Inversion: The surprising secret of winning in business.

2013 was a big year for me. But at the end of it, I was left wondering if it had been a hopeless waste of time.

I had been thinking about quitting my job and starting up, for a while. But I took the plunge in Jan 2013.

Got two solid co-founders, an interesting SaaS idea, and a few months of runway. Thus began the entrepreneurial dream.

Fast forward 10 months.

The product was ready, customers were mildly interested. But it was clear it wouldn’t work.

It was a structural effort-value mismatch. A long sales process and too much integration effort, but not a must-have product.

We tried many things but the writing was on the wall. The revenue would never justify the effort.

And here’s the other thing: we were running out of runway (personal savings). We couldn’t continue paying salaries for much longer.

So that was it then – end of the entrepreneurial dream? 12 squandered months, and then sanity prevails?

Time to go back to a regular salaried job?

Before we talk about what happened next, let’s take a short break and talk about… tennis.


The Amateur Game of Tennis.

One of my favorite David Foster Wallace (he of “This is water” fame) lines is from his essay, Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley:

I couldn’t begin to tell you how many tournament matches I won between the ages of twelve and fifteen against bigger, faster, more coordinated, and better-coached opponents simply by hitting balls unimaginatively back down the middle of the court in schizophrenic gales, letting the other kid play with more verve and panache, waiting for enough of his ambitious balls aimed near the lines to curve or slide via wind outside the green court and white stripe into the raw red territory that won me yet another ugly point.

It wasn’t pretty or fun to watch, and even with the Illinois wind I never could have won whole matches this way had the opponent not eventually had his small nervous breakdown, buckling under the obvious injustice of losing to a shallow-chested “pusher” because of the shitty rural courts and rotten wind that rewarded cautious automatism instead of verve and panache.

In professional tennis, Federer wins by hitting the ball accurately to the far corner. But in amateur tennis, you win simply by not hitting the ball out of bounds.

In fact, in amateur tennis, you don’t win matches. You avoid losing them.

It’s boring, yes. But that’s a feature, not a bug.

And it’s surprising how far you can go, by just following this dictum: Keep it simple.

Ankesh Kothari has another great example, in How to participate in the Olympics without any skill:

Elizabeth Swaney participated in the 2018 Winter Olympics in freestyle skiing. She skied straight without performing any tricks that the sport is known for. And she came in dead last. That’s not the surprising part however.

The surprising part is that she had never won any skiing competition in her whole life, and yet she qualified for the Olympics!

How can one qualify for the Olympics without winning any competition at all?

Swaney did one thing better than anyone else. She showed up. She attended all of the qualifying events in the two years before the Olympics. All of them. She didn’t miss a single one. And in all of the events, she skied straight, never falling down. Many of the contestants would do tricks and swirls and jumps in the air to show their skills. And many of them would inadvertently fall. Swaney never fell once.

And that’s how, she outperformed her more skilled colleagues and got enough points to qualify for the Olympics without winning any competition. Because she never failed.

Now, this is not just an idea from sport. You’ve heard of it before…

Inversion: A surprisingly powerful idea.

The power of Inversion

One of Charlie Munger’s pet mental models is Inversion.

It’s a simple but profound idea.

To win, don’t lose.

Morgan Housel has a great paragraph about how Warren Buffett did exactly this:

There are over 2,000 books picking apart how Warren Buffett built his fortune. But none are called “This Guy Has Been Investing Consistently for Three-Quarters of a Century.”

But we know that’s the key to the majority of his success; it’s just hard to wrap your head around that math because it’s not intuitive. There are books on economic cycles, trading strategies, and sector bets. But the most powerful and important book should be called “Shut Up And Wait.”

If you take away Buffett’s top 10 bets, he would look quite mediocre. The two secrets of his success are:

  1. Not striking out. He stays within his circle of competence, so he never risks complete ruin.
  2. He’s been doing this consistently for 75 years

That’s what winning is mostly: not losing.

Over a 40 year career, as long as you don’t shoot yourself in the foot, you’ll win.

In a power law world, optimize for staying in the game.

In a power law world, effort ≠ outcomes.

Luck plays a big role. One big break can make all the difference.

In such situations, it’s important to stay in the game.

It’s like surfing – you need to stay in the water. You need to be patient, and lie in wait for the big wave.

It’s hot out there. You might be ready to leave in an hour. “The water’s quiet today, let’s go grab a beer.”

And just as you step out, there comes a monster wave!

That’s why…

Do what you can to stay out there.

Don’t burn out. Keep adequate runway.

Keep experimenting and trying different things – you don’t know what will click.

But don’t take existential risks. Take small risks that you can manage.

Nowhere is this truer than in the case of startups. 90% of startups fail. A tiny proportion reach steady profitability. And a much tinier proportion create life-changing wealth.

So… I’m going to give you some strange advice.

Don’t be like Elon Musk.

Elon Musk is the archetypal visionary entrepreneur. Ignore naysayers, stick to your vision, and win big.

But again, don’t be like Elon Musk!

He bet all his wealth throwing one last Hail Mary. And he did that several times. Funding one last launch for SpaceX after all the previous ones had failed. Saving Tesla from the jaws of bankruptcy.

In this universe, it all worked out and he’s the world’s richest man. But it so easily might not have worked, and he would have flamed out.

Pablo Escobar's Brother Says Elon Musk Stole His Flamethrower Idea, Wants  $100 Million Payment
Instead, he’s selling flamethrowers.

So don’t be like Elon Musk. Be like Phil Knight instead.

In 1966, his company, Blue Ribbon Sports, was running out of cash to expand. His bank refused to give him working capital. And the only other bank in town had already rejected his application!

So he went back to work as a CPA at PwC. Plowed most of his salary back into the business to make it work.

He did this for 5 years.

First, the company stayed barely alive. But soon, some of its experiments started working.

The company still exists today, btw. You may know of it as Nike.


Quick interlude: If you like what you’re reading, don’t forget to subscribe! Many say Sunday Reads is the best email they receive all week.


Coming back to my story.

Where did we leave off?

Oh yes, me staring at a blank wall and a vanishing bank balance, wondering if this was it.

But then I asked myself, “Did you really expect that your first idea would be a hit?”

Of course not. So, the answer was clear: Do whatever we can to keep going.

So I went back to my consulting firm. Luckily I had enough trust in the system to work part-time (8-16 hours a week) on specific projects.

I put all my income back into the business. My co-founder did the same.

We pivoted the company and hired developers to build a consumer-facing app instead.

And the payoff came soon after.

We launched the product within 5 months. And within one month of launch, we had 18K users. We were onto something!

I’ve written before about what happened next. How we went from ~20K users to 200K users, with *zero* marketing spend.

But it all started with that one move. Flipping from default dead to default alive.


What did I learn?

At the highest level, this is what I learned: To win, don’t lose.

To win, don't lose. Invert.

In life and business, winning is not as much about spectacular victory, as it is about *not losing*.

Do the small things right and don’t die, and over a 40 year career, you’ll win big.

More specifically, I came away with three lessons:

#1. Optimize to stay in the game, in a power law world.

When luck is a big factor, you need to have as many “at-bats” as possible. So prioritize staying alive.

To win big, you need to take risks. You need to experiment. But never take the risk of ruin, no matter how small.

Don’t play Russian roulette, even if the gun has a hundred slots and just one bullet.

Take risks, but also protect yourself. When in doubt, remember the barbell strategy (I also wrote about the barbell strategy for crypto investing here).

#2. When you see an opening, swing hard!

When the big wave does come, that’s the time for action!

In late 2014, we saw an opportunity to partner with PAYBACK (India’s largest loyalty player at the time, with ~50M users). We went all-out to get the deal (including a lot of negotiation prep: Never Split the Difference is a great resource. My summary here).

We also guerrilla-ed our way into a free video endorsement from a movie celebrity. But that’s a story for another day.

#3. Keep it simple.

When you’re about to try something new in your business, ask yourself:

  • Is this like curving the ball into the top corner? What if I miss? Is it game over?
  • Or is there something simpler I can do, to keep the ball in play?

