The Startup vs Enterprise QUEST (by @saranormous via @greylockvc)

 Startups Serving The Enterprise: – Greylock Perspectives



Building strong partnerships and capabilities means that getting out of the marketing swamp, through the winds of cost and risk, across the enterprise feasibility gap, through the desert of procurement and over the ocean of early execution — will all be more tenable the second time around, and the rewards even richer on both sides.

Why are large enterprises so interested in startup tech? It’s a matter of survival. Every company is undergoing a digital transformation. Farsighted executives see the pace of change in business accelerating. These executives know that the companies who more rapidly adopt advancing technology will run their companies better, faster, cheaper, smarter. Technology is a weapon used to defend against competitive threats, and achieve and preserve market dominance.

Similarly, for an enterprise technology startup to survive and thrive, they must understand how to effectively work with large companies. Within large enterprises are most of the employees, data, workflows, industry and institutional knowledge, assets, customer relationships, intellectual property, and budgets in the world.


1. Recruiting Partners in the Swamp of Marketing Fog
Before enterprise executives and startup founders are ready to set sail together, they need to identify the right partners.

• Shine a Bright Light: A warm introduction can be vital.
• Paint a Clear (and Easy) Path Out: Startups need to clearly explain the problem they are solving, their value proposition, and their differentiation.
• Seek the Right Stakeholders, at the Right Time: And those other technologists and leaders are structurally more aggressive in technology adoption than the CIO.

2. Maintaining Faith through the Galewinds of Cost and Risk

One enterprise tech leader said that talking to his team about bringing in a new technology inevitably triggers an immune defense reaction: New vendors need to understand how customers are measuring return and cost. 

Even once your team has cleared a path out of the swamp, it can feel like you’re fighting against a galewind. There’s a lot of natural resistance to bringing in new vendors, because a new offering needs to be valuable enough to overcome inherent cost and risks of working with a startup.

Startups should be empathetic to this risk aversion and understand that, on the customer side, someone’s career is often on the line.

Enterprise customers told us they think also about the “hidden costs” of vendor management, user training and adoption, integration, implementation and administration, and the risk of the startup dying or getting acquired.
Because of these many “hidden” costs, smart technology buyers are projecting out the landscape of vendors, and looking for startups that not only offer tactical benefits but have a chance to endure as longer-term partners — disrupting an existing category or creating an important new one.
Advantages for disruptor companies include innovating on the experience of purchasing and using the technology, and the total cost of ownership.

To de-risk their decisions, enterprise tech leaders want to work with startups that have raised capital from top-tier investors, because it’s one sign they’ll go the distance.


3. Bridging the Gap of the Four S’s: Scale, Security, Spend & Supportability
Value may outweigh the costs and risk, but will the product work in their environment?

• Scale: Can the startup support the scale of the customer’s user base or infrastructure? Increasingly, we see customers want to validate that scale rather than taking it on faith. … This includes ease of use, rollout plan, reporting, integrations into existing technology, administration workflows, SLA’s. Customers are also evaluating who is going to help them deploy — for example, the existence and quality of the startup’s sales engineering or implementation team, if needed.
• Security: Startups told us this is #1 on everyone’s list. The need is often driven by regulation such as GDPR, or internal requirements for sophisticated access control, and the key thing here is to have a clear approach to customer data.
• Spend: Pricing models that are appropriate for the first thirty developers or first hundred users might not work for broad deployment. Startups must offer pricing models that are feasible at scale, aligning with the value they create for their customers.
• Supportability: Is the startup prepared to offer the kind of support (often 24/7) that enterprise customers need, at scale? Can they handle the reality of legacy technology that large companies are often saddled with, and make their customer successful?

4. Avoiding the Quicksands of Customization

The quicksands of customization are an especially tricky neighborhood.
…getting sucked into customization can mean company death, or at least, derailment.

