our plan for the first six months doesn't stop here. In our last post and as I started this post, I talked about the 2 aspects of our goal. In this post I only got the chance to talk about the "first paying customer" aspect. However, we do not want to just acquire a paying customer. Rather, we would want to acquire that customer with a product that is designed to scale. In our upcoming post I will explore the 2nd aspect further and describe how we are designing our product to scale. Do not mistake it with scaling our product but rather designing it from the get-go to scale. This is a concept I learned from Elon Musk at Tesla's Q1 2016 investor call. It wasn't actually him who talked about it first. One of his executives touched upon the concept of "designing to scale" their Model 3 Teslas. Elon took the concept and explained how Model 3 will be different form their other models by design. I then took the concept of "designing for scale" and made it relevant to our product. Stay tuned for the upcoming post!
It is easy to be busy, go through days and weeks, feel exhausted, and yet get absolutely nothing of substance done. It happens day in day out across many large companies and organizations. You can also do the same when you are on your own, starting a company. You can still be busy (doing things), even be efficient (doing things well), and yet not be productive (doing the right things). The efficient busy-bee syndrome is shared between large, established companies and startups alike. However, there is a big difference between the two: When you are busy but not productive and working for a large company, you can blame it on leadership and lack of strategy. But when you are on your own, you have no one to blame for! The problem is that a large company can afford having an army of efficient busy-bee - at least in the short term it can. But a start-up, not only it cannot afford to be efficient busy-bee, being efficient and busy and not productive will cause an early failure before the startup can even get a chance to get started. How can you avoid that as a founder? Have a plan, act on your plan, measure progress and learn from it. Today's post is about our plan for the first six months and how to measure our progress? We are calling our first six months "phase zero". It is the period we will build our product to get from zero to one paying customer. At its core, this is similar to commonly know phase of building a market-ready product. But, there are two differences between what we are building and a market-ready product. We want to build a market-ready product that meets two criteria:
Let's dig a bit deeper...
Our goal for the first six months of our startup: Now, whatever decision we will be making or activities we will be spending time on must be measured against the above goal. For example, earlier this months, I needed to decide whether I participate in a monthly "FinTech" meetup in San Francisco. I decided to volunteer for one session and help out the organizers and in return I can go to their meetups for one year without cost. It seemed like a great idea! $15 USD per meetup X 12 months of meetups adds ups to $180 USD savings in my pocket. To put it in context, that saving pays for the cost of my domain address for 3 years on Weebly.com, not to mention the learning from key notes and networking value the meetups could bring. So I decided to volunteer. After formalizing our plans for the first six months, I'm reconsidering the priority of going to the meetups as it relates to our goal. These are the questions I would want to answer before going to those meetups:
I'm tempted to answer "NO" to both questions posed above. And with that, my meetup time allocation is rapidly shrinking to zero. We expect this approach is going to cut through noise and help us stay focused and productive, and not just a meetup going busy-bee. During our first six months, being productive means an activity that meets the two criteria outlined in our goal statement. Contrary, being a busy-bee is a state where we are going through days and weeks but none of our activities will pass the test of the above two questions. There you have it! Our plan for the first six months and how to measure our progress? I am hesitating to wrap-up this post without talking about the longer term plans. The corporate strategist in me is screaming to talk about them ...What about after 6 months? What about long term aspirations and objectives? I recognize they are critical questions to answer and as a matter of fact, we do have answers to them. Having said that, at this point, I'm asking myself "does writing a blog post about our longer-term plans help us get from zero to one paying customer or reduce cost of production and modification by half?" and my answer to both is "No"! While I assure you, those plans exist but you have to wait until writing a blog post about them is in sync with our priorities! I will though tell you about the next blog post. I will be writing about "how we are acquiring our first paying customer and how we are using it to build a scalable product?" Until then, may you stay away being a busy-bee, whatever you do! Ciao!
