Startup Team Quotes

There can’t be anything more fatal to a business than making decisions based on somebody else’s assumptions.

Being successful is not that tough, you just need a little mindset change.

Business growth happens when people remember you.

You don’t want to run your business based on mere suspicions and assumptions.

A successful business owner will know their business as good as they know their favorite celebrity, their partner, and even their dogs.

Accepting that you’re wrong, shows humility which will set a better example of you as a leader on your team than sticking to something that others can clearly see is wrong.

Become a leader that shows humility and not stubbornness.

Search engines' results aren’t always trustworthy. As a matter of fact, they can be easily manipulated.

You probably can’t be the Google of 2014 in terms of compensation or perks, but you can be like the Google of 1999 if you already have good answers about your mission and team.

A startup is a team of people on a mission, and a good culture is just what that looks like on the inside.

The best thing you can do to come up with a lot of new ideas is to learn a lot of old ideas. Because new ideas are just connections between old ideas, the more ideas you have in your head, the more connections you’ll be able to create between them.

The Engineering Question Can you create breakthrough technology instead of incremental improvements? 2. The Timing Question Is now the right time to start your particular business? 3. The Monopoly Question Are you starting with a big share of a small market? 4. The People Question Do you have the right team? 5. The Distribution Question Do you have a way to not just create but deliver your product? 6. The Durability Question Will your market position be defensible 10 and 20 years into the future? 7. The Secret Question Have you identified a unique opportunity that others don’t see?

A team in the business world will tend to perform at the level of the worst individual team member

but how to establish a process by which a sales team of modest size can move the product to a wide audience.

Every successful start-up is built on four pillars. Team, Idea, Passion & Presentations

Most important, teams working in this system begin to measure their productivity according to validated learning, not in terms of the production of new features.

Boyd’s Law: speed of iteration beats quality of iteration.

Henry, you’re not a team player,” she said in an icy tone. “I think you should leave right now.

Team performance is directly proportional to team stability. Focus on building and maintaining a stable team. Stability reduces friction and increases credibility and confidence.

While Elizabeth was fast to catch on to engineering concepts, Sunny was often out of his depth during engineering discussions. To hide it, he had a habit of repeating technical terms he heard others using. During a meeting with Arnav’s team, he latched onto the term “end effector,” which signifies the claws at the end of a robotic arm. Except Sunny didn’t hear “end effector,” he heard “endofactor.” For the rest of the meeting, he kept referring to the fictional endofactors. At their next meeting with Sunny two weeks later, Arnav’s team brought a PowerPoint presentation titled “Endofactors Update.” As Arnav flashed it on a screen with a projector, the five members of his team stole furtive glances at one another, nervous that Sunny might become wise to the prank. But he didn’t bat an eye and the meeting proceeded without incident. After he left the room, they burst out laughing.

If a competitor can outexecute a startup once the idea is known, the startup is doomed anyway. The reason to build a new team to pursue an idea is that you believe you can accelerate through the Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop faster than anyone else can.

Ian also had issues with Elizabeth’s management, especially the way she siloed the groups off from one another and discouraged them from communicating. The reason she and Sunny invoked for this way of operating was that Theranos was “in stealth mode,” but it made no sense to Ian. At the other diagnostics companies where he had worked, there had always been cross-functional teams with representatives from the chemistry, engineering, manufacturing, quality control, and regulatory departments working toward a common objective. That was how you got everyone on the same page, solved problems, and met deadlines.

Westrum’s description of a rule-oriented culture is perhaps best thought of as one where following the rules is considered more important than achieving the mission—and we have worked with teams in the US Federal Government we would have no issue describing as generative, as well as startups that are clearly pathological.

So all you need is a great idea, a great team, a great product, and great execution. So easy! ;)

If you don’t give your team permission to fail, you’re not giving them permission to innovate.

If you want to glide toward money, you have to make sure your message is clear as a bell, and you need to ensure that you have a unified team capable of communicating it.

If you focus on the strength of the team, you will begin to find work as a positive challenge.

During a meeting with Arnav’s team, he latched onto the term “end effector,” which signifies the claws at the end of a robotic arm. Except Sunny didn’t hear “end effector,” he heard “endofactor.” For the rest of the meeting, he kept referring to the fictional endofactors. At their next meeting with Sunny two weeks later, Arnav’s team brought a PowerPoint presentation titled “Endofactors Update.

he bragged that he’d written a million lines of code. Some employees thought that was preposterous. Sunny had worked at Microsoft, where teams of software engineers had written the Windows operating system at the rate of one thousand lines of code per year of development. Even if you assumed Sunny was twenty times faster than the Windows developers, it would still have taken him fifty years to do what he claimed.

Venture capitalists, with the exception of people like Don Valentine, would tell you that they'd rather fund a great team than a great idea. The reason is that if they have a bad idea, great teams can figure out a better one. Mediocre people even with a great idea can screw it up in its execution. Or if they have a bad idea, then they aren't going to be in a position to think about how to change it. They're just going to pursue it blindly.

Cycle after cycle, the team is working hard, but the business is not seeing results. Managers trained in a traditional model draw the logical conclusion: our team is not working hard, not working effectively, or not working efficiently.

what kind of environment encourages new ideas? It varies from person to person, but here are the most common ingredients: Give yourself plenty of time. Keep an idea journal. Work on the problem. Get away from work. Add constraints. Look for pain points. Talk to others.