Just as customers will choose to work with a particular startup based on ability to scale, durability, and other factors, startups should also choose their early customers carefully, balancing customer requirements against strategic priorities and limited company resources. Being too accommodating or diffuse in strategy can be a recipe for mediocrity in multiple categories.
Disciplined customer segmentation is key

Giving potential customers realistic visibility into your short and medium term roadmap is also a pattern for success. Beyond choosing early customers carefully, startups should also take a pragmatic view of what feature requests to field, and when.


5. Surviving the Desert of Procurement & Approvals
The procurement process can be a bear — you feel like you’re so close to the finish line, but it’s a mirage. You can get stuck in limbo.
Startups need to have realistic expectations about speed, and plan ahead for sales cycles so they don’t run out of resources before they show progress.
Enterprises, on the other hand, need to create pathways for the business to push through important innovations fast.

To accelerate their sprint through the procurement and legal desert, startups should find internal champions, arm those buyers with the right business case and other support, and arrive prepared with mature contracts.
There are also different purchasing processes for different scales of spend. Building up engagement with a large enterprise partner through a land-and-expand model also changes a startup’s initial experience in procurement.


6. Crossing the Ocean of Early Execution
Finally, quest-goers need to build a strong ship and chart a clear course to cross the ocean of early execution.

• First, this means structuring PoCs and initial engagements to be short, with repeatable onboarding flow, clear success criteria and commitment from partners to that timeline.
• Second, technology leaders also cautioned against “poisoning the well” — damaging relationships and reputation by not delivering on promises.
• Third, enterprises need startups to consciously involve the necessary stakeholders to operationalize technology, even in planning and deployment, support their change management, and follow up with discipline.

7. The Golden Fields of Innovation

In summary, the quest to reach the golden fields of innovation — that is, to successfully deploy new capabilities and technologies into the enterprise — is a journey that requires strategy, careful planning and consistent execution.
Once that early execution is successful, this is not a one-time quest. It’s an ongoing journey with each new partner, and each new use case and product line. An early success lays the groundwork for a strong customer reference that will help generate new business — in today’s age of connectedness and transparency, a startup’s best salespeople are its happy customers.

The 70-20-10 Rule for Leadership Development

The 70-20-10 Rule for Leadership Development

A research-based, time-tested guideline for developing managers says that you need to have 3 types of experience, using a 70-20-10 ratio: challenging assignments (70%), developmental relationships (20%), and coursework and training (10%).

The 70-20-10 rule emerged from 30 years of our research, which explores how executives learn, grow, and change over the course of their careers.

The underlying assumption is that leadership is learned. We believe that today, even more than before, a manager’s ability and willingness to learn from experience is the foundation for leading with impact.

The 70-20-10 rule seems simple, but you need to take it a step further.

Benefits of the Purpose-Driven Workplace

5 Studies on the Benefits of the Purpose-Driven Workplace - IDEO U

1. Lower Risk of Death
2. More Fulfilled at Work
3. Higher Employee Retention
4. Meaning over Recognition
5. Higher Returns for Purpose-Driven Companies




The Invisible Hand: Companies & Purpose
In The Wealth of Nations and The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith introduced the idea of “the invisible hand,” how markets and their self-interests can benefit society. Whether companies and markets can deliver on the needs of people will be put to the test in the coming years with the acceleration of technology, automation, and complex issues like climate change. The Circular Economy is one example of how purpose-driven companies can lead the charge towards more sustainable systems and solutions. Will your company and others deliver on meeting the needs of people?

