Afrikaans
Akan
Albanian
Amharic
Arabic
Armenian
Azerbaijani
Basque
Belarusian
Bemba
Bengali
Bihari
Bosnian
Breton
Bulgarian
Cambodian
Catalan
Cebuano
Cherokee
Chichewa
Chinese (Simplified)
Chinese (Traditional)
Corsican
Croatian
Czech
Danish
Dutch
English
Esperanto
Estonian
Ewe
Faroese
Filipino
Finnish
French
Frisian
Ga
Galician
Georgian
German
Greek
Guarani
Gujarati
Haitian Creole
Hausa
Hawaiian
Hebrew
Hindi
Hmong
Hungarian
Icelandic
Igbo
Interlingua
Irish
Italian
Japanese
Javanese
Kannada
Kazakh
Kinyarwanda
Kirundi
Kongo
Korean
Krio (Sierra Leone)
Kurdish
Kurdish (Soranรฎ)
Kyrgyz
Laothian
Latin
Latvian
Lingala
Lithuanian
Lozi
Luganda
Luo
Luxembourgish
Macedonian
Malagasy
Malay
Malayalam
Maltese
Maori
Marathi
Mauritian Creole
Moldavian
Mongolian
Myanmar (Burmese)
Montenegrin
Nepali
Nigerian Pidgin
Northern Sotho
Norwegian
Norwegian (Nynorsk)
Occitan
Oriya
Oromo
Pashto
Persian
Polish
Portuguese (Brazil)
Portuguese (Portugal)
Punjabi
Quechua
Romanian
Romansh
Runyakitara
Russian
Samoan
Scots Gaelic
Serbian
Serbo-Croatian
Sesotho
Setswana
Seychellois Creole
Shona
Sindhi
Sinhalese
Slovak
Slovenian
Somali
Spanish
Spanish (Latin American)
Sundanese
Swahili
Swedish
Tajik
Tamil
Tatar
Telugu
Thai
Tigrinya
Tonga
Tshiluba
Tumbuka
Turkish
Turkmen
Twi
Uighur
Ukrainian
Urdu
Uzbek
Vietnamese
Welsh
Wolof
Xhosa
Yiddish
Yoruba
Zulu
[Music]
well good morning everybody and welcome
it's great to have you here i must say i
couldn't be more overjoyed to have a
chance to finally summarize after five
great workshops it's great to be at a
place where we can actually put all the
pieces back together again
before i do that i don't want to
disappoint you so i'll just tell you we
have to set this expectation you can't
summarize
five workshops which had two hours of
great participation by the students
without having the students here which
of course many of them are not because
of the fact they've got their exams and
so forth
and even the videos and the slides that
are up on the site now that's gone live
today it's official you can go find all
the materials up there don't capture the
true spirit which we witnessed over the
last uh six months or so and that is
obviously the engagement of the students
but if you'll bear with me i'm going to
try to at least give you a sense of what
did we cover and a taste of some of the
interactions with some embedded videos
so without our agenda this morning is to
cover those highlights and people said
to me as i was going through these
workshops a number of different things
that sort of really touched me one was
that the soft stuff is really the hard
stuff and what they meant by that was
starting a company and finding the right
team and figuring out how to really put
that together with a kind of culture
that made it possible to build a real
company is actually really hard and so
i've heard that so many times now i'm
going to make a little bit more emphasis
on that piece the other thing i hear is
that obviously when you take your
product to market all the things you
hope for such as everybody beating a
path to your door because you've got the
best mousetrap don't really pan out that
way and so go to market scenario that
people really want help with too and
that's why it's so great to have jeffrey
here today
as you all know because i've talked
about it so many times i'm a student of
his and i've really enjoyed learning
from him so it's fun to be
having him come up today and talk about
that but i'll cover some of those pieces
again in a little bit of depth today
we did actually have our awards ceremony
but i just wanted to recognize at least
a couple of people are here uh so we'll
do that at some point and then i need to
have a few moments to thank everybody so
you have to bear with me at that and
then obviously it's on to jeffrey so
about 45 minutes we'll have jeffrey and
i should say that although this was
entitled the wrap-up for jeffrey moore
it's really the warm-up for jeffrey
moore as you'll see when he comes on
well we started out with a very simple
thought which is you can't start a
company unless you have a value
proposition so everybody has to figure
out you know what their idea is and how
to put it together and so the first
workshop was focused around what problem
is it that you really want to solve and
then i wanted people to have in the
notion of teaching people to fish and
evaluation for their problem and so we
developed this gain pain ratio over the
i guess couple of decades in my various
different companies to try to help that
and so we talked a little bit about that
and then out of that came people's value
prop it was very exciting in the
workshops to see how many people came up
