How Did I Get Here? (by @juliemariemeyer)

 There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. ~Niccolo Machiavelli

How Did I Get Here? * You didn't choose the entrepreneur life; it chose you

Working with a start-up through their near-death experiences to their breakthrough moments is a drug. There is simply nothing better than it in life. To see the ingenuity of people working to change the world for the better is the most addictive thing on the planet. You never get over it, and you never get enough of it.

But don't think that you get pats on the back for what you do. It's not as if the world necessarily appreciates the entrepreneur. People get jealous. They don't understand how decisive you have to be. You don't have the luxury of holidays; you simply answer the phone in another location.  

Innovators get into trouble. Caravaggio was one of the greatest painters of all time. He painted the world as it was, not pretty. He was trouble, and that got him into trouble.  
Misfortune befalls innovators because as Machiavelli says above, they are bringing about a new order of things. The status quo has teeth. 

Don't be an entrepreneur because you think it's cool. It's actually not. Or you don't want to work for someone else. You work for everyone. Be an entrepreneur if you honestly will not be ok if you don't do what you take to market. Entrepreneurs are people who are literally NOT QUITE RIGHT in the head. Does anyone really think that Steve Jobs, or Elon Musk, or Larry Elison are 'nice' people. I highly doubt they are. They have created great businesses, and while they don't get a free pass for their foibles, they move the world forward – solving problems from which all of society benefits.

Stay hungry, my friend (by @asanwal)

 from his @cbinsights June, 6th newsletter

Being hungry means many things.
It is ambition, resourcefulness, scrappiness, having a get-isht-done attitude, etc.
It is very tied to humility as well, because it means realizing that no matter how many nice things people now say about us, we’re still 0.1% of the way towards what we could build.
Hunger hates complacency. It is allergic to hubris.
But as I look out at what our biggest challenges are, I realize:
It is not the size of the market. It is not some giant dinosaur company waking up and actually getting a clue. It is us waking up and thinking our isht don’t stink.
When you’re in tiny offices where a neighboring tenant poos on the floor in the bathroom (true story), or where you have office mice (also true), or where a $5K deal is the highlight of your month (also true), hunger is part of the DNA of the team.
Only a certain type of masochist joins a company at that stage and enjoys it enough to stay.
But as you grow, things change:
-The offices get a bit nicer
-There actually is a pantry
-There are some perks
This is, of course, natural and expected to some extent.
But insurgents have the advantages of speed and responsiveness to customers, and IMO maintaining hunger is key to these.
So this is our other challenge. How do we maintain hunger even in the face of the modest perceived success we’ve had?
I don’t know the answer.
I imagine having new people join and work out of an office with mice and poo on the bathroom floor for the first month probably wouldn’t be a good look :) 

If you know any good examples of companies that have maintained that hunger as they’ve scaled, would love to hear more. If any really good ideas or examples emerge from among the responses, we’ll roll them up and share back with everyone.

Maintaining culture as you scale
Last week, I shared an earlier post titled 54 mistakes of a startup CEO that was written when CB Insights was under 25 people.
That newsletter talked about some of the communication challenges that have cropped up as the result of our growth (we’re now nearly 200).
The other challenge I talked about was maintaining culture, which I wanted to cover today.
First, defining culture. We’ve defined the culture of CBI through the lens of the people we aim to have on the team.
We describe successful people at CB Insights as having the 4 H’s. They are:
-Humble
-Hungry
-Happy
-Helpful
Most of the above are obvious. Happy is probably the one that requires some explaining. It doesn’t mean walking around all day with a smile on your face.
It does mean an orientation towards solutions. A “yes, if…” mentality vs a “no, because…” disposition. It’s people who favor creation over criticism. 

When I worry about maintaining culture, however, the H that I worry about the most is hunger.

Radiografía del 'business angel' español ( by @IESEInsight & @AEBAN_es )

Datos del Informe business angels 2018. La inversión en startups: actividad y tendencias, elaborado por el profesor Juan Roure y Amparo de San José, directora de la Red de Inversores Privados y Family Offices del IESE.

IESE Insight ¿Cómo es y qué le interesa al 'business angel' español?

