Rahul Pathak : My Personal Blog

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.

There’s a new article on Techcrunch about our strategic shift from being a local review pure play to focusing on deals and saving users money.
From the article:

Judy’s Book, in contrast, made some fairly dramatic strategic changes last fall, in the hope of avoiding the same fate. They de-focused on local reviews, and went more towards the shopping angle and local deals.

There’s a long way to go before we can declare that we’re a success, but I’m proud to be part of a company that can ask itself tough questions and live with the answers it finds. If you haven’t already done so, check out our CEO, Andy Sack’s blog where he talks about the changes we’ve been going through.

It’s going to be a busy, interesting year. Shifting our attention to shopping and deals was hard - we had invested a lot in local reviews and our strategic shift impacted employees and users. I’m confident we made the right choice and although we have a metric buttload to learn, I’m excited about the direction we’re moving in.

UPDATE: 1/9, 1:18am (no, I have no idea why I’m up so late) - Acknowledgment from Andy 

The phrase “it’s done” means different things to different people. From a product standpoint, it should mean - “it works as desired” not “I’m done working on it.” This is one of my pet peeves. It’s unfortunate how rare truly taking ownership and pushing a task to completion really is.

The process goal of checking off a box on a list when a task is complete is irrelevant. Something is done when the person you’re doing it for (everyone answers to somebody) is satisfied. End of story.