Gene Berdichevsky, one of the members of the solar-powered-car team, lit up the second he heard from Straubel. An undergraduate, Berdichevsky volunteered to quit school, work for free, and sweep the floors at Tesla if that’s what it took to get a job. The founders were impressed with his spirit and hired Berdichevsky after one meeting. This left Berdichevsky in the uncomfortable position of calling his Russian immigrant parents, a pair of nuclear submarine engineers, to tell them that he was giving up on Stanford to join an electric car start-up. As employee No. 7, he spent part of the workday in the Menlo Park office and the rest in Straubel’s living room designing three-dimensional models of the car’s powertrain on a computer and building battery pack prototypes in the garage. “Only now do I realize how insane it was,” Berdichevsky said.

I like innovation. I like ideas. I like people and I like being part of winning teams. I don't gamble, I don't watch sports, I don't do any of those things. What I like to do is bet on people in the innovation business, so as soon as I had the capacity, that’s what I started doing as an individual—writing some small checks, and then some bigger checks.

a quote from John Doerr, the famous Silicon Valley venture capitalist: “We need teams of missionaries, not teams of mercenaries.” Mercenaries build whatever they're told to build. Missionaries are true believers in the vision and are committed to solving problems for their customers. In a dedicated product team, the team acts and feels a lot like a startup within the larger company, and that's very much the intention.

This was a huge red flag, because real technologists wear T-shirts and jeans. So we instituted a blanket rule: pass on any company whose founders dressed up for pitch meetings. Maybe we still would have avoided these bad investments if we had taken the time to evaluate each company’s technology in detail. But the team insight—never invest in a tech CEO that wears a suit—got us to the truth a lot faster. The best sales is hidden. There’s nothing wrong with a CEO who can sell, but if he actually looks like a salesman, he’s probably bad at sales and worse at tech.

The Engineering Question Can you create breakthrough technology instead of incremental improvements? 2. The Timing Question Is now the right time to start your particular business? 3. The Monopoly Question Are you starting with a big share of a small market? 4. The People Question Do you have the right team? 5. The Distribution Question Do you have a way to not just create but deliver your product? 6. The Durability Question Will your market position be defensible 10 and 20 years into the future? 7. The Secret Question Have you identified a unique opportunity that others don’t see? We

On the day the company starts, there is very limited customer input to a product specification. The company doesn’t know who its initial customers are (but it may think it knows) or what they will want as features. One alternative is to put Product Development on hold until the Customer Development team can find those customers. However, having a product you can demonstrate and iterate is helpful in moving the Customer Development process along. A more productive approach is to proceed with Product Development, with the feature list driven by the vision and experience of the company’s founders.

Had anyone from Detroit stopped by Tesla Motors at this point, they would have ended up in hysterics. The sum total of the company’s automotive expertise was that a couple of the guys at Tesla really liked cars and another one had created a series of science fair projects based on technology that the automotive industry considered ridiculous. What’s more, the founding team had no intention of turning to Detroit for advice on how to build a car company. No, Tesla would do what every other Silicon Valley start-up had done before it, which was hire a bunch of young, hungry engineers and figure things out as they went along.

As soon as we formulate a hypothesis that we want to test, the product development team should be engineered to design and run this experiment as quickly as possible, using the smallest batch size that will get the job done. Remember that although we write the feedback loop as Build-Measure-Learn because the activities happen in that order, our planning really works in the reverse order: we figure out what we need to learn and then work backwards to see what product will work as an experiment to get that learning. Thus, it is not the customer, but rather our hypothesis about the customer, that pulls work from product development and other functions. Any other work is waste.

One remarkable part of the SnapTax story is what the team leaders said when I asked them to account for their unlikely success. Did they hire superstar entrepreneurs from outside the company? No, they assembled a team from within Intuit. Did they face constant meddling from senior management, which is the bane of innovation teams in many companies? No, their executive sponsors created an “island of freedom” where they could experiment as necessary. Did they have a huge team, a large budget, and lots of marketing dollars? Nope, they started with a team of five. What allowed the SnapTax team to innovate was not their genes, destiny, or astrological signs but a process deliberately facilitated by Intuit’s senior management.

Focus on People, Perseverance, and Passion These “Three P’s” are the keys to successful entrepreneurship. People are the most important, particularly in the first year of a venture. To maximize their value, spend as much time as you can assembling the best possible team that really complements your skill set and can lead a little bit into where you’re heading, not just where you are. Creating the right kind of dynamic in terms of culture and commitment is really critical. Perseverance: never underestimate the value of really caring about your idea and being unwilling to drop it. If you have a big idea, and you know in your heart it’s going to happen (Passion), but know there will be roadblocks and challenges along the way. In this regard, a high degree of passion and commitment is extremely important. In my experience, really big ideas often take a decade to reach fruition. Sign

As the other startups do at the end of their presentations, Shen offers to the batch the expertise of his team's members: "Kalvin and Randy are developers," he says, and as for himself, he knows how to stay motivated in the face of rejection. "I've gotten rejected thirty days in a row," he says, a reference to his putting himself through "Rejection Therapy," in which one must make unreasonable requests so that one is rejected by a different person, at least once, every single day- inuring one to the pain of rejection. (One example of Shen's first bid to be rejected: he asked a flight attendant if he could move up to first class for free. In another case, he saw an attractive woman on the train and decided he would ask her for her phone number, and when she would turn him down, he would have fulfilled the day's required quota of rejection. He sat near her, fell into a conversation, and when they got off the train and he asked for her number, she said, "Sure." He categorized this as "Failed Rejection.") "So if you need to get pumped up for your sales calls, talk to me. p121