El perfil del business angel español gana en consistencia, ya que acumula más operaciones y años de experiencia a sus espaldas. Además, dos de cada tres han ocupado puestos directivos de alto nivel o han emprendido previamente en una startup.

Esta tercera edición del estudio señala que el conocimiento del sector y la presencia de tecnologías disruptivas son elementos destacados al valorar oportunidades de inversión, mientras que el impacto social es todavía una asignatura pendiente.

En cuanto a los elementos con un mayor potencial disruptivo en los próximos años, el informe apunta a blockchain, todo lo relacionado con la movilidad y el coche conectado, así como el auge del sector fintech.

Además, la investigación, realizada en colaboración con la Asociación Española de Redes de Business Angels (AEBAN), señala que la presencia de las mujeres en este segmento de inversión se mantiene estancado por debajo del 10%.

A Look at How Technology is Reshaping the Global Economy (by @maxmarmer )

 via medium – The Industrial Era jobs and institutions decline towards death and the Information Era matures and blooms. The decline of the Industrial Era may have been subtler, and easy to ignore in years past.

The global economy as a whole will also be in precarious place if Information Era companies do not continue to produce accelerating growth. While we’ve nominally been in recovery since 2009, much of the expansion has been enabled by unprecedented levels of debt created by Central Banks around the world. Sky high debt levels across consumers, corporations and countries, are all being buoyed by historically low interest rates. Wealth inequality is rising fast and geopolitical tensions are heating up. We’ve been blessed by very low volatility the last few years, but we also are in many ways dependent on it.

Technology companies continue to become a bigger percentage of the world economy. They have overtaken Oil and Gas companies to become the largest public companies in the world, the private market is bursting with billion dollar unicorn valuations unseen before in history, and many non-technological industries are either dying at its hands or becoming one with it.

Some of this technological future will come from large companies, but by and large these large companies still haven’t figured out how to reliably create disruptive innovation. Their role in the innovation landscape is predominantly as acquirers, where they grow acquired products, applying their capacity for efficiency and scale.

An essential orienting frame for understanding the current state of the world, is that we are at a point of criticality. A liminal space between eras. The old world Industrial order is breaking down, and the new Information world order is in the process of taking over. This transition period is one of opposing forces of exponential creation and exponential destruction.

In the forthcoming era of technological disruption the need for a robust social safety net will be paramount.


worth reading, I'd recommend max. attention ;-)

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.

Lecciones aprendidas en @habitissimo

 sesión de @JordiBer en #FactoryStartup de @Startup_VLC y @VITemprende

Tendréis que ir a un sesión de Jordi para que os amplíe cada uno de estos titulares:

1. emprender es una estupidez
2. tener un plan b por si no sale
3. por qué existe tu negocio
4. si quieres ir (qué intriga, me despisté y este no lo recuerdo)
5. tienes más socios (hacienda)
6. no necesitas inversor, sino cliente
7. bootstrapero o rondero
8. foco, foco, foco (ojo con esos partners que te piden solo una personalización)
9. se una máquina de aprender (lee al menos un libro al mes)
10. el coche es mas importante q el piloto (un modelo de negocio ganador hace triunfar a un tonto)
11. copia sin piedad
12. la cultura de tu empresa es tu producto o servicio (no es copiable)
13. ten un pxxx proceso de selección y onboarding
14. mise tus KPIs cada semana, no cada mes
15. internacionalizar es 2X mas caro y lento que lo q has previsto
16. cuídate mucho
17. breakeven = libertad (autosostenible)
18. ten la casa limpia y ordenada
19. las empresas se compran, no se venden (+5% mas de un año en manos de otra holding, ya no pagas…)
20. disfruta del viaje

The 9 Deadliest Startup Sins

 by @sgblank "The demands of customer discovery require people who are comfortable with change, chaos, and learning from failure and are at ease working in risky, unstable situations without a roadmap."

 The 9 Deadliest Startup Sins – ThinkGrowth.org

1.Assuming you know what the customer wants.

To succeed, founders need to turn these guesses into facts as soon as possible by getting out of the building, asking customers if the hypotheses are correct, and quickly changing those that are wrong.