One of the early tasks that we took care of it, during the first couple of weeks we started, was the registration of our company as a C-Corporation. To my surprise I ended up putting a lot of hours into research and making the choices that comes with the legal process of registering a company. At first glance, it seemed to be an extremely simple task but then as we went through it there were number of questions that we needed to answer and it took much longer than what I expected to come to a conclusion that made sense. In this post I will summarize what we learned, decisions we made and our logic to make those decisions. I summarized them in the form of Question and Answer so that it is easier to glance through and find the specific questions you are interested in. Intuitively you would think registering a business is all about choosing the name. It is of course required and is a hugely sentimental step. However there are three other more serious questions that you need to answer when you are registering your business legally. Here they are in the order we did research and answered: 1. Do we need to register our start-up legally? When it comes to registering the company, the first question that we needed to answer was whether we actually need to register it as a legal entity. Many start-ups go through the product development phase without any legal status. As a matter of fact, many early/idea stage investors, VCs, and incubators prefer the start-ups not to be registered. Mostly because when it comes to bringing on an early investor they would rather to have control over the type of shares being issued and so on. In their application Q&A section they ask the applicants not to register the company prior to applying for their program. You can read about their reasoning on the Q&A section of their website under the "sustainability" section. Despite the investor community and incubators' reasoning there are benefits to thinking about this question. Fore one, it forces you and your co-founders to discuss roles and responsibilities. Also, as you will see later in this post, to register your business you need to identify number of shares to authorize and issue and to whom they are assigned and that is a great conversation to have with your co-founders. What we did: After reading the descriptions of the options available and comparing them based on the business structure comparison table provided by San Francisco Business Portal we disregard Single Proprietorship, General Partnership, Limited Partnership, and Limited Liability Partnership (LLC). Then we had to choose between S-Corporation and C-Corporation and we chose to register the company as a C-Corporation for the following reasons:
2. Do we register the company on our own or use an expert help and/or advice? You can certainly register your business yourself. You need to choose a name, check whether it is available, fill the forms required, get the permits you need (depending on your industry, city, country, ...), and file all the required documents. You can also hire a lawyer to take care of the process for you. Third alternative is to use companies like https://www.legalzoom.com or https://www.priorilegal.com. These are legal services on-demand platforms supported by lawyers and accountants if needed. What we did: We chose to use Legal Zoom for two reasons:
3. How many shares, at what value and which class of shares to authorize and issue? In my point of view, this is the best and most valuable section of this post if you are about to go through the registration process of your company (yeah, your welcome!). As you go through the Legal Zoom process (I'd expect it is the same if you choose to go through the process in any other ways), you ,must answer four questions:
What we did:
Before I wrap-up, I have to say that registering your legal structure will cost you. We paid around ~$350 to Legal Zoom for the initial services (including checking the availability of our name, filing with state and federal governments, obtaining our EIN number that is needed for hiring employees). We also paid an additional ~$150 for an add-on service to make Legal Zoom our authorized agent. This means they give us a calendar and an alert system to remind us of the frequent actions we need to take to stay compliant with the legal requirements of being a Corporation (e.g., annual reports, taxes, etc.). One last expense we incurred was an additional ~$350 for Legal Zoom partners to file our company's annual taxes. You can choose not to do the last two options and either work with another company or take care of it on your own. We chose to pay for it to make sure we do not need to worry about any legal and compliance issues and focus on what matters the most which is developing our product. Also be aware that you will receive bunch of letters form the government and some commercial calls form accounting firms and Dun and Bradstreet to sell you more stuff. We chose to rejects them all and stay focused on our product development priority and minimize noise. Hope this post saves you some time as you go through the registration process of your start-up. If you are at that stage, let me just congratulate you. When the registration was done and we received our official documents in a nice package from Legal Zoom, it actually made us really happy and felt great. We knew that we are serious now and to me that was the most important reason we registered our company.