When in doubt, keep the degree of difficulty low. Make it easy.

Stack a few easy steps on top of each other, and voila! You have a 10/10 triple somersault.


PS. There are many great examples of successful entrepreneurs who kept their previous jobs when they started up.

The most fascinating is Herb Kelleher, who kept his private law practice for 14 years after starting Southwest Airlines.

Read that again – 14 years, running a frigging airline as a side hustle!

More in my twitter thread here.

Speed as a competitive advantage

speed

A lot of discussion on startup and business strategy ultimately comes down to one single piece of advice.

“Build a moat”.

Yes, increasing margins is important. Yes, solving distribution is critical. But before you do all that, you need to build a “moat”.

What’s a moat? Like medieval castles, a moat for your business protects you from competitors and substitutes. It gives you market power, so you can focus on growth, profitability, and all the good stuff.

For many investors, it is the most important thing.

Take Warren Buffett, for example.

As as the VC firm Andreessen Horowitz says, in Moats Before (Gross) Margins:

Yes, gross margins are important. But over-rotating on gross margins is myopic because business quality is driven by more than margins.

Business quality is about defensibility. Defensibility comes from moats.

Now, there are a few standard types of moats in business. If you look at the most successful companies, you invariably see some (or all) of them.

Regulations. Technology / IP. Brand. Economies of Scale. Network Effects.

Jerry Neumann has categorized them very well, in A taxonomy of moats:

image
Source: A Taxonomy of Moats, Jerry Neumann

But what if you have none of these moats yet?

Turns out, you can generate a moat out of thin air, by simply being fast. By hustling.

Yes, speed can be a lasting competitive advantage.

In fact, as per Elon Musk, it may be THE lasting competitive advantage.

Says the man who’s started four multi-billion dollar companies:

The most important sustainable competitive advantage is fostering an organizational culture that supports a higher pace of innovation.

And if you want something more tweetable:

The fastest company in any market will win. That’s why companies need to make speed a habit.

Dave McClure of 500 Startups has a great presentation, on speed as the primary business strategy

The presentation has some great examples of companies that succeeded with relentless focus on speed.

  • Stylus Innovation – $13M exit in two years.
  • Direct Hit – $500M exit in 500 days.
  • Xfire – $110M in 2 years.

The presentation also has some concrete tips on how you can be faster. Whether it’s fundraising, hiring, employee onboarding, or business development, you can be much faster.

[As you think of ways to speed up, it also helps to remember, your Minimum Viable Product can be more minimum than you think.]

We’re running at top speed here. Can’t go any faster!

Sometimes, you think it’s impossible for your organization to be any faster than it already is. If you go any faster, you’re sure things will break.

At such times, check out Patrick Collison’s list of examples of unbelievable speed. It’s called… Fast.

Some examples from the article:

  • The Eiffel Tower was built in 793 days.
  • On August 9 1968, NASA decided that Apollo 8 should go to the moon. It launched on December 21 1968, 134 days later.
  • The iPod shipped within 290 days of getting started.
  • Amazon started to implement the first version of Amazon Prime in late 2004. It went live on February 2 2005, six weeks later (!).

To be fair, when it comes to speed, Amazon SMOKES every other company.

Speed is a competitive advantage in your career too.

As James Somers says in Speed matters: Why working quickly is more important than it seems;

Systems which eat items quickly are fed more items.

Slow systems starve.

This is true at a simple level, of course.

The faster you do things, the more things you can do. The more intelligent bets you can place. And so, the more you can win.

But it’s also a superpower that makes you indispensable. The more things you take on, the more critical you become to your organization.


PS. I will add more examples and actionable tactics to this post soon.

PPS. Speaking of unlikely moats, sometimes, good old focus can be a competitive advantage too.


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The best of Jitha.me – A Compilation

Today I send out the 100th issue of Sunday Reads. It’s a good time to look back.

So I’m compiling some of the most well-received articles I’ve written over the last few years. On startups, business and management, and on mental models that make us more effective at what we do.

Hope you find the articles useful! Don’t read them all at once. Read whatever catches your fancy. You can always come back later ?.

[PS. It’s also a good time to subscribe if you haven’t. You’ll get issue #101 next Sunday. I promise you won’t regret it.]

The World of Startups

How to save yourself from a bad startup idea that looks good.

(Go to article).

This is an article I wrote in late 2015, a couple of years into my startup and when I was just starting OperatorVC, the angel fund I invest through.

It struck a chord with readers. It still gets 100+ views a week (and ranks in top 3 on Google for “bad startup idea”) despite being not very optimized for search.

We have plenty of startup ideas. Many of them are bad, and we dismiss them right away (or our friends warn us off the idea).

They’re the easy ones.

The dangerous ones are the ideas that look quite good. The ones that give you goosebumps, and then three wasted years.

In this article, I list some of the common patterns that such plausible (but actually bad) ideas have, so that you can spot them early and save your time.

Read on here.

On a related note: Why describing your startup as the “Uber of X” is a bad idea. Yes, despite what Y-Combinator says.

How Uber solved its Chicken and Egg problem (and you can too!).

(Go to article).

Some of the most exciting companies of the 2000s are multi-sided networks. Think Uber, or Airbnb, or even ecommerce marketplaces. They’re massive, and they have immense defensibility.

Anyone who wants to compete needs to get both suppliers and consumers, at the same time.

That’s the proverbial chicken and egg problem. How do you get consumers when you don’t have suppliers, and vice versa?

Turns out there are four specific ways you can solve the chicken and egg problem.

Read on here for examples of each of these solutions.

I’ve also captured it as a framework on Slideshare, that you can download.

Your Minimum Viable Product can be more minimum than you think.

(Go to article).

Most of us in the startup community understand the concept of a Minimum Viable Product, or MVP. It’s the most basic version of your product that still delivers your core offering.

Aiming for an MVP helps entrepreneurs (especially first-timers) avoid the rookie mistake – building too much product before validating market need. We all want the ten revolutionary features in our first version. But not only will these features take five extra months to build, most users will also not see them.

So that’s the concept of an MVP. Sounds simple, right?

And yet, we slog for 3 months to build the MVP. And congratulate ourselves on finding out it didn’t work, and then spend another 3 months on a pivot.

Three months is way too long! Why does the MVP take so long?

The reason is that we’ve got the notion of an MVP all wrong.

Read on here.


The World of Business and Management

What I learnt from talking toilets in rural Bihar.

(Go to article).

My last project in consulting (back in 2012) was to develop a market-based solution to the problem of sanitation in rural Bihar (one of India’s poorest states).

At that time, less than 20% of households in rural Bihar had toilets. And many of those who did have toilets, didn’t use them – they would defecate in the open instead.

Against this intimidating backdrop, we set out to build a private-sector led solution to the problem.

And we were fairly successful. The project helped over 500K rural households construct toilets in their homes. It increased the number of toilets in our focus districts by 10 percentage points.

This article talks about the timeless lessons I learned through the project, on markets, consumers, and how to sell.

On a related note, the job to be done framework. Or, as they say, “You don’t sell saddles. You sell a better way to ride.”

What doesn’t get measured… doesn’t exist?

(Go to article).

We’ve all heard the saying “What gets measured, gets managed”.

A simple, yet powerful thought. With a simple corollary – what doesn’t get measured, doesn’t get managed.

But in reality, the corollary is far more extreme.

In the eyes of the person responsible, what doesn’t get measured… doesn’t really exist!

Read on here, to see the dark flipside of this common management adage.

On a related note, the Availability heuristic. Or “what you see is all there is”.

How to manage your team LIKE A BOSS (even while working remote).

(Go to article).

This is a more recent, and more topical article.

Effective team management (whether in-person or remote) can be distilled into five key axioms.

Call them the Minimum Effective Dose, or the 80:20 of team management.

Team management 101

Read on here .

Hiring Great People.

(Go to article).