2. The “I know what features to build” flaw.

without direct and continuous customer contact, it’s unknown whether the features will hold any appeal to customers.

3. Focusing on the launch date.

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

4. Emphasizing execution instead of testing, learning, and iteration.

focusing on execution and delivering a product or service based on those initial, untested hypotheses is a going-out-of-business strategy.

5. Writing a business plan that doesn’t allow for trial and error.

Financial progress is tracked using metrics like income statement, balance sheet, and cash flow. The problem is, none of these metrics are very useful because they don’t track progress against your startup’s only goal: to find a repeatable and scalable business model.

6. Confusing traditional job titles with a startup’s needs.

“Sales” at an existing company refers to a team that repeatedly sells a known product to a well-understood group of customers with standard presentations, prices, terms, and conditions. Startups by definition have few, if any, of these. In fact, they’re out searching for them!

7. Executing on a sales and marketing plan.

in a majority of startups, measuring progress against a product launch or revenue plan is simply false progress, since it transpires in a vacuum absent real customer feedback

8. Prematurely scaling your company based on a presumption of success.

the most experienced executives are pressured to hire and staff per the plan regardless of progress. This leads to the next startup disaster: premature scaling.

9. Management by crisis, which leads to a death spiral.

The assumptions in a business plan are simply a series of untested hypotheses. When real results come in, the smart startups pivot or change their business model based on the results. It’s not a crisis, it’s part of the road to success.

3 Lessons learned and tips from a young VC’s perspective

My Summer in the Venture Capital World – Philipp Handel – Medium
via @daphnipolis

Lesson 1: Designing a good sourcing strategy is key

Looking back to the inception of our sourcing strategy, the idea was to 1) reach out to "country here" investors, 2) attend startup events, and 3) reactivate and formalize existing connections.

power of events to bring together the startup ecosystem. 

TIP 1: Discover your hunting instinct

TIP 2: The power of extroversion

Lesson 2: Learn to ask the right questions

trade-off between being efficient at screening and being open-minded to new creative ideas, thus not missing the “crazy bets”. It requires a very entrepreneurial mindset: Looking for strengths instead of weaknesses at first.

During the call you want to find out about the “raison d’être” of the startup, hear its founding story, usually starting with a) the problem they saw in the market, b) the solution they developed and c) the vision they have for the future.

If sounds exciting: 1) the product,  2) the market, 3) the team, 

A big trap would be to rely too much on a rigid framework or a checklist when assessing an opportunity. 

TIP 3: Build a trust relationship with founders

TIP 4: Develop proficiency in technology

Lesson 3: Go beyond executing the investment thesis

you evaluate an investment opportunity not only in itself but also relative to the fund’s investment thesis.

It was key for me to fully understand what we are investing in instead of only executing a checklist of criteria. 

TIP 5: Spot the value of contrarian views

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

"

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?

Step aside Silicon Valley, there is a new tech hub in town

Step aside Silicon Valley, there is a new tech hub in town | World Economic Forum

Deep tech accounted for $1.3 billion of European venture investments in 2015, delivered in 82 rounds, up from $289 million, delivered in 55 rounds, in 2011.

Europe’s traditional industries are now awakening to tech. Two-thirds of Europe’s largest corporates by market capitalization have made a direct investment in a tech company. One-third of those companies have acquired a tech company since the beginning of 2015.

image by stack overflow

…many small export-oriented European Union member countries – namely, the Benelux, Baltic, and Nordic countries – rank well above the US in so-called “e-intensity,” which covers IT infrastructure, Internet access, as well as businesses, consumer, and government engagement in Internet-related activities.

These “digital frontrunners” generate about 8% of their GDP from the Internet, compared to 5% in Europe’s Big Five (Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom).

Weaknesses

•while European tech entrepreneurs find it as easy as their American counterparts to raise startup funds, US firms enjoy 14 times more later-stage capital. That funding gap would disappear, if European pension funds allocated just 0.6% more of their capital under management to venture investments.