Mosseri’s answer to the important question was perfect by Facebook standards: “Technology isn’t good or bad—it just is,” he wrote. “Social media is a great amplifier. We need to do all we can responsibly to magnify the good and address the bad.” But nothing “just is,” especially Instagram. Instagram isn’t designed to be a neutral technology, like electricity or computer code. It’s an intentionally crafted experience, with an impact on its users that is not inevitable, but is the product of a series of choices by its makers about how to shape behavior. Instagram trained its users on likes and follows, but that wasn’t enough to create the emotional attachment users have to the product today. They also thought about their users as individuals, through the careful curation of an editorial strategy, and partnerships with top accounts. Instagram’s team is expert at amplifying “the good.” When it comes to addressing “the bad,” though, employees are concerned the app is thinking in terms of numbers, not people. Facebook’s top argument against a breakup is that its “family of apps” evolution will be better for users’ safety. “If you want to prevent interference in elections, if you want to reduce[…]

Launching “Buy It Now” was a large change that touched every transaction, but the eBay team also innovated across the experience for both sellers and buyers as well. With an initial success, we doubled down on innovation to drive growth. We introduced stores on eBay, which dramatically increased the amount of product offered for sale on the platform. We expanded the menu of optional features that sellers could purchase to better highlight their listings on the site. We improved the post-transaction experience on ebay.com by significantly improving the “checkout” flow, including the eventual seamless integration of PayPal on the eBay site. Each of these innovations supported the growth of the business and helped to keep that gravity at bay. Years later, Jeff became a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, where he would kick off the firm’s success in startups with network effects, investing in Airbnb, Instacart, Pinterest, and others. I’m lucky to work with him! He recounted in an essay on the a16z blog that his strategy was to grow eBay by adding layers and layers of new revenue—like “adding layers to the cake.” You can see it visually here: Figure 12: eBay’s growth layer cake As the core US business began to look more like a line than a hockey stick, international and payments were layered on top. Together, the aggregate business started to look like a hockey stick, but underneath it was actually many new lines of business.

But Holbrooke brought to every job he ever held a visionary quality that transcended practical considerations. He talked openly about changing the world. “If Richard calls you and asks you for something, just say yes,” Henry Kissinger said. “If you say no, you’ll eventually get to yes, but the journey will be very painful.” We all said yes. By the summer, Holbrooke had assembled his Ocean’s Eleven heist team—about thirty of us, from different disciplines and agencies, with and without government experience. In the Pakistani press, the colorful additions to the team were watched closely, and generally celebrated. Others took a dimmer view. “He got this strange band of characters around him. Don’t attribute that to me,” a senior military leader told me. “His efforts to bring into the State Department representatives from all of the agencies that had a kind of stake or contribution to our efforts, I thought was absolutely brilliant,” Hillary Clinton said, “and everybody else was fighting tooth and nail.” It was only later, when I worked in the wider State Department bureaucracy as Clinton’s director of global youth issues during the Arab Spring, that I realized how singular life was in the Office of the Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan—quickly acronymed, like all things in government, to SRAP. The drab, low-ceilinged office space next to the cafeteria was about as far from the colorful open workspaces of Silicon Valley as you could imagine, but it had the feeling of a start-up.

One day Spinner, the woman who runs PR tells me, “I like that idea, but I’m not sure that it’s one-plus-one-equals-three enough.” What does any of this nutty horseshit actually mean? I have no idea. I’m just amazed that hundreds of people can gobble up this malarkey and repeat it, with straight faces. I’m equally amazed by the high regard in which HubSpot people hold themselves. They use the word awesome incessantly, usually to describe themselves or each other. That’s awesome! You’re awesome! No, you’re awesome for saying that I’m awesome! They pepper their communication with exclamation points, often in clusters, like this!!! They are constantly sending around emails praising someone who is totally crushing it and doing something awesome and being a total team player!!! These emails are cc’d to everyone in the department. The protocol seems to be for every recipient to issue his or her own reply-to-all email joining in on the cheer, writing things like “You go, girl!!” and “Go, HubSpot, go!!!!” and “Ashley for president!!!” Every day my inbox fills up with these little orgasmic spasms of praise. At first I ignore them, but then I feel like a grump and decide I should join in the fun. I start writing things like, “Jan is the best!!! Her can-do attitude and big smile cheer me up every morning!!!!!!!” (Jan is the grumpy woman who runs the blog; she scowls a lot.) Sometimes I just write something with lots of exclamation points, like, “Woo-hoo!!!!!!! Congratulations!!!!!!! You totally rock!!!!!!!!!!!!” Eventually someone suspects that I am taking the piss, and I am told to cut that shit out.

In fact, the same basic ingredients can easily be found in numerous start-up clusters in the United States and around the world: Austin, Boston, New York, Seattle, Shanghai, Bangalore, Istanbul, Stockholm, Tel Aviv, and Dubai. To discover the secret to Silicon Valley’s success, you need to look beyond the standard origin story. When people think of Silicon Valley, the first things that spring to mind—after the HBO television show, of course—are the names of famous start-ups and their equally glamorized founders: Apple, Google, Facebook; Jobs/ Wozniak, Page/ Brin, Zuckerberg. The success narrative of these hallowed names has become so universally familiar that people from countries around the world can tell it just as well as Sand Hill Road venture capitalists. It goes something like this: A brilliant entrepreneur discovers an incredible opportunity. After dropping out of college, he or she gathers a small team who are happy to work for equity, sets up shop in a humble garage, plays foosball, raises money from sage venture capitalists, and proceeds to change the world—after which, of course, the founders and early employees live happily ever after, using the wealth they’ve amassed to fund both a new generation of entrepreneurs and a set of eponymous buildings for Stanford University’s Computer Science Department. It’s an exciting and inspiring story. We get the appeal. There’s only one problem. It’s incomplete and deceptive in several important ways. First, while “Silicon Valley” and “start-ups” are used almost synonymously these days, only a tiny fraction of the world’s start-ups actually originate in Silicon Valley, and this fraction has been getting smaller as start-up knowledge spreads around the globe. Thanks to the Internet, entrepreneurs everywhere have access to the same information. Moreover, as other markets have matured, smart founders from around the globe are electing to build companies in start-up hubs in their home countries rather than immigrating to Silicon Valley.