This links back to the previous article. You can only work with people you end up hiring. So, hiring well has an inordinate influence on your team’s future output.

Hire well, and you have an NFL Dream Team. Hire badly, and at best you get a squabbling dysfunctional family. Not much effective team management you can do there.

In the same vein as the previous article, here are 7 key learnings on hiring.

1. Hire only when you absolutely need to.

2. Don’t be too hard on yourself. 1 in 3 hires don’t work out – if you do it right.

3. False Positives are OK. False Negatives are not.

4. What to look for in candidates: drive and self-motivation, innate curiosity, and ethics.

5. A few tips for running an interview process. Most important one – do reference checks.

6. How to let people go. Decisively, but with sensitivity. It’s your fault – not theirs – that you hired them into a role where they can’t succeed.

7. Diversity will not happen on its own. You’ve got to make it happen.

Read on here.


The World of Mental Models

What are “mental models”?

They are tools that help us understand the world faster and better. Instead of approaching every new problem from scratch.

Simple but powerful concepts, that help us understand situations more clearly, and make quicker yet better decisions.

For example, take this core principle from economics: “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch“. It reminds us to look at every wonderful business deal with care. What’s the catch? There’s always a catch.

In a way, mental models help us think in a more “modular” fashion.

Modular programming makes software much faster. In the same way, mental models are the modules that soup up your decision-making engine.

Mental models are the modules that soup up your decision-making engine.

Over the years, I’ve written about a few powerful mental models, that have helped me think faster (and better) about business problems.

Listing a few of them below.


Hope you like some of these articles!

Do write back or comment with the articles you liked best, and I’ll share more on those topics in the coming weeks.

And don’t forget to subscribe, so you get issue #101 of Sunday Reads!

The Fat Startup Experiment

Is the Lean Startup dead?

If there’s any ideology that’s gone from radical idea to article of faith in less than a decade, it’s “Lean Startup”.

When the idea was first proffered by Steve Blank in the early 2000s, it took the world by storm. A simple idea. That generated so much momentum for a startup.

And by 2007, everyone could point to Facebook – or even better, Twitter – as proof that Lean Startup works. Facebook at least scaled with a consistent vision. Harvard → other universities → the world. Twitter was the original clown car that pivoted its way into a gold mine .

I’m a strong believer in starting up lean.

It’s how, in a past life, I iterated my consumer loyalty app to 200K users… with zero marketing dollars. Or how we launched a new lending segment at Indifi, and made it our top segment in 6 months.

I’ve also written about it scores of times.

So yes, Lean Startup works. And it is an article of faith. The word “lean” is almost redundant today. Of course a Startup has to be Lean. Of course you first build an MVP and test it with customers. Raise serious money only when you find product/market fit.

And then there’s Quibi.

Quibi raised USD 1.75 billion two years before launching its first product.

It then went on to raise another USD 750 million a year after that. Still a relaxed one year before launch.

If you haven’t heard of Quibi, you’d be forgiven to think it was a rocket company to rival SpaceX. But no, Quibi is a mobile content platform (short for Quick Bites), which launched a month ago.

The antithesis of Lean Startup. Will it work? Is this how we’ve got to do it now?

Get Big Fast Baby[1]

The first insight about Lean Startup is that it bootstraps leverage from scratch.

As Ben Horowitz says in The Case for the Fat startup:

There are only two priorities for a start-up: Winning the market and not running out of cash

Every start-up is in a furious race against time. The start-up must find the product-market fit that leads to a great business and substantially take the market before running out of cash.

That’s where leverage helps. Maximize the ROI on the cash, people, or other resources you bring to the business. Win the market as fast as you can, before you run out of cash.

Now, there are many types of leverage a startup can have.

  • Proprietary IP / best-in-class technology
  • Regulatory capture: Microsoft scaled only because of their hilariously one-sided deal with IBM[2].
  • The product itself: Instagram has in-built virality. In its early days, Instagram’s core use-case was to touch up photos, and post them on Facebook or Twitter. So, by simply using the product, you were marketing it to your friends.
  • Network effects: Uber

The revolutionary suggestion of the Lean movement was that the process itself could generate leverage.

Create hypothesis → Test → Observe results → Refine hypothesis → Repeat.

That’s how Lean Startup works. Start with a hypothesis: product X solves problem Y for consumer Z. Test it in the most basic way possible, and iterate and refine.

Such a simple process, but generates such strong momentum.

It’s like you try to lift yourself by your shoelaces. You wouldn’t expect it to work, but magic, it does!

The first insight about #leanstartup is that it bootstraps leverage from scratch. The process itself generates momentum.

Now here’s the thing – the leverage could simply be intuition.

The founder of Quibi is Jeff Katzenberg.

His catalogue of accomplishments is stunning. He oversaw The Lion King (the original), Beauty & the Beast, Aladdin, etc. at Walt Disney Studios. Then he co-founded DreamWorks, and produced Shrek, Kung Fu Panda, Madagascar, and several other massive hits.

Jeff knows more about film-making than 99.9% of the world’s population. Combined.

And the CEO of Quibi is Meg Whitman, ex-CEO of HP and eBay. A tech veteran.

Katzenberg and Whitman have boatloads of intuition, sharpened by decades building large media and tech companies.

Katzenberg recognizes this. In an early interview, back in 2019,

“I said to Meg that, until day one, every decision that we make around content will be driven by instinct,” Katzenberg said. “Minutes after we launch, everything will be driven by data.”

And it’s true. They’ve doubled down, extracting every ounce of instinct from their extensive experience.

Everything was so meticulously planned. From the same interview:

  • A launch date a year in the future (and they were bang on time)
  • Crystal clear financial model for funding content production
  • Firm view on pricing tiers for the app

No testing hypotheses with an MVP. Just dive right in. With a few billion dollars in the bank.

What do you do when there’s no leverage?

The second insight about Lean Startup is that it was an answer to a specific question, posed at a specific point in time.

As Steve Blank says, the idea of the Lean startup was built on top of the rubble of the 2000 Dot-Com crash.

Most entrepreneurs today don’t remember the Dot-Com bubble of 1995 or the Dot-Com crash that followed in 2000. As a reminder, the Dot Com bubble was a five-year period from August 1995 (the Netscape IPO) when there was a massive wave of experiments on the then-new internet, in commerce, entertainment, nascent social media, and search.

After the crash, venture capital was scarce to non-existent. (Most of the funds that started in the late part of the boom would be underwater). Angel investment, which was small to start with, disappeared, and most corporate VCs shut down. VCs were no longer insisting that startups spend faster, and “swing for the fences”. In fact, they were screaming at them to dramatically reduce their burn rates. It was a nuclear winter for startup capital.

The Lean movement started during a nuclear winter for venture capital.

The idea of #leanstartup was built on top of the rubble of the 2000 Dot-Com crash.

When capital is scarce, you have no choice but to go Lean.

When capital is not scarce, it’s worth considering whether other forms of leverage can help you win the market faster.

Well, today, capital is not so scarce. And it’s chasing fewer good deals.

If you can raise the capital, it makes sense to go big, and go fast. Correct mistakes along the way. Figure out product/market fit as you go.

Thin was in, but fat is where it’s at.

Will Lean Startup have a resurgence, post #COVID19?

It’s tempting to say that Lean will have a resurgence post COVID-19, as the world tips into recession.

But many funders have raised large funds at the top of the market. 10 of the largest 15 VC funds ever raised, have been since 2016.

And tech startups will be especially hot, seeing the resilience of tech in this downturn (NASDAQ is inching back towards its peak!).

So capital is available, searching for “fat” tech startups that can absorb a lot of their capital. The number of seed deals will continue to fall, as they have since 2015.

Let’s talk about Quibi.

OK, we’ve discussed why fat startups like Quibi will be the norm going forward. Now it’s time for the punchline.

I don’t think Quibi will work. Despite all the leverage (or “fat”) it has.

It won’t go bust. But the value of the company will trend towards the value of the content it has bought / licensed. The platform itself will have limited value at best.

Let’s get the obvious first-level problems out of the way.