•lack of a true European single digital market. In the US or China, tech entrepreneurs gain immediate access to a massive market. In Europe, they still must navigate 28 different consumer markets and regulatory regimes. …Europe’s “single digital market,” they argue, currently amounts “to a jumble of outdated, corporatist, counterproductive industrial policies that favor producers over consumers, big companies over small, traditional incumbents over digital startups, and EU firms over foreign ones.”

•instead of liberalizing, the EU wants to regulate.

But

A new appetite for risk seems to be sweeping the continent; Atomico reports that more than 85% of founders say it is “culturally acceptable” to start one’s own company. Add to that deep research talent – five of the top ten global computer science faculties are within the EU – and Europe’s start-up boom looks sustainable.

Europe’s digital frontrunners are beginning to organize into a potent force, with 16 small EU countries, from Denmark to Ireland and Estonia, having formed a pro-Internet group. Together, these countries have urged the EU to ban data-localization requirements.

The Friendship of David & Goliath

 @daphnipolis uses to send a weekly newsletter, always interesting but with an editorial I think they do not publish in the internet… so I will, as it is a very good article, interesting as it backs the (not so) new trend accelerators are promoting, some of then even changing their current business model… by Paul Bazin.

Bold emphasis is mostly mine.

Our curse in Europe is that despite all our efforts we are not as sexy as the US with their big champions. That’s understandable: They have built worldwide tech giants since the 80s. Of course, we have our own champions, the “Criteos“ and “Spotifys“, but they don’t have the same visibility across the world to date. 

If you like to look at the bright side of things, you can mention that foreigners are very often surprised by the quality and the energy of the ecosystem. That is exactly what happens to Paul Graham. We might have an undervalued asset to showcase our know-how: France's multinational corporations represent 8% of the biggest companies in the world. And guess what: As they are well-known throughout the world, they could be really good ambassadors. 

But to do so they should be real actors of the tech ecosystem, you say? That’s right! They should be and they need to be.  

We often consider that startups and big corporation are the David and Goliath of an economic battle. Big corporations are seen as the old generation. The expert one, where you needed to be the biggest know-how in a specific field to work your way up. Startups are at the opposite. In order to have a new look you need to think different, thus you need to have a global and broad knowledge. Brian Chesky never worked in the hospitality domain before disrupting it with Airbnb. Startups bring this fresh and new look that big corporations desperately need. Meanwhile, to share this vision, startups need money, visibility, worldwide networks, facilities, the list goes on… 

 

There are two types of startups that interests MNCs:
• The competitive: The ones that are attacking big corporations head on by capturing market share. Those provide the new vision.  

•The mutualistic: The ones that are offering tools and technology to reinvent themselves. Startups can benefit from big companies by using them as a distribution channel (think what Apple did to the mobile industry) or clients (think of many B2B SaaS companies), big enterprises are using startups to reinvent themselves by making better use of their data, being more efficient, more customer centric, the list goes on... Those escort MNCs in their digital transformation.  

Startups and big corporates should be viewed in a co-evolution process. The morphology and behaviour of the one is impacting the other. 

Bottom line: Goliath needs David and David needs Goliath.
Big corporations should provide visibility, know-how, money in exchange of a fresh vision, and tools for their digital transformation.  

This way of seeing the relationship implies a big mentality shift: MNCs must be seen as a leverage opportunity to scale, and not as the enemy anymore. Having international players close to us is a chance for the ecosystem to grow.

Innovation, Change, and the Rest of Your Life (Steve Blank)

 As we’ll see, information does not mean experience, maturity or wisdom.
Reading about, hearing about, and learning about how to build a successful company is not the same as having done it. 

Innovation, Change, and the Rest of Your Life – ThinkGrowth.org

Silicon Valley emerged by the serendipitous intersection of:

• Cold War research in microwaves and electronics at Stanford University,
• a Stanford Dean of Engineering who encouraged startup culture over pure academic research,
• Cold War military and intelligence funding driving microwave and military products for the defense industry in the 1950’s,
• a single Bell Labs researcher deciding to start his semiconductor company next to Stanford in the 1950’s which led to
• the wave of semiconductor startups in the 1960’s/70’s,
• the emergence of Venture Capital as a professional industry,
• the personal computer revolution in 1980’s,
• the rise of the Internet in the 1990’s and finally
• the wave of internet commerce applications in the first decade of the 21st century.
• The flood of risk capital into startups at a size and scale that was not only unimaginable at its start, but in the middle of the 20th century would have seemed laughable.