Si alguien trabaja más por la parte variable es que no es un buen profesional (por @RafaelOliverTDC )

Si alguien trabaja más por la parte variable es que no es un buen profesional | Dirección Comercial Blog

El argumento base es de libro, si no me pagan un variable sustancioso no trabajo más allá del mínimo legal/moral. … Los que piensan que los salarios con parte básica y variable convienen a las empresas se equivocan, si hay profesionales que no consiguen los resultados esperados de ellos hay que analizar el porqué de esa consecuencia, si es por falta de visitas, por no dirigirse a los prospects correctos, de hacerlas correctamente, de falta de leads generados por la empresa, de falta de producto, de no saber desarrollar las operaciones…

Pagar una remuneración muy dependiente de los resultados está basado en un mecanismo corruptor de alguna manera, es como pagar mucho más a un policía por perseguir a los criminales o por las multas que imponga. La labor de un profesional puede estar relacionada con incentivos en función de los resultados, pero llevando cuidado con los factores sobre las que se basa. Un médico, un vendedor, un policía, un fontanero, un cocinero, etcétera, deben esforzarse al máximo por conseguir su propósito y no puede estar premiados por hacer una parte básica de su función, sólo por aquellas partes de su trabajo que conllevan un riesgo especial, un esfuerzo fuera de su área geográfica, la adquisición de un nuevo conocimiento por su cuenta, etcétera, merecen un extra.

El buen management es el que debe conseguir esa querencia hacia los resultados, aunque también es el responsable de conseguir una remuneración digna. Para exigir hay que pagar bien.

A Taxonomy of Troublemakers (via @firstround)

 “If in workplace after workplace you are the only one who's right and everyone else is a jerk, schmuck or idiot, take note: there’s a common denominator and it’s you,” says Foster.

A Taxonomy of Troublemakers for Those Navigating Difficult Colleagues | First Round Review



Here’s a list of eight difficult personality types — and how their behavior can manifest positively or negatively in the workplace.

Narcissus - thinks highly of oneself, ballooning self-esteem

• As a positive trait: willingness to try new things with any possibility of success
• As a negative trait: entitled, condescending, self-centered, attention-seeking

Venus Flytrap - very appealing initially, eventually brings chaos

• As a positive trait: incredibly persuasive and relatable to many people
• As a negative trait: shifts expectations/emotions, creating unstable relationships

Swindler - systematic and charming, but dangerous and self-propagating

• As a positive trait: magnetic, influential, savvy and resourceful
• As a negative trait: no regard for rules, laws, or for other people

Bean Counter - controls quality, but becomes a bottleneck

• As a positive trait: focused, persistent and involved
• As a negative trait: obsessive, paralyzed, blocks progress

Distracted - a nutty professor, can’t time-manage, organize or finish tasks

• As a positive trait: brilliant, curious and informed
• As a negative trait: procrastinating, preoccupied and noncommittal

Robotic - process-oriented, but struggles to connect with people

• As a positive trait: structured, focused, rule-bound
• As a negative trait: rigid, aloof, disconnected, mechanical

Eccentric - unique individual, but with peculiar ideas

• As a positive trait: original, strong beliefs, big thinker
• As a negative trait: difficult to understand, detached, irrational

Suspicious - Self-protective, but paranoid, often with a conspiratorial world view

• As a positive trait: vigilant, prizes loyalty/trust, confidential
• As a negative trait: insecure, fearful, always at war

Regardless of which disruptive colleagues you may encounter, she recommends taking agency with the following five steps:

• Check yourself. “When someone is causing you trouble or you're having difficulty with someone at work, check yourself. Have you ever just disliked somebody because they reminded you of somebody else you disliked? It happens. Take a beat and make sure that your reaction is calibrated.”
• Name the beast. “It's very easy to call someone a jerk or a schmuck. But people aren't necessarily schmucks at all — there’s a mismatch between their personality-driven behavior and the situation. Define exactly what it is that’s causing trouble because once you can define the behavior, it can really help you with your intervention.”
• Empathize with their anxiety. “Take what you know about people. People love to tell you about themselves. Listen. If they're having interpersonal trouble, figure out which bucket they might fall into and try to empathize with the anxiety that’s causing them to act that way.”
• Call out the behavior. “Decide whether you're going to call out the behavior or not. Some behavior's so egregious that you absolutely have to call it out in the moment. Other times when you notice the behavior recurring, schedule a private meeting to talk about that pattern.”
• Keep it short. Be direct. “If you do call out the behavior, keep it short, be concise, and be direct. And try to do this feedback or intervention as close to a recent event as possible to give the other person the best chance of hearing the message.”