Quibi launched at the wrong time

At one level, this is correct. It’s also a massive understatement. The launch date of April 6, decided a year ago in true fat-startup style, ended up smack in the middle of a worldwide quarantine.

People aren’t traveling to work. They don’t need Quick Bites on their mobiles. Which is a bummer, because Quibi’s first product works only on mobile.

But this is a problem Quibi can surmount. Remember, Katzenberg and Whitman have plenty of capital. They can wait till people start traveling again.

Quibi isn’t as viral as TikTok

You’re right, it’s not. And yes, the product needs to be viral to succeed.

But it will improve. Again, with so much cash in the bank, Quibi can afford to iterate and improve the product.

In fact, Tiktok is not the point.

Quibi isn’t about user-generated content. It’s about quality, Hollywood content.

It’s like Netflix, but for mobile.

The Netflix of mobile is ____

Unfortunately for Quibi, the Netflix of mobile is… Netflix.

Or Disney+ or Amazon Prime or Hulu or HBO Max.

For one, Netflix does have some short-form content that you can watch on mobile.

And if Quibi unearths a crazy-large latent need for “quick bites”, Netflix will copy it. Without mercy. Just like Instagram cloned Snapchat and starved it of oxygen.

Remember the TiVo Problem:

The battle between every startup and incumbent comes down to whether the startup gets distribution before the incumbent gets innovation.

The Netflix of mobile is… Netflix. Or Disney+ or Amazon Prime or Hulu or HBO Max.

But the more important reason Quibi will fail is…

This tweet:

What is Quibi’s Seinfeld?

Content follows a Power Law distribution. You can have a million shows, but viewership will concentrate around a few.

I couldn’t find a chart on TV shows, but here’s a chart about movie viewership from Michael Tauberg.

Movie box office collections follow a power law.

Netflix paid 6 years (!) of its content budget for Seinfeld, because Seinfeld is a “whale”. Like The Office and Friends, this is what people will subscribe to Netflix for. Not for Altered Carbon or Too Hot to Handle or whatever else.

That’s the math of the streaming video industry.

Consumers will pay for 2-3 subscriptions, and you do what you can to be one of them. You need proven hits like Seinfeld, not hit-or-miss new shows.

It’s like the SEO Red Queen Effect – if you aren’t in the first three results on Google, you don’t exist.

Quibi has some solid content. But unless it unearths a Seinfeld or Sopranos or Big Bang Theory in its first try (possible, it’s Katzenberg after all), it’s down for the count.

Well, that’s how the Quibi crumbles.


Related: Teledesic was the original fat startup. Raised two billion dollars for a satellite network… and then didn’t even launch.

As Tren Griffin writes in this short memoir, some investors received many times their original investment. Even though the company never provided service!


[1] Referencing Jeff Bezos, via Eugene Wei

[2] More in The agreement that catapulted Microsoft over IBM

Thanks to Srinivas KC, Jinesh Bagadia, Aditi Gupta, Bharat Ram, and Anupam Agarwal for reading previous drafts of this.

[UPDATE 5/31/2020]: Seems like some of my predictions are starting to come true, ahead of schedule.

Fundraising Mistake #7: Describing your startup as “Uber of X”

[A version of this article first appeared in The Quint.]

As a seed-stage investor at OperatorVC, I see at least 50 startups a month that are looking to raise a seed round. Most pitches aren’t perfect. That’s usually OK – a founder’s core competency should be building, not pitching.

But one of the most egregious mistakes is calling yourself the “Uber of X”, or the “Airbnb of Y”.

The moment you say this, the pitch ceases to remain credible.

This is such a common refrain – and such a rookie mistake – that I can’t help but point it out.

Startups ain't Star Trek, but I feel Picard's pain.

Startups ain’t Star Trek, but I feel Picard’s pain.

I think the “X of Y” epidemic started with Y Combinator’s application process. The How to Apply page mentions that YC likes hearing “X of Y”. It helps them place the startup into the pantheon of successful companies they’ve seen.

It makes sense for YC. When they have to scour thousands of startups in a short time to select a few, a metaphor helps. “Hi, I’m the Uber of bicycles.” Enough, let’s move on.

But most fundraising pitches are not YC applications or Demo Days. Yet, Paul Graham’s words are gospel. So everyone and their next-door founder has adopted this with great gusto.

Even in situations where it doesn’t make sense.

And it’s gotten to a point where it’s almost ludicrous! I’ve heard a startup describe itself as “the BikeBob of X”. Have you heard of BikeBob? Neither have I!
[Note: I’ve disguised the real name of “BikeBob”, but trust me, you haven’t heard of it.]

Let’s be clear – this is not a “done thing”. It’s not a “best practice”. It’s a mistake, in most pitching situations. Even if it’s Uber you’re comparing yourself to, and not BikeBob or MotorcycleMary.

Before digging into why it’s a mistake, there’s an even more basic question. Why do we do it? Fierce individualists that we are, why do we willingly attach our identities to something else?

Why do we do it?

Three reasons:

  • Helps explain the product. This is why it’s recommended for YC Demo Day.
  • Shows a pattern. We all know that VCs are in the pattern recognition business. This just makes it easy for them to realize that you’re the next Uber. They better chase you with their money!
  • An attractive narrative. Starting up is hard. It’s difficult to justify to your family – and yourself – why you’re abandoning a stable ship. In such a scenario, who wouldn’t like a little ego boost?

Saying you’re Uber of X is awesome. Wouldn’t you love to equate your startup to a unicorn?

But the moment I hear it in a startup pitch, it’s hard not to cringe. Why?

Why is it a mistake?

1. Gives the impression that you’re not solving a real problem.

It sounds like you just read about a successful startup’s business model, and applied it to the first sector you could think of.

“AirBnb for cars: rent other people’s cars when they aren’t using them.”

It’s like you went to the neighborhood workshop and bought yourself a hammer. Now everything looks like a nail!

Unless an idea has formed organically from a real problem, it’s probably a bad startup idea.

[Side note: this is just one characteristic of a startup idea that sounds good, but is probably bad. Click here for a full list of such characteristics.]

"Do you want a bicycle at this very moment?" "Not really, but your speakers look awesome!"

“Do you want a bicycle at this very moment?” “Not really, but your speakers look awesome!”

Sometimes, it’s a real problem all right. But the solution doesn’t make sense.

An “Uber of intercity B2B logistics” is OK from a problem perspective. Manufacturing companies do need intercity logistics.

But do they need it on-demand? No! A huge majority of customers transport loads often, on predictable timelines. They’d prefer negotiating longer-term contracts.

I once thought of applying the Airbnb model to books.

Once I finish a book, it’s lying on my bookshelf. Wouldn’t it make sense to lend it out to others who may want to read it?

The problem is real – I need to buy a book to read it. But is this the best solution at scale? No. Not in a world where book prices are falling, e-retailers offer one-day delivery, and you can download a Kindle book in an instant.

Do I know the problem exists? In some cases, yes. In most cases, no. All I know is that the solution has worked. In another, unrelated sector.

2. It can constrain your imagination.

The moment you start calling yourself “Uber of X”, you constrain your thinking. You fool yourself into believing you have a foolproof playbook. When in fact there are important nuances and differences that are critical to consider.

When Taxi for Sure started, one initial focus area was inter-city cabs. Do you think they’d have discovered the lucrative on-demand taxi market if they called themselves the “Redbus of taxis”?

Oyo Rooms, a successful startup in its own right, could have called itself “Airbnb of hotels”. But would that have worked? Would the founder have made the same decisions? It’s possible. But not probable.

3. It’s another stake in the ground you must defend.

VCs are in the business of pattern recognition. They’ve internalized the patterns of successful startups to a level you never will.

They’ll point out nuances of those playbooks that don’t apply in your case.