Betsy didn’t want to be at the party any more than Cole did. She’d met the birthday girl in a spin class a couple of years earlier and had been declining her Evites ever since. In an effort to meet new people, however, this time Betsy replied “Yes.” She took a cab to the party, wondering why she was going at all. When Betsy met Cole there was a spark, but she was ambivalent. Cole was clearly smart and well educated, but he didn’t seem to be doing much about it. They had some nice dates, which seemed promising. Then, after sleeping over one night and watching Cole wake up at eleven a.m. and grab his skateboard, Betsy felt less bullish. She didn’t want to help another boyfriend grow up. What Betsy didn’t know was that, ever since he’d started spending time with her, Cole had regained some of his old drive. He saw the way she wanted to work on her sculptures even on the weekend, how she and her friends loved to get together to talk about their projects and their plans. As a result, Cole started to think more aspirationally. He eyed a posting for a good tech job at a high-profile start-up, but he felt his résumé was now too shabby to apply. As luck would have it—and it is often luck—Cole remembered that an old friend from high school, someone he bumped into about once every year or two, worked at the start-up. He got in touch, and this friend put in a good word to HR. After a handful of interviews with different people in the company, Cole was offered the position. The hiring manager told Cole he had been chosen for three reasons: His engineering degree suggested he knew how to work hard on technical projects, his personality seemed like a good fit for the team, and the twentysomething who vouched for him was well liked in the company. The rest, the manager said, Cole could learn on the job. This one break radically altered Cole’s career path. He learned software development at a dot-com on the leading edge. A few years later, he moved over and up as a director of development at another start-up because, by then, the identity capital he’d gained could speak for itself. Nearly ten years later, Cole and Betsy are married. She runs a gallery co-op. He’s a CIO. They have a happy life and gladly give much of the credit to Cole’s friend from high school and to the woman with the Evites.

The complex nature of today's innovations requires teams of people with diverse skills. As Victor Hwang and Greg Horowitt describe in their book, The Rainforest: The Secret to Building the Next Silicon Valley, we are in need of diverse teams more than ever, but we are unfortunately hardwired to distrust people who are different from us. The ability to consistently overcome this limitation of human nature separates vibrant innovation systems from the others.

It is not tough to fight against giant companies whose people don't talk to each other. Just ace team play.

The product launch and first customer ship dates are merely the dates when a product development team thinks the product’s first release is “finished.” It doesn’t mean the company understands its customers or how to market or sell to them, yet in almost every startup, ready or not, departmental clocks are set irrevocably to “first customer ship.” Even worse, a startup’s investors are managing their financial expectations by this date as well.

Teams were involved in creating new technologies, processes, and systems. • Cross-functional teams were formed around new great ideas. • Customers were involved from the inception of each feature concept. It’s important to understand that the old approach did not lack customer feedback or customer involvement in the planning process. In the true spirit of genchi gembutsu, Intuit product managers (PMs) would do “follow-me-homes” with customers to identify problems to solve in the next release. However, the PMs were responsible for all the customer research. They would bring it back to the team and say, “This is the problem we want to solve, and here are ideas for how we could solve it.” Changing to a cross-functional way of working was not smooth sailing. Some team members were skeptical. For example, some product managers felt that it was a waste of time for engineers to spend time in front of customers. The PMs thought that their job was to figure out the customer issue and define what needed to be built. Thus, the reaction of some PMs to the change was: “What’s my job? What am I supposed to be doing?” Similarly, some on the engineering side just wanted to be told what to do; they didn’t want to talk to customers. As is typically the case in large-batch development, both groups had been willing to sacrifice the team’s ability to learn in order to work more “efficiently.

About the Bacharach Leadership Group: Training for Pragmatic Leadership™ “Vision without execution is hallucination.”—Thomas Edison The litmus test of pragmatic leadership is results. The Bacharach Leadership Group (BLG) focuses on the skills necessary to lead and move agendas. Whether in corporations, nonprofits, universities, or entrepreneurial start-ups, BLG instructors train leaders in the core competencies necessary to execute change and innovation. At all levels of the organization, leaders must master ideation skills for innovation, political skills for moving change, negotiation skills for building support, coaching skills for engagement, and team leadership skills for going the distance. The BLG approach: 1. ASSESSMENT BLG will assess your organizational challenges and leadership needs. 2. ALIGNMENT BLG will align its training solutions with your organization’s challenges and culture. 3. TRAINING BLG training includes options for mixed-modality delivery, interactive activities, and collaboration with an emphasis on application. 4. OWNERSHIP BLG provides continuous follow-up, access to the exclusive BLG mobile apps library, and coaching. Whether delivering a complete leadership academy or a specific program or workshop, BLG will partner with you to get the results you need. To keep up to date with the BLG perspective, visit blg-lead.com or contact us at info@blg-lead.com.