If all that fails, Foster has one final tip. “If in workplace after workplace you are the only one who's right and everyone else is a jerk, schmuck or idiot, take note: there’s a common denominator and it’s you,” says Foster. “If and when you figure this out about yourself — or if you're lucky enough to have somebody point it out to you — consider yourself fortunate. You have been given a roadmap for self-betterment. Eat humble pie and take it under advisement. Do what you need to do to make changes. It’ll improve your life — in and outside of work.”

How Likely Is Your Industry to Be Disrupted? (via @HarvardBiz)

 “Nothing in life is to be feared; it is only to be understood” ~Marie Curie, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903 and in Chemistry in 1911, had that point of view which would serve today’s business leaders well.
Understanding where your industry sits in terms of its susceptibility to disruption will help you make momentous strategic choices. The right time to start taking control of your unique state of disruption is now.

How Likely Is Your Industry to Be Disrupted? This 2x2 Matrix Will Tell You

In the durability state, companies must actively reinvent their legacy business rather than focus on preserving it. This means taking steps to both maintain cost leadership in their core business while also running extensive experiments to increase relevance — for example, by making key offerings not only cheaper but also better for their customers. 

Those in the vulnerability state must address productivity challenges in their legacy businesses right away and thoroughly to get in shape for future innovations (their own or competitors’). One way is by reducing dependence on fixed assets. Another is by taking underused assets and monetizing them. Leading independent power producers, for example, have begun to deploy asset-light, platform-based business models. 

For companies in the volatility state, decisively changing the current course is the only way to survive. Rather than simply abandoning the core business, companies will need to strike a delicate balance when making corporate and financial restructuring moves. 

Companies in the viability state must embrace strategies that keep them in a constant state of innovation. This involves increasing the penetration of innovative offerings with existing customers while expanding aggressively into adjacent or entirely unchartered markets by leveraging the strength of their core business. 

9 frameworks to master Product Management (by @firstround)

 #mustread … The best companies are most often built by extraordinary product minds. Even if you’re not a PM right now, you can benefit from adopting the habits and strategies that make talented PMs successful.

17 Product Managers Who Will Own the Future of NYC Tech — and the 9 Frameworks They’ll Use to Do It | First Round Review

Absolute must read

1. Getting into the PM Mindset
A good PM fills in the gaps and gets out of the way.
Prioritization becomes critical. 
Significance = Magnitude x Number of People Impacted
where magnitude is a measure of how frustrating/painful/unbearable the problem being solved is.
A magnitude 1 problem might cause mild annoyance, whereas a magnitude 3 problem might cause show-stopping frustration and anger.

Continually question whether the tactic you’re trying creates more friction than the original problem. If the answer is yes, immediately shift course.


2. Figuring Out When to Build What
-Time-Based Risk: when a competitor has launched a new version of its product that its customers don’t like as much, that would give you a time-window.
-Building Blocks First: the other follow-up question you should always ask is “How many other projects depend on this thing?”


3. Turning Product Vision into an Executable Strategy
-Structure your vision wisely.
-Create 2-3 objectives that move you toward that vision.
-Place bets under each objective.

Following this template, you end up with a quarterly roadmap that has every action and each person’s work closely connected with the company’s direction and purpose.


4. Effective Stakeholder Communication
Group 1: Executives and leadership
Do...
-Send presentations, decks and other materials before every meeting.
-Validate every decision with data.
-Be specific about the executives' desired participation.
-Take notes and close the loop.
-Send high-level updates right after each meeting with action items.
Don’t...
-Go into too much detail.
-Surprise anyone with bad news. If the news is bad, reach out to folks 1:1 in advance.
-Show up unprepared.
-Ignore room dynamics.

