Starting Up by Rahul Pathak

Sounds obvious, but it’s easy to forget. Mark Hurst’s post on Richard Branson prompted me to read the Fast Company article he was talking about. It’s fantastic. One thing jumped out at me while reading it:

What Branson understood two decades ago is just now beginning to be embraced by other corporate leaders: We should be having fun when we’re spending our money…

…He takes on intransigent industries that treat customers inexplicably badly and shows that he can offer not only a better deal but a truly entertaining experience. The approach has made Sir Richard a multibillionaire and Virgin a beloved brand–as well as a $10 billion-a-year operation.

Helping your customers have fun doesn’t seem important (or profitable) but I think it’s critical. If people feel good while giving your their money, I think you’ve pulled off something amazing and it’s likely that they will do it again.

Mark, thanks for making me think and for pointing me to a great article.

This is the classic problem facing startups looking for talent. Do you hire someone who’s been around the block, been knee-deep in the industry for years, or do you look for someone who’s smart, hungry and can figure things out?

There’s no question that experience can be valuable, but there are times when it can work against you. As Andy Monfried writes:

Frequently, people with experience would say, “Media planners won’t do that.” “Agencies wont commit budgets without a site list…” Turns out the media planners did. Because we were not afraid to change the language — we did not know any better, we sold it - and it worked. Had there been someone internally, beating us over the head, with all their previous media experience, telling us NOT TO DO IT - we probably would not have.

The trick is to find people who have had enough experience that they can avoid common pitfalls but who are receptive to learning from the environment and who are willing to challenge the status quo. The market today isn’t the same as it was 15 years ago; not all of the experience gained may be applicable. Someone who can take in today’s input with an open mind and process it in light of prior experience is invaluable. This sort of person is also extremely rare.

When you’re setting out to do something different, sometimes people without experience are the ones who find a way. There’s a great post on Ask the Wizard in which Dick Costolo talks about hiring the ‘Best Available Athlete’ which is right in line with my thinking.

As with all people-related decisions, there’s no right answer, but I would pick someone I enjoyed working with who got stuff done and could adapt over the ‘perfect on paper’ candidate every time.

P.S. I’m reserving the right to change my mind about this in about 15 years or so.

When you screw up, admit it. Sometimes, even when it’s not your fault, you should take responsibility (those of you with significant others know exactly what I’m talking about.)

Jetblue is one of my favorite airlines and they screwed up big-time. I just got this in my inbox from them:

We are sorry and embarrassed. But most of all, we are deeply sorry.

Last week was the worst operational week in JetBlue’s seven year history. Following the severe winter ice storm in the Northeast, we subjected our customers to unacceptable delays, flight cancellations, lost baggage, and other major inconveniences. The storm disrupted the movement of aircraft, and, more importantly, disrupted the movement of JetBlue’s pilot and inflight crewmembers who were depending on those planes to get them to the airports where they were scheduled to serve you. With the busy President’s Day weekend upon us, rebooking opportunities were scarce and hold times at 1-800-JETBLUE were unacceptably long or not even available, further hindering our recovery efforts.

Words cannot express how truly sorry we are for the anxiety, frustration and inconvenience that we caused. This is especially saddening because JetBlue was founded on the promise of bringing humanity back to air travel and making the experience of flying happier and easier for everyone who chooses to fly with us. We know we failed to deliver on this promise last week.

My experiences with them have been stellar and I hope they come out of this well, but that’s neither here nor there. I like their apology a great deal. And granted, after what happened, it needed to be good. What I like about itis the repeated use of “we did this…” and “we did that…” - they made it personal.

Taking responsibility is critical. We own our actions (or inaction) and there’s no escaping that. Once you take responsibility for the screw-up, you commit yourself to fixing what went wrong. It’s a lot easier to sweep things under the rug when your reputation isn’t what’s at stake. “I have to fix it,” follows much more readily from “I screwed up,” than it does from “the weather screwed things up.”

We all screw up. What’s important is what happens next.

You’re not done until it’s tested, deployed and running.

When working hard to build a site you think users will rave about, it’s critical to not lose sight of the operations support required to test, deploy and keep your site running. The best site in the world is a complete waste of time if pages load slowly and you constantly have to be apologize for being offline.

The unfortunate reality of infrastructure is that if it’s performing well, it’s invisible. Most of the time most of us in the United States never think about electricity, running water or being able to pick up the phone and call someone. (This wasn’t the case growing up in Nigeria, but that’s another story.) The same is true when we think about websites. We focus on what we can see and interact with and not on what’s behind it, unless something is not working.

At Judy’s Book, infrastructure and ops form a significant part of what we do. Interacting with data feeds (inbound and outbound), setting up and configuring machines for development, test and production, managing builds and monitoring servers all take time and resources. Planning for and anticipating the ops impact of your product decisions is critical.

Make sure your ops team doesn’t feel like they are invisible.

There is a fantastic post on ‘On Startups’ (a blog I highly recommend) talking about why ‘me-too’ companies aren’t always a bad idea.

“Yes, there are competitors, but nobody has built a product yet that users really like…”

And there, quite simply is the crux of the motivation.  It is easy to discount companies as being “me too”, but the reality is we have seen a fair number of successes in the past in categories that we have felt were already crowded.  The reason is that nobody had really solved the problem quite right.  This is what motivated Matt, and this is why you shouldn’t let me (or others) talk you out of a startup idea simply because it might be labeled a “me too” idea.

This makes a ton of sense. Until the use case is really nailed, there is opportunity for new entrants. I think a critical element to consider, however is that your take on the idea shouldn’t require users to change existing modes of behavior. If they can do what they’re doing on the existing sites but get better results and more utility from you, then you’re on to something.