In short, anything that bucks the status quo—whether on your team inside a big company, at a startup, or within a personal art project—will be an uphill battle. These are the battles worth fighting. If you put something out there and it meets no resistance, chances are it isn’t as vital and worthwhile as you think it is. When it generates a reaction, you know you’re onto something.

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Digital natives—the startups that know how to build software—start to win market share. In response, one of the incumbents, intent on fending off the upstart, reverses the IT-outsourcing trend and starts assembling their in-house software teams to compete. One by one, every player in the industry (the ones that intend to survive, at least) becomes a builder. It’s unavoidable. It’s mandatory. That’s why I call this a Darwinian evolution of every industry. It’s no longer a question of Build vs. Buy. Rather, it’s the existential question of Build vs. Die. It’s natural selection driven by customers, who pick the companies that serve them better in this digital era.

The Five Whys ties the rate of progress to learning, not just execution. Startup teams should go through the Five Whys whenever they encounter any kind of failure, including technical faults, failures to achieve business results, or unexpected changes in customer behavior. Five Whys is a powerful organizational technique. Some of the engineers I have trained to use it believe that you can derive all the other Lean Startup techniques from the Five Whys. Coupled with working in small batches, it provides the foundation a company needs to respond quickly to problems as they appear, without overinvesting or overengineering.

For the Five Whys to work properly, there are rules that must be followed. For example, the Five Whys requires an environment of mutual trust and empowerment. In situations in which this is lacking, the complexity of Five Whys can be overwhelming. In such situations, I’ve often used a simplified version that still allows teams to focus on analyzing root causes while developing the muscles they’ll need later to tackle the full-blown method. I ask teams to adopt these simple rules: 1. Be tolerant of all mistakes the first time. 2. Never allow the same mistake to be made twice.

On the surface, Five Whys seems to be about technical problems and preventing mistakes, but as teams drive out these superficial wastes, they develop a new understanding of how to work together. Tony put it this way: “I daresay that I discovered that the Five Whys transcends root cause analysis by revealing information that brings your team closer through a common understanding and perspective. A lot of times a problem can pull people apart; Five Whys does the opposite.

Greg set out to change the QuickBooks development process by using four principles: 1. Smaller teams. Shift from large teams with uniform functional roles to smaller, fully engaged teams whose members take on different roles. 2. Achieve shorter cycle times. 3. Faster customer feedback, testing both whether it crashes customers’ computers and the performance of new features/customer experience. 4. Enable and empower teams to make fast and courageous decisions.

There were three differences in year three: • Teams were involved in creating new technologies, processes, and systems. • Cross-functional teams were formed around new great ideas. • Customers were involved from the inception of each feature concept.

Although the primary changes that are required in an adaptive organization are in the mind-set of its employees, changing the culture is not sufficient. As we saw in Chapter 9, lean management requires treating work as a system and then dealing with the batch size and cycle time of the whole process. Thus, to achieve lasting change, the QuickBooks team had to invest in tools and platform changes that would enable the new, faster way of working.

Internal startup teams require support from senior management to create these structures. Internal or external, in my experience startup teams require three structural attributes: scarce but secure resources, independent authority to develop their business, and a personal stake in the outcome. Each of these requirements is different from those of established company divisions.

We often frame internal innovation challenges by asking, How can we protect the internal startup from the parent organization? I would like to reframe and reverse the question: How can we protect the parent organization from the startup? In my experience, people defend themselves when they feel threatened, and no innovation can flourish if defensiveness is given free rein. In fact, this is why the common suggestion to hide the innovation team is misguided.

The challenge here is to create a mechanism for empowering innovation teams out in the open. This is the path toward a sustainable culture of innovation over time as companies face repeated existential threats. My suggested solution is to create a sandbox for innovation that will contain the impact of the new innovation but not constrain the methods of the startup team.

Whenever possible, the innovation team should be cross-functional and have a clear team leader, like the Toyota shusa. It should be empowered to build, market, and deploy products or features in the sandbox without prior approval. It should be required to report on the success or failure of those efforts by using standard actionable metrics and innovation accounting.

The sandbox also promotes rapid iteration. When people have a chance to see a project through from end to end and the work is done in small batches and delivers a clear verdict quickly, they benefit from the power of feedback. Each time they fail to move the numbers, they have a real opportunity to act on their findings immediately. Thus, these teams tend to converge on optimal solutions rapidly even if they start out with really bad ideas.

Functional specialists, especially those steeped in waterfall or stage-gate development, have been trained to work in extremely large batches. This causes even good ideas to get bogged down by waste. By making the batch size small, the sandbox method allows teams to make cheap mistakes quickly and start learning.

The problem for startups and large companies alike is that employees often follow the products they develop as they move from phase to phase. A common practice is for the inventor of a new product or feature to manage the subsequent resources, team, or division that ultimately commercializes it. As a result, strong creative managers wind up getting stuck working on the growth and optimization of products rather than creating new ones.

The way out of this dilemma is to manage the four kinds of work differently, allowing strong cross-functional teams to develop around each area. When products move from phase to phase, they are handed off between teams. Employees can choose to move with the product as part of the handoff or stay behind and begin work on something new. Neither choice is necessarily right or wrong; it depends on the temperament and skills of the person in question.

After an entrepreneur has incubated a product in the innovation sandbox, it has to be reintegrated into the parent organization. A larger team eventually will be needed to grow it, commercialize it, and scale it. At first, this team will require the continued leadership of the innovators who worked in the sandbox. In fact, this is a positive part of the process in that it gives the innovators a chance to train new team members in the new style of working that they mastered in the original sandbox.

startup teams require three structural attributes: scarce but secure resources, independent authority to develop their business, and a personal stake in the outcome.