Group 2: Your own team
Do...
-Leverage efficient daily stand-ups.
-Review strategy/roadmaps regularly.
-Record and send out notes on key decisions and actions.
-Reward team members often, tell anecdotes about customer pain points that were alleviated.
Don’t...
-Make decisions without engineering and design.
-Send action items/requests without talking about them first, 1:1 or stand-up.
-Forget to update folks on roadmap or specs changes, particularly important after meeting with execs.

Group 3: Internal and external partners
Do...
-Exhibit detailed understanding of their work and domain.
-Use the right format at the right time with the right audience.
-Leverage your teammates. Bring in engineering leads.
-Gently and continuously educate them. Partners sometimes don’t know the consequences of their actions.
-Build relationships outside of work meetings.
-Create transparency. Don’t rely on others to communicate to everyone.
Don’t...
-Forget who to loop in at what stage.
-Make stakeholders feel ignored.
-Forget you have more insight than anyone else. Stakeholders don’t see your roadmap.
-Allow meetings to end without clarity.
-Forget to educate about timelines and tradeoffs.

Group 4: Customers
Do...
-Always start with the user problem. Ask why and understand the journey that creates that pain point.
-Keep, what’s important to them, top of mind.
-Treat email copy as a part of the product experience.
-Generate empathy for yourself by reading through user feedback, attending user studies in person…
Don’t...
-Leave product communications/messaging to the last minute. *Start with this, don’t end with it.
-Assume marketing will position the product themselves.
-Leave customer success in the dark about launch.
-Believe internal products require no roll out.


5. Create Compelling Product Messaging
Start with one question:
What superpower do you want to give your user? For example, the iPhone lets us navigate to unknown places wherever we are in the world. As a PM, it’s your job to ensure the entire team knows the story you’re trying to create for your users. *This should come first in your development process, not last.
Will Carlin’s 5 C’s framework comes in hand for telling strong stories (your goal should be to craft a story around a single user — not a group of users).
-Context: Establish the setting and identity of the user you’re talking to.
-Conflict: The problem your product attempts to solve for that user.
-Conflict Escalation: Really visualize what it’s like for a user to encounter this problem. Draw out the emotions tied to the pain point and solutions that have been tried but failed. Really feel and describe the frustration, disappointment, etc.
-Climax: Your product is introduced — what changes for the user?
-Conclusion: Detailed description of the improvement in the user’s life.

Use this framework to create a story about your product. Remember, no matter what you do, different versions of your story will emerge once it launches. To win, craft the story that is closest and most personal to your user. The more emotionally resonant it is, the more it will drown out competing perspectives.


6. Build Your Best Product Team
You have to hire people who aren’t just talented, but who are perfect for your particular business.
Develop a strategic hiring plan by determining who on your existing team should be a part of the hiring process (all relevant folks the role will interface with), and the concrete steps every candidate will take between application and hire.
-Build a strategic hiring plan.
-Define key competencies
-Standardize your assessment of competencies.
Running this exercise is time intensive. You have to run several voting rounds to arrive at competencies, questions for each competence, and then the best and worst responses to each question. Sounds like a lot, but it’s incredibly worth it to have a standardized approach created collaboratively — one that can be recycled and reused again and again as hiring picks up pace.


7. Scale Yourself as a Product Leader
PMs should focus on scaling in four areas: decision making, velocity, collaboration and empowerment.

Decision making starts to slow down and crack at a certain point of growth. The warning sign is too many cooks in the kitchen and slowed pace. The antidote is the DACI framework:
-Driver: The one person responsible for the project who drives process and keeps everyone aligned.
-Approver: The person who approves the proposal/recommendation for the project.
-Contributors: People working on the project team, providing input, producing work, etc.
-Informed: People kept in the loop about the project and results, but not contributing.