Sounds interesting, but it is just another idea! Put it on a paper and see if you can convince others to build it with you! Said my brother at the other end of the line, as his voice got blurred into the sound of HW101 traffic during one of my nightly commutes back home to the city. For several months I struggled to start my company. I had a solid answer to the problem of a niche group of customers and I was convinced that is enough to build a company. Despite the idea and the product being so clear in my mind, I was struggling to make a progress. For many days and weeks, I had thought about it and worked on what I thought is the company's product. I had several Google sheets and docs describing it - mind you that our product is a downloadable content so in its barest form it manifests itself in the form of docs and sheets. I had even gone further and had a manifesto to describe company's values to the future employees. However, I still did not know how to take the next step between a product I thought we had and a company we wanted to build. In the simplest form, you have a company when you have a product that someone is willing to pay for it in a sustainable period of time and you have a way to distribute the product to the target customers in a repeatable way. While I thought the product was ready but I could not make visible progress in building the company that can produce and sell it. There is a Persian proverb that goes something like this: "seven sets of pots of pants but no lunch or dinner". It resonated with me for several months as I struggled with defining the starting point. You don't need to know the final answer to build a deck. Use the PowerPoint as a tool to put yourself in the shoes of your audience. It forces you to think within the boundaries of a page and bring your idea to life as you build the deck. Heard myself coaching one of my team members with such a confident tone as if I'm a kung fu sensei explaining the art of martial arts to my student. It sparked then and there. Of course! the starting point is to design and build it from the point of view of the audience - may it be a PowerPoint deck or a new company you are trying to build. You should bring your idea to life through the lens of your audience. It's like what they teach you in "design thinking" workshops. Empathize with your audience and build it in a way that they can interact with it. Empowered by my own sensei-like wisdom and fatigued by several months of not knowing where to start, I ditched everything - the business plan template, the business model canvas, the job posting to hire people to help me further enhance the product, and every other docs and sheets I had put together to build my company and instead I bought a domain name and started with a free website theme on weebly. A free website theme gives your three things and in my point of view that's all you need to build a company: 1) a Home Page, 2) an About Us page, and 3) A Blog. One might think a website is just a marketing tool in the age of Internet. But when website is your primary means of communications with the customers and the main channel of distribution for your products and services then it is a lot more than a marketing tool. It is the lens through which you experience your company as if you were the customer and even an investor. The three elements of any free website theme can be used with purpose to develop your product and design your company around it. And that is what we are doing these days:
There you have it. We are building our website first so that we can develop our product and design a company around it. When I started I thought it will take me couple of days to publish the website but 1 month into the process the website is not published yet. Because as I started to put it down on paper so that it can be presented on the website, I am realizing there are elements of our product that are not ready yet. We are forced to go back to the drawing board again and again. It has proven to be the most effective tool to start our company. It has given us a framework and a platform to develop our minimally viable product and commit to a progress that is publicly visible and shareable. Where I'm standing today, I still think we will swing back and forth between our website pages and the drawing board for couple of more weeks and that's going to be the engine of our progress. I'm using this blog as a diary to share my journey to build a company from "zero to one". Therefore, it is only fair to start by defining what I'm planning to build. Right? But not too fast... Before that, I have to talk about two other ideas, so that I can free my mind from their distractions. These two keep popping up and distracting me from the main product I'd want to build. At every moment of time, I have several ideas that have the potential to become a stand alone company and these mostly serve me as tempting distractions, especially when they are the two of my all time favorite ideas. By way of writing about them, I'm parking these other ideas so that I can continue with my journey without distraction #essentialist. May these two become someone else's journey in one shape or another!
So there you have it, my two all-time favorite business ideas and distractions. If any of the above inspires you, let me know and may these two become a journey to share. However neither of them get me excited enough to start a journey on my own. There is of course a 3rd idea, the "one" to my journey, the destination of my pursuit ... but you have to wait for the next post to read about it! One cannot go on a journey without identifying the destination! And identifying the destination needs significant amount of thinking, making decisions about where you wish to end-up, and ultimately coming up with course of action to get there. Coming from corporate strategy background this step should come to me naturally... but not to fast!
Every time I start planning, I can hear the Bay area start-up community and founders all screaming at me: "control freak", "old school MBA", "corporate strategy junkie", "non spontaneous", "non entrepreneur", "non agile", "non lean", and many other "non-things" freak! Start the journey, build some guiding principles and the destination will shape-up as you move with agility and refine your path, just like "How Google Works"! Let me tell you something, I wondered too long and too close to the fence of non planning school of thoughts and doubted the need for a "strategy" and "planning"! It was all the San Francisco "fog" that clouded my judgment! You see, when you move to the San Francisco area, there is a fog (pun intended) that clouds your judgment. You wonder how come all these startups are successful without a whole pack of experienced, formally MBA trained, Ivey-school graduates. You then talk to people, listen to them and hear about agile start-ups who do not go through any formal planning processes. You read about how strategic planning is doomed to fail and gradually start to believe in all those fairy tales. The reality is, there will always be examples to prove ones case against the need for planning, strategy and the need to get clear about the destination your are moving toward and I don't intend to write about them here, but I'm starting my journey with a clear definition of where the "destination" is and how it looks like. In other words, there would be no journey without it! As the journey starts there will be too many distractions that will cloud our judgment and will take us away from the path to our destination. I promise to you there will be always new ideas and possibilities, different people, cities, and markets, another article to read, another person to network with, a new email to answer, a new problem to solve, a new phone call to make, or a new destination to move toward... So without knowing where you are planning to go and defining it well you will not get there. Or even if you'll get there somehow, you will pay a heavy toll to do so. Before I go back to the journey of zero to one and define the "one" destination of this journey, let me get all of this fog-induced anger out of my system and tell you the first rule of the journey from "zero to one" is to define the destination as clear as possible and don't ever let the fog cloud your judgment. Starting from "zero"2/27/2016 It is very hard for me to start writing this blog post! I have been postponing this one for months, if not for years. It is hard to start from "zero" when there are way too many "one's" out there that you can focus on. I bet you are asking yourself "what's she talking about?" ... Let me start again ...