Today, small start-up teams can profoundly change behavior by guiding users through a series of experiences I call hooks. The more often users run through these hooks, the more likely they are to form habits.

Sponsored Stories was the classic indefensible two-miracle startup idea. Miracle one was all the companies in the world doing work to integrate with Facebook and give away their data, at dubious benefit to themselves. Miracle two was those companies’ marketers abandoning their old workflows and success myths for some newfangled paradigm, one with unproved and unprovable efficacy, just because Facebook said so. And so, like any two-miracle startup idea, it was almost certain to fail. That didn’t stop the Ads team, however.

More than domain expertise, what mattered was having work experience at all. It’s the soft skills like managing a team, hiring and firing, raising money, and working the Rolodex of connections that made a difference. Founders

What gets measured gets managed.” I'd add to that: if you don't know something even exists, you can't begin to measure it, let alone manage it!

Unequal support with respect to items such as equipment managers, trainers, massage therapists, meals, hotel accommodations, and transportation; • The commitment of funds to pay for 14-year-old boys and not girls to live and train in Bradenton, Florida, while attending a private soccer academy; • The commitment of $10 million to build soccer stadiums for a for-profit professional league for men, Major League Soccer (“MLS”); • The commitment to loan or give millions to assist in the start-up of MLS. Correspondingly, when repeatedly asked by the Women’s United Soccer Association (“WUSA”) for start-up funding to help relaunch a league, US Soccer has repeatedly claimed “it is not in the business of building leagues”;

The presumed strength of patent protection in the United States has been gradually eroding in the face of multiple challenges, including from foreign competitors whose home jurisdictions may not recognize U.S. patent validity. For a startup, protecting and defending against patent infringement can involve expensive litigation that can drag on for years, a kiss of death for a lean startup and a system that now operates in favor of large companies that can afford teams of expensive lawyers. Is there a better way to mitigate the risk of having your idea stolen? Increasingly the answer lies in developing your idea very carefully, testing markets as quietly as possible, and working through your startup’s production and distribution mechanisms in anticipation of an all-in start, one that makes clear your intent to own the market that your innovation is targeting.

While every coach and every startup manager has to make decisions on the fly, there are tricks that can help you in managing through the chaos. The first is to make brutally efficient use of your time, and figure out a way to get as much of it as you can. In the last minutes of a tied championship game, with thousands of fans yelling and all your players desperately looking to you for the right play, managing the clock is critical. Every coach caught up in a tight game knows that the best weapon can be a “time out,” where she can change the flow of the game, disrupt the other team’s momentum, and re-establish her own strategy.

A roller coaster is all about fast thrills and wild, whiplashing movements. They can be a lot of fun, but they aren’t a good model for effective product management. Investors and executives like to see immediate results, and when those results don’t materialize right away, they can be tempted to pivot suddenly, resulting in whiplash for the product team. This problem comes from setting a time horizon that is too short. For startups, a lack of patience is often the result of having a very short runway. They have to get something up and running fast so they can raise the next round of funding, or they need to start producing revenue right away. Of course, everyone wants to make fast and efficient progress, but providing insufficient opportunity for success will result in false negatives that can lead product managers astray. When an otherwise healthy “fail-fast” mentality is taken to the extreme, it can stifle innovation. “We think this new feature is a good idea,” a product manager might say. “To avoid overinvesting, we’ll first launch a lackluster version of it. If it doesn’t get overwhelmingly positive results immediately, then we’ll know it’s not the right direction for our product.” Daisy-chained together, these false negatives result in a headache-inducing roller coaster ride for product development that ends up in exactly the same place it started.

Huggy was also part of a research team that experimented with “prenups for start-ups.” They created 348 remote teams and asked each to develop a business plan for a wellness product. These new teams could bolster performance when—rather than racing to start their work—members devoted their first meeting to writing a prenup or a “charter” to spell out agreements about the team’s roles, norms, rules, and values. That way, rather than being mired in confusion and conflict about who ought to do what, and what was good and bad behavior, they were ready to charge ahead and develop their business plan.

Topics & Questions for Discussion In Chapter One, “Cyrus Jones and the Magic Funeral,” Asha describes Cyrus as “mostly human, a little bit cartoon, a tiny bit ghost.” Having read the book, what do you think of Cyrus as a character? Have you met anyone like him in real life? Think back to your high school crush(es). Do you recall that first feeling of attraction? How would you react if you happened upon that person now? What does Asha’s relationship with her older sister Mira bring to story? How does she add to your understanding of Asha as a person? Jules is a source of support, emotional and financial, for Cyrus and Asha. What other roles does he play in the novel? Recall the manifesto Cyrus writes in Chapter Three: “We don’t try to convince people to buy things We don’t spy on anyone We don’t sell our souls (we don’t sell anything) and We are equal partners and make all decisions together.” Did you predict any of these points might falter? Were you correct? Consider what kind of workplace Utopia is. Would you like to work there? What elements would you like to see in your current work situation? At the end of Chapter Five, Asha thinks about the cultural differences between her and Cyrus, contemplating his “whiteness.” To what extent do you think their differences affect their understanding of each other? Have you had to think about cultural differences in a similar way? Besides WAI, several other app ideas are mentioned in the novel: Consentify, LoneStar, Buttery, Flitter, and so on. Discuss your favorite, or if you have any other start up ideas. Asha, Cyrus, and Jules must delve into all the logistical aspects of starting and growing a business, from assembling the right team to sourcing funding. What seem to be the biggest challenges to starting a business? The novel deals with themes of gender dynamics and white male privilege throughout. At what points can you see these dynamics at play, and how do the characters respond? If you were Asha’s friend, or family member, how would you react to her relationship with Cyrus? Would you have warned her or supported her? What does or doesn’t seem to work about their marriage?