What we’re now seeing is The Democratization of Entrepreneurship. What’s happening today is something more profound than a change in technology. What’s happening is that these seven limits to startups and innovation have been removed:

1. Consumer Internet and Genomics are Driving Innovation at scale.
2. We’re now Compressing the Product Development Cycle.
3. Founders Need to Run the Company Longer.
4. You can start a company on your laptop For Thousands Rather than Millions of Dollars.
5. The New Structure of how startups get funded.
6. Starting a Company means you no longer Act Like A Big Company.
7. The last one and perhaps the most profound and one students graduating today don’t even recognize is this — Information is everywhere. 

The Entrepreneurial Singularity
Revolutions are not obvious when they happen. When James Watt started the industrial revolution with the steam engine in 1775 no one said, “This is the day everything changes.” When Karl Benz drove around Mannheim in 1885, no one said, “There will be 500 million of these driving around in a century.” And certainly in 1958 when Noyce and Kilby invented the integrated circuit, the idea of a quintillion (10 to the 18th) transistors being produced each year seemed ludicrous. 

We may remember this as the time when scientific discoveries and technological breakthroughs were integrated into the fabric of society faster than they had ever been before. When the speed of how businesses operated changed forever. 

We may remember it as the time when we reinvented the economy and GDP began to take off and the world reached a level of wealth never seen before. It may be the dawn of a new era for a new economy built on entrepreneurship and innovation.

Ooooh...that founder narrative

 by @asanwal in CB insights newsletter.



The idea that tech startup founders take a bunch of financial risk when starting up is on average pretty BS. It's generally manufactured cuz it's great for PR.

Let's understand the risk.  

1. Most are highly employable if their startup doesn't work out
2. The reality is that many are middle-class or better
3. If they raise money, they're taking a salary (even if modest) as well
4. Many have families/spouses who bring insurance, paychecks, financial support, etc

This is not roughing it despite the stories they tell when trying to get press for their startup.

I'm not saying it's easy, but this whole "we burned the ships. There was no turning back" narrative is kinda horse-isht.



If you dig into the background of founders who say this, more often than not, they've got a safety net.

Heck, a lot of them raise from friends & family so it's clear their families have some discretionary dinero lying around. (BTW, I'm not talking about the 0.1% of people whose parents take a 2nd mortgage out to pay for their kid's startup. That's just dumb.)

Again, I'm not saying the startup life is easy or some folks don't struggle significantly financially. I'm talking on average.

The problem with this "woe is me, I took all this risk" narrative besides it being false for the purposes of PR is it makes people think their success is due to them and doesn't give credit to luck or other advantages. It's tiresome and dangerous.

If you're truly living hand-to-mouth, a tech startup is prob the last thing you build. You'd want a cash flow generating business. Not on-demand laundry.

BTW, tech startups are socioeconomically, a middle, upper-middle, and upper-class game. This should not come as a surprise to anyone.

Why Companies Are Not Startups, by Steve Blank

 The Enterprise: Business Model Execution

Why Companies Are Not Startups – Startup Grind – Medium

an enterprise is:
A company is a permanent organization designed to execute a repeatable and scalable business model.
Once you understand that existing companies are designed to execute then you can see why they have a hard time with continuous and disruptive innovation.

Driven by Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) and Processes
Once the business model is known, the company organizes around that goal and measures efforts to reach the goal, and seeks the most efficient ways to reach the goal.
Paradoxically, these very KPIs and processes, which make companies efficient, are the root cause of corporations’ inability to be agile, responsive innovators.

Finance
The goals for public companies are driven primarily by financial Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s).
A consequence of using these corporate finance metrics like RONA and IRR is that it‘s a lot easier to get these numbers to look great by:
Outsourcing everything.
Getting assets off the balance sheet.
Only investing in things that pay off fast.