I once saw a startup that was building the “Oyo of manufacturing”. Just like Oyo helps hotels use their idle capacity, this founder would help manufacturers deploy theirs. Only two tiny chinks in his plan:

  1. Hotels have average capacity utilizations of around 60%. Manufacturers have much higher utilizations. And moreover, they don’t want to be at 100% – flexibility is important. If a plant has 80% utilization, there’s no idle capacity.
  2. Unlike hotels, production is stable. A plant owner doesn’t want one-off users. He’d prefer someone who promises orders for at least 6 months.

Pattern recognition has a flipside too. An average VC sees 500 pitches every year, to select 3-4. So, they’re far more well-versed in the patterns of bad startups than good ones. Be ready for sweeping statements!

VCs are far better at identifying bad startups than good ones.

[I’ve shared a more comprehensive list of patterns seen in bad startup ideas before.]

So what should you do instead?

Fundraising 101. Explain the problem you’re solving. Explain why it’s an important problem to solve. Then show your traction.

Or flip the order, if your traction is more compelling than your problem description.

These are the two most important things, for your investors to make money. They’ll be listening hard.

Not only does this avoid the pitfalls above, it also serves your original reasons better:

1. It’s much easier to explain.

The problem is now self-evident, and there’s a clear line-of-sight from problem to solution.

2. VCs would prefer identifying the patterns themselves.

Let’s say you’re trying to solve a particularly hard logical puzzle. Would you prefer it if your friend told you the answer, or would you rather figure it out yourself?

So it is with investors as well (at least with me). It’s my job to predict the future, and I’ll feel more fulfilled if I detect the pattern myself.

This may not be flamboyant. But it’ll be a better ego boost when a VC tells you that you’re the Uber of X!

TL:DR

  • Calling your startup “X of Y” while pitching to investors is a mistake.
  • It sounds like you’re replicating an existing model, rather than making an original attempt to solve a real problem.
  • It can also constrain your thinking.
  • Instead, simply state the problem you’re solving and how you’re solving it.
  • Leave the pattern-recognition to the investors.

PS. A far more insidious version of the “X of Y” template is “X of India”. I’ve written about it in this article.

PPS. I’m calling this “fundraising mistake #7” because (a) there are several other mistakes; and (b) I want to goad myself to put the rest of them down. So watch this space.

WARNING: Too much focus can constrain your startup

Successful entrepreneurs, investors and strategy experts all extol the virtues of focus. I have as well, as a strategy consultant, then a founder, a writer, and now as a seed stage investor at OperatorVC.

If you focus on a small segment, you can own it, dominate it.

So the conventional wisdom goes.

But there are times when focus can constrain a startup from achieving its potential. When you become a big fish in a small pond, while there are gloriously large oceans just around the corner.

How do you know which is which? How do you know when to focus, and when to extend?

Perils_of_focus

This came up in a conversation with Ankesh Kothari, a fellow entrepreneur and seed investor. He highlighted how a lot of startups focus too narrowly on a small market, and never expand. And we often see the opposite at OperatorVC. Startups trying to solve problems across a broad swathe of consumers from the outset. “Microsoft Office products that solve everyone’s problems”, as I call them here.

Here’s what’s interesting: neither of these is always the right answer.

Sometimes, you have to focus on a specific consumer segment. Make sure you solve a need deeply. At other times, you need to expand your horizons.

If you focus too acutely, you’ll never become a $100 million company.

This is not intuitive. You can’t be deep in the weeds one moment, and flying at 20,000 feet the next.

Great founders can alternate between these two opposite behaviors well. And legendary founders plan for this in advance.

Exhibit A: Elon Musk’s Master Plan for Tesla.

Before Tesla started, Musk anticipated when he would focus. And when he would extend lower in the price pyramid. And he wrote it all in a badass blog post, for all the world to see.

[Tweet “If you focus too acutely, you’ll never become a $100 million company.”]

So how can you be more like Elon Musk?

At its very basic, it’s three simple steps:

  1. Start with extreme focus. Focus on a narrow segment. Serve that segment’s needs so completely that you build a monopoly in it. Focus on a city, community, or neighborhood, and then OWN it
  2. Then, expand into an adjacent segment
  3. Repeat steps 1 and 2.

 

Several great startup successes have done exactly this:

  • Facebook: Started with a student listing, just for Harvard. Once Zuckerberg found product-market fit there, he then expanded to other universities. And then the rest of the world.
  • Uber: Started as a premium limo service. Only for select customers, only in San Francisco. Today, there’s a good chance you’re reading this sitting in an Uber.
  • In the 70s, two Harvard geeks built a simple Basic interpreter for the Altair, a decidedly non-popular microcomputer. How would that ever grow big? It did. You might have heard of Microsoft.
  • Oracle has done this scores of times, sometimes even pivoting at scale to a new, much larger market.

 

Now, I know what you’re saying. Hindsight is 20:20.

Is this just one of those clichés that you retrofit to success stories? Or is there actually a lesson here for people just starting out?

 

Is it even possible to be more like Elon Musk?

The Chasm model of product adoption is a great framework to know when to focus, and when to extend.

Chasm Model

At the trivial level, we all know this. Tech enthusiasts and early adopters will use your product first. The mass market (the Early Majority or “Pragmatists”) will gradually start using it later.

But the Chasm Model offers two new insights:

  1. There’s a “chasm” between the early adopters and the mass market (the early majority). It’s very hard to make that leap, and many startups die trying.
  2. Unlike the early adopters, the early majority aren’t interested in your tech. They are interested in its application to their most important needs.

And therein lies the way.

 

When to focus

Focus when you’re crossing the chasm.

Focus on a single narrow niche within the mass market. Understand that niche and its most important needs. Create an application of your technology tailored to that segment’s needs. Find product-market fit, and cement your place there. Own that niche.

  • Tesla first focused on the luxury segment. It built a perfect car. So good it broke the Consumer Reports rating system. Oh, and it was electric too.
  • Let’s take an example we’ve seen at OperatorVC. Say you’re building an AI based system to help people recover from illnesses. Don’t start coding algorithms for all the million diseases that are possible. Don’t even start with the 100 most prevalent diseases. Start with one disease. Just ONE.

 

When to extend

Extend once you own that first segment.

Select the next niche(s) in the mass market that you want to own. Again, design applications of your technology for those segments.

And REPEAT.

  • This is exactly what Tesla is doing now, working its way down the price segments.
  • Once the healthcare bot is perfect for that one disease, it’ll be much easier to expand to the next disease. And the next hundred.

[Tweet “Be like Elon Musk. Focus first. And then extend to own the world.”]


So, when you’re starting off, make sure you focus on a segment you can really own. But also be ready to extend later, so you can own the market.

Niche to win, baby. But then parlay.

[Tweet “Let focus be your superpower. But don’t let it become your kryptonite.”]


PS. Focus is really a superpower. See how focus can be a competitive advantage.

PPS. Read Crossing the Chasm. Few books have a higher wisdom / word ratio.

[A version of this article appeared in Yourstory on Oct 10, 2016]

What doesn’t get measured… doesn’t exist?

Many of us have heard the saying “What gets measured, gets managed”. A simple, yet powerful thought. With a simple corollary – what doesn’t get measured, doesn’t get managed.

But last week I heard an interesting anecdote that drove home the power of measurement. In reality, the corollary is far more extreme. In the eyes of the person responsible, what doesn’t get measured… doesn’t really exist.

But before we get into that, let’s take a second look at Peter Drucker’s statement.

What gets measured gets managed - Peter Drucker

In just five words, he captures an overwhelming amount of insight. On human behavior, cognitive biases, the power of incentives, and the strength of a goal-driven approach.

If you want something done, measure it. If there’s an objective number representing the outcome of your actions, you (or your team or partner) will automatically work towards improving it. If you’re assessing something subjectively (or not at all), then progress will never happen.

We see scores of examples of this, across our personal and professional lives:

A. Choose an objective metric

  1. If you need to exercise more, then don’t just tell yourself to do that every day. Track your activities. A guy I know walks up and down his office building five times every day, just so he can hit the step goal on his Fitbit.
  2. If you want to increase user engagement on your app, look at your Daily Active Users or Monthly Active Users metrics. Run experiments to increase them. Don’t directly start integrating fun-and-games mechanics without an objective goal.