I could read it so you don’t have to?” she offers, but I’m already halfway through. I start to read aloud. “ ‘I had this vision for creating a platform that would help people to connect and coalesce around the things that mattered most to them. It was a natural extension of what I’d been doing for years. People used to call me a humanist spirit guide—I guess that’s what I’m bringing to WAI now, just on a larger stage.’ “He doesn’t even mention us. Doesn’t say anything about how Jules and I dragged him kicking and screaming into this. I wanted to create a platform. Cyrus just wanted to baptize cats.” “To be fair, the Cat Baptism is one of the most shared rituals,” Destiny says, trying to lighten the tone. “Eight hundred thousand videos and counting.” I keep going. “ ‘I’m attracted to the solitary life, Jones says. You can imagine him in a monastery, although he’d have to cut off that halo around his head. In addition to creating a social network that millions of people are turning to for meaning and community, he is also taking care of his employees—he has just kicked off a mentorship program to give the women on his team the support they need to thrive in their roles.’ ” Destiny tells me to stop reading. “It’s just bullshit.” I take a shaky deep breath. “That’s my mentorship program,” I whisper. “Cyrus is telling them what he wants to hear. You and I both know that.” I’m stammering now, but I keep going. “ ‘He’s otherworldly but handsome in an almost comical way. His sentences are long, and when you’re in the middle of one, you wonder, where is this going? But he always manages to bring whatever he’s saying to a satisfying conclusion. Everything he says is mysterious and somehow obvious at the same time.’ ” At least this one is funny. I allow Destiny to laugh briefly. I get to the last line. “ ‘I have to say, I’m developing something of a crush.’ ” “Oh, for God’s sake, another woman in love with Cyrus. Take a number, sister.” Destiny leans over, reads the byline. “George Milos. Guess Cyrus appeals to all genders.” As we get up to leave, she says, “I don’t think Cyrus is a bad person. He’s just basking in a sea of adoration, and it makes him think more of himself than he should.” “Where does that leave me?” “You have a tough gig. No one wants to be married to the guy everyone thinks is going to save the world.

The best entrepreneurs create environments of stressful urgency. Entrepreneurs know that start-ups rarely get anything done in a relaxed, take-your-time environment. For example, Steve Jobs, the cofounder of Apple, was notorious for pushing his team beyond its limits by setting seemingly unrealistic timelines. As a result, his company created products quicker than they had ever imagined was possible and thus gained a huge competitive advantage over rival companies like IBM.

This is the Rocketship Growth Rate—the precise pace at which a startup must grow to break out. How do you calculate this rate of growth? First, by setting a goal of exceeding a billion dollars of valuation—thus being in a position to achieve an IPO—and working backward. Hitting a $1 billion valuation generally requires at least $100 million in top-line recurring revenue annually, based on the rough market multiple of 10x revenue. You’d want to hit that in 7–10 years, to sustain the engagement of the key employees and also reward investors who often work in decade-long time cycles. These two goals—revenue and time—work together to create an overall constraint. Neeraj Agarwal, a venture capitalist and investor in B2B companies, first calculated this growth rate by arguing that SaaS companies in particular need to follow a precise path to reach these numbers:64 Establish great product-market fit Get to $2 million in ARR (annual recurring revenue) Triple to $6 million in ARR Triple to $18 million Double to $36 million Double to $72 million Double to $144 million SaaS companies like Marketo, Netsuite, Workday, Salesforce, Zendesk, and others have all roughly followed this curve. And the rough timing makes sense. The first phase, in which the team initially gets to product/market fit, takes 1–3 years. Add on the time to reach the rest of the growth milestones, and the entire process might take 6–9 years. Of course, after year 10, the company might still be growing quickly, though it’s more common for it to be growing 50 percent annualized rather than doubling. The argument is that products with network effects both can see higher growth rates as they tap into the various network forces I’ve discussed, and can compound these growth rates for a longer period of time—and looking at the data, I think that’s generally true.

HIRING Find Producers Who Are Also Visionaries One of the tricky things about being an entrepreneur is finding people who can engineer and deliver on schedule, but who are also willing to take intellectual risks. If you’re doing something radically new, you need a team that’s willing to go on a ride that’s very different from anything they’ve encountered before. It’s hard to find people who can both deliver and try something quite radical and stay with the vision.