HR Process
The incentive system for a company focused on execution is driven by the goal of meeting and exceeding “the (quarterly/yearly) plan.”

What Does this Mean?
Every time another execution process is added, corporate innovation dies a little more.
Innovation is chaotic, messy and uncertain. It needs radically different tools for measurement and control. It needs the tools and processes pioneered in Lean Startups.

What to do
Because internal culture applies execution measures/performance indicators to the output of these incubators and allocates resources to them same way as to executing parts of company.
Corporations that want to build continuous innovation realize that innovation happens not by exception but as integral to all parts of the corporation.
To do so they will realize that a company needs innovation KPI’s, policies, processes and incentives. (Our Investment Readiness Level is just one of those metrics.)

Lessons Learned

• Innovation inside of an existing company is much harder than a startup
• KPI’s and processes are the root cause of corporations’ inability to be agile and responsive innovators
• Every time another execution process is added, corporate innovation dies a little more
• Intellectually companies understand innovation, they don’t have the tools to put it into practice
• Companies need different policies, procedures and incentives designed for innovation
• Currently the data we use for execution models the past
• Innovation metrics need to be predictive for the future
• These tools and practices are coming…

The best way to manage people is to not manage them at all

 “Compassionate people ask for what they need. They say no when they need to, and when they say yes, they mean it. They’re compassionate because their boundaries keep them out of resentment.”
  ~ Brené Brown


By @Sofiaqt in Techstars via Mattermark Daily

One of the wonderful things about building a remote company is that you have to learn to reject the urge to control people. Instead, you have to build real trust — trust that can be tested everyday and not break. 

…a team members called Juan types in your internal chat:
“guys I’m going to take a nap and come back later, I didn’t sleep well and have a headache.”
In a typical business setting there would be some sort of freak out, some peers would get offended by Juan somehow being lazy and not pushing through the day, others will keep tabs for the next 1:1 session with Juan, and in other companies Juan would get fired immediately.
Why do we want Juan to be tired at work? Make a bunch of mistakes and have a bad day? Wouldn’t it be easier for Juan to go, take that nap and come back when he is ready?
Most importantly, the team needs to feel confident that Juan will come back at some point, do a superb job and continue doing his thing. 

Productivity for me is to be part of a team I don’t have to control, a team that does more in less time because they are not exhausted, a team that gets involved beyond their job description because they feel good about helping others. 

If your team is driven by learning, by freedom and by achieving a common goal, all you need to do is to provide the best environment for those things to happen. The rest is noise. 

If trust didn’t scale, we all would be dead by now. We need to trust each other to function as a society. In business, you build trust by doing small things well… 

Accountability is an agreement not an imposition. 

Good organizations know how to set boundaries without making people feel caged. Trust is built everyday, with small but frequent reactions and interaction.
It took me many burnouts and failures as a leader to finally understand that the best way to manage people is to not manage them at all.

Intel Disrupted (by Steve Blank)

Intel Disrupted: Why large companies find it difficult to innovate and what they can do about it

First, companies bought into the false premise that they exist to maximize shareholder value — which said “keep the stock price high.” 

Second, the leaders of these companies tended to be those who excelled at finance, supply chain or production. 

Third, the reason why companies find it hard to innovate is the explosive shifts in technology, platforms and markets that have occurred in the last 15 years–personal computers moving to mobile devices. 

Fourth, it’s harder for large corporations to offer disruptive breakthroughs… 

Startups have realized that large companies are vulnerable because of the very things that have made them large and profitable: by focusing on maximizing shareholder return, they’ve jettisoned their ability to do disruptive innovation at speed and scale. 

In contrast, startups operate with speed and urgency, making decisions with incomplete information. They’re better than large companies at identifying customer needs/problems and finding product/market fit by pivoting rapidly. 

Their size lets them adopt flatter and more agile organizational structures while providing incentives that reward risk-taking and collaboration.

Innovation can come from inside the corporation, by adopting Lean Startup language and methods, developing intrapreneurship, and fostering innovation-driving behaviors… 

So to succeed, corporations must re-think and then re-invent their corporate innovation model, replacing a static execution model with three horizons of continuous innovation: This requires a corporate culture, organizational structure, and employee incentives that reward innovation. 