B. Choose the right metric

  1. If you want to lose weight, don’t just count calories. Instead, count the amount of simple carbs you’re eating. [Aside: this is an excellent layman’s book on the subject].
  2. If you want your salespeople to increase sales, don’t measure the daily hours they clock. Count the amount of sales they make. Else, you’ll have diligent workers… who use Facebook 8 hours a day (9-5, on the clock).

As they say, “track it till you crack it” (it rhymes, so it must be true).

What doesn't get measured

Photo by Russ Hendricks on Flickr (https://bit.ly/32vlBp8)

But I heard a surprising story last week about Indian broadcast media. It underlined the power of the measure, or in business jargon, the Key Performance Indicator (KPI). It showed how, when marketers can’t measure their impact on a market, they all pretend it doesn’t exist. Even though they know full well that the market is substantial.

First, some quick background on the Indian broadcast market.

Traditional audience measurement was flawed

Till recently, TV broadcasters and advertisers in India measured impact of TV programming using an agency called TAM. TAM had special set-top boxes installed in 20K households across India, which tracked data on TV watching habits.

Using this, TAM could tell broadcasters how many people, in which cities, were watching which show. Broadcasters were incentivized to produce content that generated high TAM scores, so they could show this data to advertisers and demand hefty ad rates.

It was a useful KPI, aligning incentives all round. Except for a tiny problem – TAM’s sample was urban-centric. In a market where the rural populace forms a sizeable proportion of TV watchers.

Broadcasters recognized this problem, and fixed it

Since TAM placed disproportionate importance on urban TV viewing, it was clearly unrepresentative. And the powers-that-be knew that. So, in the last two years, the industry created an alternative – the Broadcast Audience Research Council, or BARC.

BARC looks at a much larger sample, including a sizeable rural proportion. The system rolled out just recently, with an objective of giving a clearer picture to broadcasters and advertisers.

Instantly, broadcasters started generating new, “rural-focused”, content

Here’s where it gets interesting.

As BARC launched, more and more shows with supernatural elements started appearing on TV. Even existing shows, whether staid family dramas or comedies, started having occult “tracks”. This is what happened in 2015:

  1. New shows were launched, like Darr Sabko Lagta Hai (“Everyone gets scared”), Naagin (rough translation: “serpent woman”), etc. In fact, Naagin was one of FOUR new shows about serpent-women!
  2. Many ongoing shows started introducing supernatural elements. Not only daily soaps (or saas-bahu shows as we call them in India), but also comedies.

Why did this happen? The reasoning goes – ghosts, serpent-people and others are integral parts of age-old Indian folklore. These beliefs are still a major part of rural lives. Hence we’ve introduced them to create a better connect with the new rural audience.

Disregard the blatant stereotyping for now (we’ll come back to it later). Assuming that this is what the rural audience wants, the logic makes eminent sense.

Except for one trivial detail.

The rural market is not new!

It has existed for some time. The 2011 Census showed that the no. of rural households with TVs were as many as urban. A major satellite TV company, Dish TV, said in 2013 that 50% of its connections were in rural areas.

Why then was television content urban-focused? Why were there no shows targeting the rural populace?

Because rural wasn’t measured.

The only number available was the urban-focused TAM, which was out of step with reality. And producers of TV shows, in full knowledge of this fact, nevertheless used it. There was no other number, so they followed this one. Single-minded and unswerving, like mice following the Pied Piper.

A classic example of availability bias.

[Tweet “If you can’t measure it, it doesn’t exist.”]

What does this mean for us? We need to be more careful than ever in choosing our KPI – the True North that we set our sails by.

If we don’t choose the right metric (or worse, choose the wrong one), the outcomes will be the antithesis of our objectives. No matter how well-meaning we or our colleagues are.

Coming back to our rural stereotype, we’ll find out how true it is in the coming months. If it isn’t, expect the broadcasters to nimbly eliminate the black magic tracks from their shows. It will be managed adeptly. After all, it’s getting measured now.


PS. I couldn’t help but see the link to quantum mechanics. At sub-atomic scales, things don’t exist until they are measured.

PPS. And in this article that first seems to be about politics, Scott Adams explains why this means our reality is probably a computer simulation.

Does a great market really pull product out of a startup?

Large market

Over the last few years, I’ve been quite interested in the startup investing process.

At the trivial level, understanding the investing process could help struggling entrepreneurs (like me) raise funding faster. And, assuming that this investing philosophy does pick winners, this could also teach us what kinds of businesses tend to make it big. And we could then apply those patterns to our own businesses.

Marc Andreessen wrote a landmark article in 2007, on the only thing that matters. If you haven’t read it, go do so now. I’ll wait.


I re-read this article every few months. One line stood out to me the first time itself (and every time since).

A great market pulls product out of a startup.

He channels Andy Rachleff (Co-founder of Benchmark Fund, one of the most successful VCs) in his article, saying:

When a great team meets a lousy market, market wins.
When a lousy team meets a great market, market wins.
When a great team meets a great market, something special happens.

Thus, of the three key dimensions of a startup opportunity – market, product and team – market is far and away the most important aspect.

What’s the takeaway for an entrepreneur? Take aim at a humongous market, and put your head down and execute.

But is that true? Is targeting a large market the only important factor? Are the team, technology, etc. not as important?[1]

[fancy_box id=6][content_upgrade id=500]BONUS: Do you want this article as an easy-to-read PDF?[/content_upgrade][/fancy_box]

Is large market the most important factor?

It certainly is, according to the conventional wisdom. According to Andy Rachleff, again:

The best investments have high technical risk and low market risk. Market risk causes companies to fail. In other words, you want companies that are highly likely to succeed if they can really deliver what they say they will.

Don’t take market risk – i.e., aim for markets that are already large. Instead, take tech risk – where the product itself is hard to create.

This sounds great, and is a commonly accepted truism. And it also seems to be common sense.

But, again, is it true?

One way to settle this is to look at the performance of venture capital over time. As they say, nothing talks like money. But a quick look at VC returns can be quite sobering.

The Kauffman Foundation reports that VC hasn’t outperformed public markets since the late 1990s. In fact, since 1997, VCs have returned less cash to investors than they invested!

Could it be that this VC approach of taking high tech risk but low market risk isn’t working? 

Tech matters (more)

I’ve just finished reading Crossing the Chasm, Geoffrey Moore’s landmark book. He presents technology adoption as a bell curve, with a few “gaps” between segments.

Chasm Model

It’s easy to get the innovators and the early adopters. They want to be the first to try new technologies, so they’re primed to be convinced. You start hitting the main market only with the next group, the early majority.

Moore’s key insight is that it’s not natural to move from the innovators and the early adopters to the early majority. That’s why there’s such a huge chasm between these segments in the image above. A graveyard of companies that show great early traction, but suddenly hit a wall and collapse into the chasm.

His model suggests two pointers for technology companies:

  1. Building a version of the tech, and serving innovators and early adopters, comes first.
  2. The real challenge is crossing the chasm. You need to find a specific application to solve the early majority’s existing problems. This market isn’t visible or obvious at first – you need to create / discover it.

Thus, tech companies don’t take tech risk. They take market risk. If they find a big market, they succeed big. If they don’t, they fail. 

Don’t take tech risk. Take market risk. If you find a big market, you succeed big. Else, you fail.

Jerry Neumann has written an excellent history of venture capital in the 80s. He makes a few similar observations (I paraphrase):

  • Whenever VC returns peaked, the driver was high market risk. Would there be a big market for computers (60s, Intel)? Would there be a big market for PCs (70s, Apple, Microsoft)? Would biotech become big (Genentech)? Would the Internet reach the masses, or would it remain a plaything of the elite (90s)?
  • These markets may seem inevitable today, but that’s just hindsight bias. Ask Ken Olsen. Or Thomas Watson. Or anyone in this article.
  • In most cases, investors didn’t take tech risk. Often, they found already-working products. Apple’s technology was already working when it raised funding.
  • Whenever VCs tried to reduce market risk to stabilize returns, they failed. For example, in the 80s, they entered more traditional, massive industries like retail. Result: returns were consistent and stable. But bad.