Velocity of work starts to slow down as tech debt accumulates and teams grow. To fix it, create durable teams around durable problems. To avoid scope creep and last-minute design changes, Chang recommends the following product development process:
-Goal definition: Everyone included in your DACI framework should come together and emerge with a singular goal for the product.
-Product definition: Align on scope of the project and what will be required to solve the problem at hand. What is and isn’t out of scope?
-Design review: Be explicit about the type of feedback you want and don’t want.
-Tech review: Make sure everyone has a chance to debate and buy into the technical approach.
-Go/no-go: Review your checklist to make sure the rest of the org is operationally ready for a product/project launch — i.e. customer service has the bandwidth to answer questions, etc.

Collaboration starts to break at a certain company size. Free people up and fuel effective collaboration with these three moves:
-Make your product roadmap and product docs accessible to the entire company.
-Hold Gate Meetings to force decisions that must be made to proceed.
-Send decision emails to communicate to all possible stakeholders when big decisions have been made and why.

Empowerment at scale becomes important when teams get so big that people feel like they’re just executing on other people’s orders. Several strategies to combat this are:
-Present options instead of a firm decision.
-Start milestone meetings with a background share.


8. Drive Product Development with Data
PMs use data to align stakeholders with roadmaps, track efficacy of what's been built, and prioritize what to build next.
-You have to gather implicit data. Stop making excuses. If you don’t, you’ll have no real visibility into how users will react to new features. These can be little experiments, like seeing if someone will click on a link.
-Don’t underestimate the importance of explicit data. Protect yourself against this by taking in qualitative feedback shared directly by your users.
-Always go to your customers when you observe them. see how people are using your product in their natural habitat. If they’ve developed any workarounds, take special note.
-Find the right users for your questions. At B2B companies, product managers often find themselves engaging with the C-suite at their customers. Determine who is the most relevant user of your product, and pose the questions to them directly.
-Find a meaningful metric for your performance. Net Promoter Score is a common choice, but that’s not universally appropriate. You could augment it with a Customer Effort Score —a measure of whether the company made it easier to perform certain tasks.


9. Going from PM to Founder
In many ways, product management is the ideal springboard for founders. It’s a position that affords you opportunities to go deep in areas that will serve you when running your own business, like:
-negotiation
-P&L and forecasting
-legal-
-hiring
-operations

But before you can get into all of that, you need to be sure you’re choosing the right idea to work on.
How do you know if an idea is worth pursuing? Evaluate each one according to Marty Cagan’s Four Big Risks:
-Value: Do people want this? When you talk to prospective users, do they see value in what you’re building?
-Usability: Can people figure your solution or product out intuitively?
-Feasibility: Can you and an eventual team build what you have in mind within a realistic time frame with the resources you can realistically get?
-Viability: Is there a clear business model and path to making money?
Before you set out after an idea, make sure you can check each of these boxes and confidently explain your answers to each of these questions to possible investors.

7 Types of Companies You Should Never Work For

 @glassdoor "And just say no to places who define “hard work” as 15-hour days and long weekend email threads."

 7 Types of Companies You Should Never Work For

1. The High Turnover Outfit

Red flags: Key roles pop up consistently on a company’s job site.

2. The Culture Clash Corp

Red flags: Negative employee reviews, lack of focus on a true employee experience, recruiters evading your questions.

3. The Curb Appealer

Red flags: Pristine and ideal image in marketing materials and publicity, however, the day-to-day operation is far from glamorous. Only the leaders have what can pass as offices, staff is dispersed amongst shoddy cubicles, lighting is awful, technology is from the ’90s, and let’s not get started on the break room.

4. The Top Heavy Business

Red flags: Too many executives brainstorming, too few employees tasked with executing.

5. The Perpetual Promisor

Red flags: Unfulfilled corporate expectations, employees report a lack of trust in CEO, inability to live up to brand promises.

6. The “Stagnator”

Red flags: Lack of learning opportunities, fails to promote mentorship, offers little more than the role you’ve applied for.