Couple of months ago I listened to Peter Thiel's latest book called "Zero to One". Peter is a member of the so called PayPal Mafia. In the book he talks about how most of companies are focused on improving products and services that already exist. Figuratively speaking, they take "one" concept that already exists and grow it. He goes on and argues that only companies who make it their mission to create something new have the potential to make a real impact. Again figuratively speaking, only those who start from "zero" and create something new have the potential to "rock the world". Since I've listened to that book during my regular commutes between San Francisco and Mountain View, I haven't stopped thinking about the journey I might go through to take a "zero" to a "one". And that's what I'm about to start! First thing first, I'm going to change the focus of this blog from a "parking lot" of my random thoughts to a diary of my journey from "zero to one". I'm writing, because writing things down drives focus (at least for me) and above anything else this journey needs focus. I have to say though, just like the idea of going form zero to one that is borrowed from Peter, the inspiration of writing this blog is also something I've learned from the founder and CEO of Groove, Alex Turnbull. He is my most admired CEO and founder. He writes about his company's journey on his blog. I think he is one CEO that deserves to win and win big. He is transparent about his journey, he shares his thoughts, talks about his plans, success stores and mistakes. And above all, he takes his customers, partners, readers, and employees along with his journey to build an outstanding Groove #visionary. So here's to Peter Thiel who planted the seed of the journey and to Alex Turnbull who inspired the journey itself! And here's to my journey from "zero to one"! May the force be with me at all times! Here, here ....
All that has been done without a single day spent at any of the financial industry giants (e.g., Visa, MasterCard, Bank of America, etc). Nor he lived in Detroit or Germany (so that he can work for the likes of Ford Motors and BMW). Certainly he has no background at NASA or Russian space programs. In summary, he does not have the experience but he qualifies! So how does one solve this dichotomy?
The short answer is that people like Elon Musk have a special power. Don't get too excited you Nerds! I'm not talking about Tony Stark's magnetic chest plate that Elon Musk owns (boom... you get what I did there). Some people in strategic consulting industry call his power "problem-solving". Others call it "design thinking" based on empathy. Hell, some people in food industry call it "molecule gastronomy". What do all these seemingly random examples I am listing here have in common with Elon Musk? They all poses the power to follow a deconstruct-reconstruct process when dealing with complex problems. These people have the ability to simplify a complex matter to its bare minimum structure (deconstruct) and then design a better version based on a new set of logic and norms (reconstruct). Simply, they start asking the "why" question repeatedly to peel the onion layer by layer:
You get what I'm trying to say? Elon Musk and people like him have the power to ask the "why" question several times in order to deconstruct a problem to its bare minimum and then reconstruct a better version. Most people unknowingly learn this process through experience. That's what it means to be an experienced guru in a field. Drawing from many years of experience, one immediately knows the bare minimum skeleton behind an issue. He has seen it in the past and when facing the problem, his experience tells him where to look at and how to solve the problem. But there is another way! You don't need to have the experience to solve a complex problem in any field. People like Elon Musk just use their power and deliver again and again. While most people draw from their experience, Elon-type people draw from their deconstruct-reconstruct power. Owning or not owning the power of deconstruct-reconstruct process splits our workforce into two types of people: (type 1) those who draw from experience in their specific field of expertise, (type 2) those who draw from their special power and succeed at any field. Which one are you? If you are a type 2 person, you are most probably a better fit to become an entrepreneur. You naturally feel qualified for a wide range of roles and responsibilities but hit the wall of type 1 people and cannot pursue too many ventures in the corporate world. However, more importantly, if you are a type 1 person, I'd like to leave you with two takeaways:
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