Disclaimer:
These are not the opinions of my employer, AWS, and the only purpose of this newsletter is to share, learn through sharing, and foster some honest discourse in the community at large.
Sitting in a Pret at the Zurich airport with some coffee and chocolate croissant. Yum. 13 hour flight from Singapore to get here and another 10 hours to go in order to get to Chicago. Deep dish pizza here I come.
Something I read:
Increasingly in this day and age everything is coming at us fast and the notion of going deep or spending a lot of time on something is lost on most of us. The story of Audible kind of debunks this.
Don Katz started Audible in 1995 and after taking it public, eventually sold to Amazon in 2008. For all of this time he has been the CEO - that is pretty amazing. You don’t hear any outlandish stories about him - in fact his story is not really talked about much until recently he decided to step down as the CEO and only have the chairmen role.
When I look at my own career my longest stint at any one company is 5+ years which was at BEA and if you add my WebLogic years to it - then it would be 7+ years. I have some stints at short as 1 year in there as well. Normally my viewpoint is to always stay at least a year in case things improve or to give me enough time to find something new.
I will admit to taking some gigs knowing that I wouldn’t be there for long, possibly knowing ahead of time that it would be 1 and done. However I usually join something thinking I will be there a while. As I age I think more about this all the time. Maybe it is because I am old enough now to think about the end working state and what I want to do before that happens.
When I think about my kids this career stuff starts to really hit me, since I wonder what my kids will do and how they will navigate the changing times. Most gigs they take will probably not last for more than a few years and I worry that they are getting the skills they need to sort this out.
I am not sure what the trick is or how to help them other than try and teach them about variety, enjoying the little things and just soaking up as experience as they can. Which brings me to how I try and explain life skills to them - be a generalist for as long as to you can till you find the thing you love that you want to specialize in.
I suggest the new book Range by David Epstein. Lots of data and history points to being a generalist as a better survival tactic for the modern world.
A lesson learned:
When I was knee deep in VC, I was trying to codify the way I thought about companies so I could streamline my processes. VC is kind of a volume game on the funnel and of course depending on how a lead came to us or how we found the company would greatly influence how we thought about it. Again, this is not to say that the way you get a lead is everything but it is a big piece of it.
Moving past the lead stage and getting into the - we like this company so let’s dig in stage, I was trying to codify how I looked at it. Someday I will share my Triangle of Goodness image but for now I can safely land on some tenants that seem to be working as I look back on the portfolio and see how the companies are doing now.
I usually bounce around three core tenants - people, product and market. Increasingly, I put product as the last bit and feel that people or the founders is the most important but there has to be a market. I have seen great products go nowhere due to people issues or just no market. Of course product and market go hand in hand to some extent but there can be the notion of building something cool with no one to sell to. One might consider that you design a product for a market but that does not mean that the marketing or sales is sorted but it helps to know you built something people want to pay money for.
I keep thinking about this framework all the time but now I am not looking at deals with any sort of volume so it is tough to practice whatever my thinking is.
If you are building a startup make sure you have the right people around you and this is not only thinking around the founders but early employees and senior staff. Single founder companies are okay as well - surprisingly in my own experience the single founders have not generally been an issue. Make sure you think deeply about the market, marketing and sales early on - you can’t easily fix this stuff if it isn’t working unless you catch it very early.
Product is never in final state anyway and it can always be repaired.