It requires establishing acceptable risk level and innovation KPIs for each horizon.
And it also requires understanding the differences between executing the existing business model, extending the business model and searching for and disrupting the business model. 

Lessons Learned
• Even the most innovative companies eventually become yesterdays news
• To survive companies need to run three-horizons of innovation
— Horizon 1 — execute their existing business model(s)
— Horizon 2 — extend their existing business model(s)
— And for long-term survival — Horizon 3 — search for and create new/disruptive business model(s)

El panorama europeo del Venture Capital

El Fondo Europeo de Inversión (European Investment Fund) parte del EIB Group cuyos accionistas son el Banco Europeo de Inversiones, la Unión Europea a través de la Comisión Europea, y entidades financieras y bancarias públicas y privadas de toda Europa entre las que podemos encontrar por parte de España, al Banco Santander, La Caixa a través de Microbank, el ICO y la Agencia andaluza IDEA, lleva años trabajando el estudio "The European venture capital landscape: an EIF perspective".

Ha editado recientemente el tercer volumen que estoy leyendo todavía, pero antes de que se me anticúe para –en su caso– comentarlo, quería compartirlo. Y de paso centrar todo el estudio en una sola entrada en vez de otros contenidos.

Volumen 3 (2017):
Liquidity events and returns of EIF-backed VC investments

Volumen 2 (2016):
Growth patterns of EIF-backed startups

Volumen 1 (2016):
The impact of EIF on the VC ecosystem

The No Excuses Culture

 by @sgblank (Steve Blank) Think Growth - The No Excuses Culture

Making excuses instead of producing timely deliverables meant we were failing as an organization. We weren’t supporting the mission of the company (generate revenue and profit), and the lack of honesty diminished our credibility, and our integrity. …with no consequences our entire department acted as if schedules and commitments didn’t matter… 

By accountable I meant, “We agreed on a delivery date, and between now and the delivery date, it’s OK if you ask for help because you’re stuck, or something happened outside of your control. But do not walk into my office the day something is due and give me an excuse. It will cost you your job.” That kind of accountable. 

The goal wasn’t inflexible dates and deadlines, it was to build a culture of no surprises and collective problem solving. 

…Asking for help, and/or saying you were stuck created cognitive dissonance for many people. Even as we publicly applauded those who asked for help, some just couldn’t bring themselves to admit they needed help until the day the project was due… 

One other thing needed to be fixed before we could implement “no excuses.”… We quickly put in a capacity/priority planning process. Each marketing group, (product marketing, marcom, trade shows, etc.) calculated their number of available man-hours and budget dollars. Then every week each department stack-ranked the priority of the projects on their plate and estimated the amount of time and budget for each. …If we didn’t have the resources to support them, we helped them find resources outside the company. And finally, each of the projects we did accept had to align with the overall mission of the company and our department. 

Over time, accountability, execution, honesty and integrity became the cornerstones of our communication with each other, other departments and vendors. 

We became known as a high-performance organization as we delivered what said we would — on time and on budget. 

Lesson Learned:

• No excuses for failures given, just facts and requests for help
• No excuses for failures accepted, just facts, and offers to help
• Relentless execution
• Individual honesty and integrity

Management skills are support skills; people skills.

@Trello's People VP talks about how the company is doing with on boarding, management, performance reviews, company culture and goals and compensation setting…

Management skills are support skills; people skills. It’s about figuring out what makes someone tick, understanding their concerns and figuring out how to make them better at their job.

An interesting "case study" from Impraise.

Lo que, por cierto me recuerda esta otra entrada en este blog (en español y propia), que actualizaba hace poco para decir que Seth Godin indicaba la conveniencia de no llamar "soft skills" a aquellas referidas a las habilidades para las relaciones personales, no son nada "soft".
Y la conveniencia de confirmar si uno dispone o no de dichas "skills", pues las competencias "vocacionales" (propias del puesto, digamos) ya se le suponen al empleado o aspirante.