Thus, VCs didn’t often take tech risk. They preferred technologies that were already proven, and showed promise. And whenever they tried to reduce market risk by entering existing large markets, they failed.

At the end, Jerry summarizes:

The only thing VCs can control that will improve their outcomes is having enough guts to bet on markets that don’t yet exist. Everything else is noise.

There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home – Ken Olsen, Founder, DEC
There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home – Ken Olsen, Founder, DEC

Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund adds its own voice to the argument. It highlights how, from the 60s to the 90s, VC was a predictor of the future. Today, though,

VC has ceased to be the funder of the future, and instead has become a funder of features, widgets, irrelevances. In large part, it also ceased making money, as the bottom half of venture produced flat to negative return for the past decade.

When you focus on incremental innovation, for a market that’s here and now, returns fall.

And last, Paul Graham makes a similar point, even more indirectly:

When something is described as a toy, that means it has everything an idea needs except being important. It’s cool; users love it; it just doesn’t matter. But if you’re living in the future and you build something cool that users love, it may matter more than outsiders think. Microcomputers seemed like toys when Apple and Microsoft started working on them… The Facebook was just a way for undergrads to stalk one another.

Build a product users love. Even if the market’s small today, it could become massive in the future.

I alluded to a similar point in a previous article, where I said that you must target a deep need for a narrow population, rather than a shallow need for a broad one.

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What about the team, then?

As a VC friend of mine was quick to remind me when we discussed this, the quality of the team is incredibly important!

Large Market or Strong Team

But this quality is not theoretical or bookish. It’s not about which Ivy League school you graduated from. Or even whether you have a string of successes under your belt (at least in consumer).

Instead, it’s about three things:

  1. How driven you are. Will you overturn that 99th stone to find the gold mine? Or will the first 2-3 pivots fatigue you? Your initial ideas for tackling a problem will rarely be right. You’ll need to persist: find a new beachhead, and wade in again.
  2. Are you willing to learn? Again, you won’t be right the first time. They say industry knowledge is a great unfair advantage. True, but it’s also a double-edged sword.
  3. Can you execute?

So what’s the conclusion?

Which of these three is the most important?

The ex-consultant in me would answer, “all three”. And he’d throw in an “it depends” for good measure.

But it appears the conventional VC wisdom, of taking tech risk but not market risk, is wrong. As the Founders’ Fund article above says, the current trend of funding incremental innovations and more efficient solutions for existing markets is what has pushed VC returns downwards.

And what does this mean for entrepreneurs? Instead of trying to build something for large markets that VCs seem to be interested in, “swing for the fences”. But not in the conventional sense of aiming for large markets. Instead, try and piggy back on emerging trends that could become waves.

Sure, you’ll probably strike out. But should the market materialize, you will laugh all the way to buying the bank.


I’d love to hear your opinions. If you’re an entrepreneur or startup investor – what’s your stand on market risk vs. tech risk? Do email me at [email protected], tweet at @jithamithra, or comment here. I’d love to publish a follow-up sharing your opinions.

Thanks to Aditi Gupta and Abhishek Agarwal for commenting on drafts of this post.

[1] This article is about VC backable startup, and not a small business in general. Many great cashflow businesses (e.g., auto dealerships, general manufacturing) are often not high-growth businesses that can return 20x on invested capital, and are therefore not VC backable. See this article for a great description of such businesses.

How to break the chicken and egg problem – A Framework

In March last year, I published an article called How Uber solved its chicken and egg problem (and you can too!).

Multi-sided business models are a unique phenomenon – unlike standard businesses which offer a product / service to a particular type of consumer, multi-sided businesses don’t offer any product / service. Rather, they provide a platform that connects buyers and sellers.

Think of Uber – it connects cab drivers and passengers, who benefit each other. E-commerce marketplaces are also examples – they connect buyers with sellers.

Such businesses face a natural chicken and egg problem. For the platform to be useful, both sides have to be present. Sellers won’t come on to your platform without buyers, and buyers won’t come either, unless there’s enough choice (i.e., sellers).

For example, people buy video game consoles only if there are games they can play. But game designers make games for a console only if there are enough people who own it. The proverbial chicken and egg problem. How do one solve this impasse?

The above article discussed a few ways in which businesses can break this deadlock. Many readers wrote in after the article, asking if I could create a framework / checklist that they could use to brainstorm ways to scale their own multi-sided businesses.

Towards that end, I recently published this presentation on SlideShare. Check it out, download it, and let me know what you think!

5 remarkable ideas that transformed how I think in 2015

Ideas_Bookshelf

Regular readers of this blog and my newsletter (subscribe here if you haven’t!) know that I’m an avid reader. 2015, for me, was a year of quantity. I read 60+ books, and at least ten times as many articles.

Some of these were bad, some good, and some changed my perspective on work and life.

I could list the top 5 books I read in the year. But instead, let me present the top 5 ideas that transformed my thinking, and the books I found them in.

[Note: You can find my 2014 list here.]

1. Keystone Habit – One Habit to Rule Them All (The Power of Habit)

I’ve written before about Thinking, Fast and Slow, and the difference between System 1 and System 2 thinking. The former is rapid, automatic, instinctive and judgmental. The latter is slower, more considered and analytical, and more effortful.

In most situations, we tend to use the quick-and-dirty System 1. The more methodical System 2 is quite lazy.

This proclivity to use System 1 underlines the importance of habits. Such sequential, repetitive tasks are so ingrained that we do them without thinking. The essence of System 1.

For instance, do you think when you’re brushing your teeth in the morning? More likely you’re so woozy you can’t walk straight. Still, your teeth are sparkling clean by the end of it.

That’s the power of habits – you can do certain tasks without thinking.

To understand more about habits, I read two books this year – Hooked and The Power of Habit. They talk a lot about the structure of habits, how to build good habits, how to break bad habits, etc.

But the most powerful concept to me was that of the keystone habit. Keystone habits are small, narrow habits in one area of your life that impact several other areas in a significant manner.

As Charles Duhigg says in The Power of Habit:

Some habits have the power to start a chain reaction, changing other habits as they move through an organization. Some habits, in other words, matter more than others in remaking businesses and lives. These are “keystone habits,” and they can influence how people work, eat, play, live, spend, and communicate. Keystone habits start a process that, over time, transforms everything.

A few examples of this are:

  1. Exercise. When you start exercising, even if only once a week, it triggers changes in various other areas. You start eating better. You become more productive and confident at work. You show more patience towards your family and colleagues. All because of a few push-ups once a week. That’s a keystone habit.
  2. Making your bed every morning. It’s a tiny, almost irrelevant change. But studies show that this correlates with better productivity, greater well-being, and more willpower.
  3. Willpower. This is the most important keystone habit. Studies show that willpower in children is the most accurate indicator of academic performance throughout their student lives. Even more accurate than IQ.

At an organizational level as well, keystone habits can have transformative impact. The book cites an example of how a worker safety program at Alcoa ended up not only improving safety, but also turning Alcoa into a profit machine.

How do these small, unrelated habits have such widespread impact? In Duhigg’s own words:

Small wins fuel transformative changes by leveraging tiny advantages into patterns that convince people that bigger achievements are within reach.

So what are your keystone habits at life and work?

Books: The Power of Habit, Hooked

Further Reading: Pregnant mothers – the holy grail of retail; Keystone habits: why they are important, and how you can build them effortlessly

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2. Rewards and their Unintended Consequences (Drive)

Incentives are strange, powerful beasts. Whether it’s pocket money we give children for doing household tasks or bonuses our bosses give us for exceeding sales targets, incentives play a key role in driving us to perform.