7. The Directionless Ship

Red flags: No clear plan for the future, employees don’t know long-term goals, senior leadership fails to adequately communicate.

The Simple Secret To A High-Performing Team

 How To Build A High-Performing Team
The Simple Secret To A High-Performing Team

1. 1. Build Trust On Your Team

   
   

2. 2. Build Psychological Safety On Your Team

   
   

3. 3. Set Ambitious Goals

   
   

4. 4. Work On Communication Skills

   
   

5. 5. Help Employees Build Confidence

   
   

6. 6. Listen To Your Employees

   
   
   
   
   

11 Corporate Habits That Kill Your Company's Innovation Engine (Strategyzer video)

Replay: 11 Corporate Habits That Kill Your Company's Innovation Engine — Strategyzer

1. Current business model dominate the agenda
2. One-size-fits-all decision making hurts speed & inventiveness
3. Insisting on untested and detailed business plans
4. Opinions and past experience matter more than evidence
5. Outsourcing customer discovery and testing
6. Lack of senior leadership participation
7. Obsession of competitors rather than customers
8. Predominant focus on technology risk at the expense of other risks
9. Innovation is career suicide in most organizations
10. The innovation engine is siloed from the execution engine
11. Integrate new ideas into the execution engine too qickly 

Lecciones aprendidas emprendiendo

 por Francisco J. Martín ( @aficionado ) fundador de @bigmlcom

Francisco inició su carrera como becario del MEC en el departamento de Sistemas Informáticos y Computación de la UPV y después en el Instituto de Investigación en Inteligencia Artificial del Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC).

En 1999 fundó iSOCO-Intelligent Software Components, uno de los primeros spin-offs del CSIC.

En 2004 participó en Strands que fue vendida a Apple por 49 millones de dólares.

En 2007 fundó BigML.

En el meetup en el que lo escuché hizo un repaso a sus lecciones aprendidas en estos años. Son:

1. Entrena cuerpo y mente, la condición física y mental es esencial
2. Auto-disciplina
3. Equipo y coordinación (pero el "equipo mínimo viable")
4. Permanentemente en economía de guerra
5. Conviértete en un francotirador (focus)
6. Conoce a tus enemigos (competidores, tóxicos dentro)
7. Haz muchos aliados
8. Los planes están para romperlos (Eisenhower)
9. Estar listo para las bajas (cofundadores, empleados…)
10. Desarrolla el sentido del humor

La persona a mi lado, en el cierre de Francisco fue capaz de sintetizar en una frase muy simpática la síntesis de Francisco sobre todo lo que nos habñia contado:

Haz el negocio, no la guerra.

Growth is getting hard…

 from intensive competition, consolidation, and saturation by @andrewchen

Growth is getting hard from intensive competition, consolidation, and saturation


"
The reason for the above is that there are multiple trends – happening right now – that impede growth for new products. These trends are being driven by the biggest players – Google/Facebook, et al – but also by the significant leveling up around of practitioners in design/PM/data/growth.

We’ll look at a couple trends in this essay, including the following:

1. Mobile platform consolidation
2. Competition on paid channels
3. Banner blindness  = shitty clickthroughs
4. Superior tooling
5. Smarter, faster competitors
6. Competing with boredom is easier than competing with Google/Facebook

These trends are powerful and critical to understanding why all of a sudden, entrepreneurs/investors are starting to get into many new fields (genomics, VTOL cars, cryptocurrency, autonomy, IoT, etc) in order to find new opportunities.

…When the App Store first launched, competition was easy: Boredom. Mobile app developers were taking time away from easy, ‘idle’ activities like waiting in line, commuting etc. But today, acquiring a new app user means stealing a user’s time from their favorite existing app. As we’re near the end of the cycle, companies have moved from non-zero sum to a zero-sum competition. …

How the industry is evolving, in response
The above trends are troubling for new products, and especially for startups. All 6 of these trends are scary, and they’ve emerged because we’re at the end of a cycle. There’s a variety of natural monopolistic trends (like app stores, ad platforms, etc), where everything with related to growth and traction is getting harder.