David versus Goliath Asymmetry lies at the heart of network-based competition. The larger or smaller network will be at different stages of the Cold Start framework and, as such, will gravitate toward a different set of levers. The giant is often fighting gravitational pull as its network grows and saturates the market. To combat these negative forces, it must add new use cases, introduce the product to new audiences, all while making sure it’s generating a profit. The upstart, on the other hand, is trying to solve the Cold Start Problem, and often starts with a niche. A new startup has the luxury of placing less emphasis on profitability and might instead focus on top-line growth, subsidizing the market to grow its network. When they encounter each other in the market, it becomes natural that their competitive moves reflect their different goals and resources. Startups have fewer resources—capital, employees, distribution—but have important advantages in the context of building new networks: speed and a lack of sacred cows. A new startup looking to compete against Zoom might try a more specific use case, like events, and if that doesn’t work, they can quickly pivot and try something else, like corporate education classes. Startups like YouTube, Twitch, Twitter, and many other products have similar stories, and went through an incubation phase as the product was refined and an initial network was built. Trying and failing many times is part of the startup journey—it only takes the discovery of one atomic network to get into the market. With that, a startup is often able to start the next leg of the journey, often with more investment and resources to support them. Contrast that to a larger company, which has obvious advantages in resources, manpower, and existing product lines. But there are real disadvantages, too: it’s much harder to solve the Cold Start Problem with a slower pace of execution, risk aversion, and a “strategy tax” that requires new products to align to the existing business. Something seems to happen when companies grow to tens of thousands of employees—they inevitably create rigorous processes for everything, including planning cycles, performance reviews, and so on. This helps teams focus, but it also creates a harder environment for entrepreneurial risk-taking. I saw this firsthand at Uber, whose entrepreneurial culture shifted in its later years toward profitability and coordinating the efforts of tens of thousands. This made it much harder to start new initiatives—for better and worse. When David and Goliath meet in the market—and often it’s one Goliath and many investor-funded Davids at once—the resulting moves and countermoves are fascinating. Now that I have laid down some of the theoretical foundation for how competition fits into Cold Start Theory, let me describe and unpack some of the most powerful moves in the network-versus-network playbook.

Bundling eventually stopped working for Microsoft. After the antitrust investigation, the company maintained its dominance on the PC operating systems market, but it lost control of many other markets. Eventually the industry jumped from PC to mobile. Microsoft tried to exactly replicate the network effects it had before—an ecosystem of hardware manufacturers who paid a licensing fee to run Windows Mobile, and app developers and consumers to match—but this time it didn’t work. Instead, Google gave away its Android mobile OS for free, driving adoption for phone makers. The massive reach of Android attracted app developers, and a new network effect was built, derived from a business model where the OS was free but the ecosystem was monetized using search and advertising revenue. Microsoft has also lost the browser market to Google Chrome, and is being challenged in its Office Suite by a litany of startup competitors large and small. It continued to use bundling as a strategy, adding workplace chat via Teams to its suite—but it hasn’t achieved a clear victory against Slack. If bundling hasn’t been a sure thing for Microsoft, it’s an even weaker strategy for others. The outcome seems even less assured when examining how Google bundled Google+ into many corners of its product, including Maps and Gmail, achieving hundreds of millions of active users without real retention. Uber bundled Uber Eats across many touchpoints within its rideshare app, but still fell behind in food delivery versus DoorDash. Bundling hasn’t been a silver bullet, as much as the giants in the industry hope it is.

Woodism - “Be in it to win for yourself; be open to all the possibilities of the journey!

Woodism - “Control what you can control and let go of the rest.

Founders must decide in moments of crisis to view them as danger or as a unique opportunity for change and improvement.

First-time founders mistakenly ascribe too much power to their prospects. This manifests in sharing too much information, demos, and access to yourself without getting enough in return. Don’t make this mistake. Remember, the customer has big problems that you, with your insight, team, and technology, are uniquely suited to solve. The companies you’re selling to are worried about being disrupted from below or having their direct competitors steal a march on them. They need innovation, which you represent, to surpass the competition and prevent disruption.

The next billion-dollar startup will only have three employees.” The culture of that startup would be “AI first,” and it would use autonomous AI agents to get work done. All marketing and sales would be automated via AI bots, and the three employees would be: The CEO, who would handle vision and purpose and lead public-facing marketing. She would also code and be involved in engineering. The Product Lead, who would interface with customers and team to manage the product roadmap and drive development The Operations Lead, who would be responsible for the outcome of the AI bots and handle finance and legal and smooth operations. We

solutions to market saturation might sound straightforward—add new geographies, support more formats and business models, and other tips that sound like common sense. However, the challenge is in the execution, which can’t be underestimated. Launching in every major country around the world while simultaneously staying on top of a hypergrowth startup in a core market is not easy. Yet that’s exactly what eBay had to do, building one of the most valuable internet companies in the 1990s while simultaneously adding the international business, “Buy It Now,” and new product verticals. Once these obvious growth levers are mined, what’s next? Eventually new products have to be layered on. It’s hard to ask teams to start and build new products from scratch. It’s difficult enough as a startup, but trying to do this inside a larger company adds myriad of complexities—there’s internal politics, distractions, lack of resources, adverse selection of talent, and dozens of other challenges.

Rarely discussed in studies of entrepreneurial startups is just how lonely it can be out there with a revolutionary new product, no competition, and a market that doesn't seem to get what you are doing. You can try to hide in an echo chamber of your own team but eventually, you have to go outside and deal with investors, analysts and potential customers. And when all of them are skeptical, even dismissive, it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain the supreme confidence you need to keep going. That's why many of the great entrepreneurs are arrogant and obsessive to the point of megalomania. They sometimes have to be able to take their solitary vision and make it real.

The person who’s not scaling to the new level of complexity of the business and the size of the team and the different kinds of problems, that’s different—that’s not necessarily a mistake. You would possibly have made the same decision if you had the same information you have now. Whereas the mistake, if you had the same information, you would not go back and make the same decision. So that one, you definitely want to limit to one digit if you can. The scale and

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if the plan is to see what happens, a team is guaranteed to succeed—at seeing what happens—but won’t necessarily gain validated learning. This is one of the most important lessons of the scientific method: if you cannot fail, you cannot learn.

Each product family gets a dedicated engineering team, a dedicated marketing person, a dedicated designer and writer. And that turns them into little startups inside the business—smaller, faster, more autonomous.