As Charlie Munger, legendary investor, says in his famous Psychology of Human Misjudgment speech,

I think I’ve been in the top five percent of my age cohort almost all my adult life in understanding the power of incentives, and yet I’ve always underestimated that power. Never a year passes but I get some surprise that pushes a little further my appreciation of incentive superpower.

Given the immense power of incentives, it becomes all the more important to design them right. If they’re even slightly misaligned, they can “damage civilization” (Munger’s words, a tad hyperbolic).

I read Drive earlier this year – an insightful book on the powers of rewards. The book also talks about the negative influences of incentives, if not designed well.

  1. Incentives can drown out intrinsic motivation, even when you’re doing a task you enjoy. If you receive an incentive for doing something, you also receive a subliminal message that the task is not worth doing without the incentive. End result: incentives transform an interesting task into a drudge, and play into work.

[Tweet “Incentives transform an interesting task into a drudge, and play into work.”]

  1. Incentives can only give a short-term boost. Like caffeine, they’re useful when a deadline looms. But beware the energy crash that will inevitably follow.
  2. Rewards can become addictive. As Daniel Pink, the author, says – Yes, rewards motivate people. To get more rewards.
  3. Incentives do have their uses, but only for process-oriented tasks. In fact, incentives for creative tasks can impede progress. They narrow your focus at the exact moment when you need broad thinking.

The book captures many more interesting and significant implications of an innocuous, innocent incentive.

Book: Drive

Further Reading: Yes, rewards motivate people. To get more rewards.

 

3. Your MVP can be more “minimum” than you think (Lean Startup)

Most people working in the startup ecosystem are familiar with the Minimum Viable Product. The MVP is the most basic version of your product that still delivers your core offering.

It’s an important concept to keep in mind as you build a product. You don’t want to spend too much time building the first version, before realizing customers don’t want it.

I thought I’d understood the concept well. I congratulated myself as I built my first product in three months, found that people didn’t need it, and junked it. And again when I built my next product in four months, tested it with customers for three, and then pivoted it to its current form.

Then I read Lean Startup.

I realized then that I’d taken far too long to build my MVP. What’s more – so had everyone else I know. Why do we all take so damn long to build an MVP?

The reason is that we’ve got the concept wrong. You don’t need to ‘build’ an MVP. You just need to put it together.

What does that mean?

Let’s say you want to create a website offering fashion tips. You can launch in one day or less.

  1. Buy a domain. 3 hours (the actual purchase will take 2 min. But I know you’ll agonize over names for the remaining 2 hours 58. And no, the name won’t matter.)
  2. Build a landing page with Unbounce where people can ask questions or upload photos. 1 hour.
  3. Run a small Facebook campaign publicizing the site. Or tell 10 friends, and tell them to tell 10 more each. That’s your test audience. 2 hours. 

Thus, you can be up and running tomorrow! Even if you’re slow because this is your first time.

[Tweet “Your Minimum Viable Product can be more “minimum” than you think.”]

Many popular products of today hacked together such makeshift MVPs when they started. Check out the article in Further Reading for examples.

Books: Lean Startup, Four Steps to the Epiphany (focused more on the actual process of building a company in the Lean Startup way)

Further Reading: Your Minimum Viable Product can be more “Minimum” than you think; Have a great business idea? Don’t quit your job yet.

 

4. Pareto Principle & the Minimum Effective Dose (Four Hour Work Week)

Four Hour Work Week, by Tim Ferriss, is THE book to read on personal and business productivity. Unlike most productivity books and blogs, he eschews all the standard life-hacking methods (of the “shake your hips while you brush your teeth, to get some exercise” variety).

All he has to say about traditional time management is, “Forget all about it.”

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Instead, he focuses on using the Pareto Principle, or the 80/20 rule. He uses this to introduce the concept of the Minimum Effective Dose – the smallest amount of effort for the most impact.

Whether your customers, your vendors, books you read, anything – choose the few that give you the most value, and forget about the rest.

He should know. He puts the Pareto principle on steroids. Sample this:

  1. In his nutrition products business, he “fired” the least profitable 97% (!) of his customers, to instead focus on the 3% most promising ones and double his income.
  2. He eliminated 70% of his advertising costs and almost doubled his direct sales income.
  3. He discontinued over 99% of his online affiliates.

Eliminating the least value tasks and business relationships helped him free up his time to do more productive tasks. And achieve the Holy Grail of less work but more profit. That’s how you do productivity!

Side note: In his follow up book, The Four Hour Body, Ferriss uses the concept of the Minimum Effective Dose to illustrate how to become more healthy. Check that out too.

Books: Four Hour Work Week, Four Hour Body

Further Reading: Winners don’t do things differently. They do different things., The Power of the Minimum Effective Dose

 

5. What’s your BATNA? (Getting to Yes)

One skill I tried to build last year was negotiation and persuasion. I read three great books on the subject. I’m still to have the investor conversations where I’ll use this skill, so I don’t know how much they’ve helped!

But one concept that has stuck is that of the BATNA – the Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement. In simple terms, the BATNA is your fall-back option in case talks fall through.

Your BATNA is tantamount to your leverage in the negotiation. It works in two ways.

1. The better your BATNA, the more leverage you have.

Let’s say you’re negotiating the sale of your house with a prospective buyer. Your alternative to this is to (a) rent it out; (b) sell it to a land developer to make a parking lot, and (c) live there yourself. If option (b), say, is the most attractive of these, then that’s your BATNA. The value the land developer offers you should form the baseline for the negotiation.

As long as the buyer’s offer is higher than this, you can reduce your price (after making a big deal of it, of course).

Far more important though, is that if the buyer pushes you below this BATNA, you can and should refuse. This is difficult. We tend to over-invest emotionally in a long negotiation. But with this hard stop in mind, you can overrule your emotions and walk away.

2. The worse you make your opponent’s BATNA, the more leverage you have.

Improving your BATNA gives you leverage. Straightforward. But there’s a more interesting insight here. You can improve your leverage by worsening your opponent’s BATNA.

Let’s say you’re the prospective buyer in the above transaction. You know that your seller is holding out because of the safety net of the land developer.

So, you remove that safety net. For example, you could sell one of your own other properties to the land developer, so he’s no longer making an offer to your seller.

By removing the most promising alternative your seller has, you’re weakening his leverage. And strengthening your own considerably.

[Tweet “Show your opponent he has a lot to lose from breaking talks, and he’ll be surprisingly pliable.”]

Books: Getting to Yes, Influence, Bargaining for Advantage

 

6. [BONUS] Focus on strengths, not lack of weaknesses (The Hard Thing about Hard Things)

By default, we are all risk averse. In fact, Loss Aversion is one of the strongest, most deep-rooted cognitive biases there is, squirming deep inside our brain’s reptilian core.

This loss aversion manifests itself in several ways. Holding on to bad-performing stocks in the hope of a turnaround. Not making bets because of high risk, even if the reward is much higher.

In the corporate environment, this results in a preference for well-rounded candidates. We tend to choose such people over others who are spiky in some areas, but middling in others. We choose average programmers with great communication skills over 10x programmers who are introverts. We reject uber-salesmen just because they don’t know much about tech.

As Ben Horowitz says in this book, that’s the exact wrong approach. That’s not how great organizations work. Instead, such organizations look for excellent candidates, who are in the top 1 percentile of their roles. Never mind that they’re not good at other things.

“Identify the strengths you want, and the weaknesses you’re willing to tolerate.”

Your Product team should have the best programmers. Even if their communication skills could be better. For sales, hire the best salesmen out there, even if they’ve not worked in your industry before.

We also tend to paper over the weaknesses and focus on repairing them. Again, not the most optimal approach. Instead, focus on honing your employees’ strengths. Plug the weaknesses (If they’re important. They often aren’t.) by hiring superstars in those areas.

[Tweet “Identify the strengths you want, and the weaknesses you’re willing to tolerate.”]

Books: The Hard Thing about Hard Things

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So, those were the books and ideas that captivated my thinking in the last year. Here’s to many more brilliant ideas and books in the new year. Of course, you’ll be the first to know of any great books I find (sign up here to receive regular updates!).