Andy Monfried has a great post on his blog about having the courage to make decisions that aren’t safe and goes on talk about how he doesn’t want to build another cool company, but rather to change how media is bought. Not only is this post though-provoking and right  on the money, it’s engaging and extremely well written.

I’ve never met this dynamic young lady – but her adventurous journey, made me think about many of the opportunities we all take, and others we miss out on.

How many times have we said to ourselves that we will be more daring, take on more challenges, and generally just confront life head on, more aggressively?

Time is NOT on our side – (as Jagger and Richards wrote) – time works against us, and each day that passes in our lives makes, joining the proverbial circus, harder – more difficult, and more fraught with risk.

I’ve made a decision.

It’s really easy to get caught up in incremental improvement and to not take the intellectual steps needed to even dare to think big. Funnily enough, Andy Sack and I were having the same conversation last night. Maybe there’s something in the air.

I’ve come to believe that ‘forcing functions’ are great tools to make things happen. What do I mean by forcing functions? External events that enforce accountability. In a startup, these can be a board meeting, a sales pitch with an important prospect, your competitor’s product launch, expiration of your office lease, you get the idea. In general, unless there’s some serious crack smoking happening during deadline setting, motivated people find a way to get stuff done in the time allotted.

Forcing functions are intimately linked to accountability. Once you have a deadline you can’t move, you are forced to meet it. We went through such an experience recently the first time we paid out users for commissions earned. Once we committed to a date to issue funds, we were forced to walk through the entire process and involve the appropriate individuals from development, marketing and accounting to work through the issues and implications. We found a lot of holes in our processes but were able to work out how to fix them in time to meet our deadline. Funnily enough, these issues were largely known, and were on our list of things to do, but the forcing function made us deal with them.

This model can only be successful when you have an organization that responds well to pressure. In addition, effective organizations find ways to create deadlines and forcing functions for themselves in order to operate at a high level of productivity.

I was told about two great posts today. The first is by Peter Rip at Crosslink Capital about “failing fast and failing often.” You have to get into the market, see what works and adapt.

The classic venture model has been to fund to milestones 12-18 months out. In consumer web services, there are only two meaningful milestones — (1) are you getting a lot of users and (2) have you figured out how to make money? We use other metrics in other sectors (like management, product, etc.) as proxies for real economic progress. We also use them because (we believe) they would have residual value in an asset sale or merger.

None of this is true in consumer web services. You’re either hot or not. Second place generally sucks.

The problem is that it is hard for entrepreneurs and VCs to know a priori if something is going to be a hit. The only way to know is to try, and trying takes time and money. So here’s the real rationale for what it makes sense for these companies to raise “a lot of money” and not blow it. They have to run lots of experiments.

One thing I would add to this - when you’re in a mode of getting into the market quickly and iterating, you have to do enough work to make sure that what you present to the market is good enough that their reaction to it is meaningful. If you release a buggy piece of crap quickly, you might conclude that no one cares. The flip side to this is that truly great ideas find a way to win, but in general, not shooting yourself in the foot is a good idea.

The second great post is on Mark Cuban’s blog and it’s about his relationship with Bobby Knight.

You said, and Im paraphrasing: “Everyone has got the will to win, its only those with the will to prepare that do win”

Clearly, a lot of factors go into success and even the definition of that word is a personal one. There’s no question in my mind though that the will to put yourself in a position to win and the ability to evaluate your situation and change what’s not working are critical.

I came across an amazing story in the UK’s Daily Mail which was making the rounds on the front page of Reddit. It was about a British Airways flight that flew through the dust cloud from a volcanic eruption near Indonesia in 1982 and lost all four engines.

With unbelievable restraint, Captain Eric Moody addressed British Airways flight 009 as his Boeing 747 drifted inexorably down towards the Indian Ocean.

Displaying the stiff-upper-lip spirit that built an empire, he uttered the words that are every air passenger’s worst nightmare: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. We have a small problem. All four engines have stopped. We are doing our damnedest to get it under control. I trust you are not in too much distress.’

The crew didn’t panic as all four engines failed and the jumbo became the world’s largest glider. They knew how their plane handled with no power and how much time they had aloft. As oxygen masks deployed, the captain realized that not all of them worked. In order to keep his passengers alive, he traded 6,000 ft of altitude (sort of important when you have no power) so they could breathe. Amazingly, as he flew into denser air, three out of four engines were able to restart and he was able to get his plane on the ground in one piece in spite of no instruments and a damaged windshield.

It’s moments like this when you really appreciate what pilots do. On routine flights, autopilots and ILS systems can handle the workload, but when things go wrong, you want someone who knows what to do in charge. The amount of training that airline crews go through is what makes it possible to make good decisions under pressure.

I’ve had a long standing love affair with planes and flying so this story may not mean much to you, but it got me thinking so I thought I’d share. While most of us will never be in a position where our decisions directly affect this many lives, the general lesson here still holds. You have to practice your craft and stay ready so when the time comes, you can act with confidence and achieve your objective. This lesson applies throughout life - in sports, in school, at work.

Note: Image and quote from The Story of BA flight 009 and the words every passenger dreads… by Zoe Brennan

Jason Yip has a great post at Martin Fowler.com about making sure the ‘daily scrum’ is productive. One of the key concepts in his post centers around focusing on three things:

• What did I accomplish yesterday?
• What are my obstacles?
• What do I intend on accomplishing today?

Another key concept focuses on the need to build shared commitment. All these items make a ton of sense, but the hard part is implementing them consistently. We had tried to do this at Judy’s Book, but had let them lapse. His post inspired me to try and start them up again. We’re in a critical phase of our business and need to make sure we are executing as efficiently as possible. I think implementing some of these ideas will help us achieve that.