If companies want to stay in the mobile/software product categories, they need to evolve their strategies. I’ll save a deeper discussion for a future essay, but here are some observations on what’s happening:

1. More money diverted to paid acquisition
2. Deeper monetization to open up channels – especially paid
3. Creation of paid referral programs to complement ad buying
4. Personalization features that rely on lots of data to amp up targeting
5. Products trying to deepen differentiation by solving hard(er) problems/tech

"

The Scale Fallacy

The Scale Fallacy (And How I Learned the Value of Success That Was Steady, Not Spectacular)

Services businesses don’t scale because they are based on manpower: to double your revenue, you need to double the hours worked. Unless there is unused capacity, that means doubling the size of your team. And that’s just to achieve 2x growth. But in the tech world, scaling often means aiming for 10x or even 100x growth because the marginal cost for making extra copies of a digital product is insignificant.

VCs are looking for many multiples of growth to make a return on the multiple businesses they’ll invest in that fail. They’re not interested in slow but steady growth; they want boom, and they’ll risk bust (for the individual startup) to get it. (That’s just another reason why investor interest is not a good guide of the potential of your startup.)

So VCs won’t be interested if your startup doesn’t scale, and neither will the media and neither will the public. This is because the American dream isn’t a fantasy of steady, incremental growth—it’s a dream of celebrity, stardom, and riches.

If you’re prepared to put the dream on hold and take a cold look at your prospects, you’ll realize that there are significant advantages to creating a services business—one that doesn’t scale.

You’ll see money on day one, instead of working towards a future payday – which may never come.

You’ll learn about the cutting edge of what customers are demanding (and developing).

And this combination of revenue to play with and a sense of what is in demand can provide the perfect ingredients with which to subsequently create a successful scalable product business.

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Jonathan Siegel is the founder of RightCart, RightSignature, and RightScale, the chairman and founder of Xenon Ventures, and the author of The San Francisco Fallacy.

To Grow Faster, Hit Pause

To Grow Faster, Hit Pause — and Ask These Questions from Stripe’s COO | First Round Review

“A lot of companies don’t decide how they want to grow until they’re well into their growth phase,” she says. “For a long time, your actions pull your company along, and then all of a sudden it switches — your existing business starts pushing your behavior. External forces like feature requests, the need for more customer support, the need to create a team to do X when you never even needed to do X before — those forces start to dictate your decisions.”

The key, she says, is pausing just long enough to be very intentional about how you approach each phase of growth. 

It’s easy to become too reactive, and when that happens, you’ll inevitably start to make human resources mistakes, execution mistakes, prioritization mistakes.

1. Have we documented our operating principles?

Stripe calls them “Operating Principles.” (Many companies have “values,” but Stripe wanted to distinguish philosophical beliefs from the concrete principles that should be applied to the day-to-day work of running the business.) Three of Stripe’s operating principles, as Johnson describes them, are:

• Users first: “We always start with what our users need or would like, and then consider things like like infrastructure, internal constraints, partnerships, product roadmap, and so on."
• Think rigorously: “We care about getting things right and it often takes reasoning from first principles to get there. We work hard to detect the errors in received wisdom. Rigor doesn’t mean not-invented-here syndrome; we’re interested in the world around us and think that other companies, industries, and academic fields have a lot to teach us. But in many cases progress comes from taking paths less traveled.” 
• Trust and amplify: “We want to work in a company of deeply good people who treat their colleagues exceptionally well. People should be committed to amplifying one another: to going out of their way to help each other in both the short- and long-term.”

2. What structure is going to help us achieve our goals?

3. Who has been successful at our company so far?

4. Do we have a 5-year plan?

5. Do we have a way to measure the employee experience?

6. Are we decentralizing decisionmaking?