with things that really refined both
their thinking and also made us all pay
attention so there was certainly some
great energy that came out of it
so let me tell you how we got that some
of the highlights we picked out and i
want to thank adam barry adam are you
here today
yep uh adam helped me with some of this
i always think about things in very
black and white terms and so he came up
with this um moniker which was the idea
of really finding a problem that is
blatant and critical as opposed to
latent and aspirational now if you're a
consumer marketer you might actually
need to go into this bottom left but i'm
mostly focused on b2b as i've explained
to many of you because that's my
experience
and we look for blatant critical
problems where people can really focus
on what pain and need is just so urgent
that you have to address it so we talked
a little bit about that and we said look
if you're going to solve a really
fundamentally worthwhile problem there
really are at least four use that we
could think of
first of all is it really unworkable i
mean it's something just fundamentally
broken so that when you go in there
you're fixing something that ultimately
delivers value right from the get-go
better still is it unavoidable so i know
in the audience today is one of our
companies that was a case study reval
they are in the business of actually
providing derivatives accounting and it
turns out to be totally unavoidable
because of the sec and actually totally
unworkable on spreadsheets because it's
got so complicated and by the way it has
a very urgent need because if you get
caught out as a few companies like ge
did it cost you hundreds of millions if
not billions of dollars of market cap
so
the last piece became a whole subject in
itself in the go to market which is how
do you find underserved markets and how
do you segment them we'll talk a little
bit about that later on
we then went on to talk about what kind
of solution can you come up with that's
going to make a real impact and we
talked about this in some of the ways
that i think people already know you
obviously want a discontinuous
innovation something marginal isn't
going to cut it
you also want something that ultimately
becomes defensible and that is
disruptive as a business model too
so the disruptive business model piece
actually became a whole topic of itself
and is the subject of a workshop so we
didn't cover too much at this stage but
what i was trying to point out to people
is that actually this troika can make a
big impact and it's not just about
technology but so often when we're
dealing with entrepreneurs and trying to
help them get going we find they always
think about technology first but in fact
early on if you can think about the
business model and how to interweave it
with your technology can make such a big
impact i read an article in case you're
interested in a bit more depth on that
that's up on venturebeat that talks a
little bit about why that's important to
think about right from the get-go
and then as i said what we try to do is
give people a sense of what is the way
they can evaluate their own idea
in the notion that if you can think
about it in a way that actually brings
it to life for the customer then you're
probably going to be the voice of the
customer and your own best critic
and i pointed out something that is
obvious which is obviously you want gain
for the customer but you've also got
pain that they have to go through in
many instances to actually deal with
implementing that solution and many
people forget this they think well you
know if i've got an incredible product
the customers just implement it they'll
take it on right away and the reality is
there are a lot of things customers have
to do to even find you if you're a small
startup that are painful they take time
and energy and everything else but the
big one i find people ignore and
actually catch them out so many times is
the inertia and it comes from the fact
that as a startup unfortunately you
don't carry any credibility you very
rarely even carry any brand at all maybe
you have some personally and so this
inertia is a big part of what we try to
talk about how do you overcome the do
nothing alternative
or if you're going to display something
how do you make it incredibly clear why
the gain of displacing you is worth the
pain of taking that existing solution
out of play so i would encourage
everybody here who gets a chance to
contribute back because there was a lot
of uh this was all about us learning as
much as we could to contribute back as
the future generations obviously
of entrepreneurs come out and i've
learned a lot by listening to the the
workshop so one of the things i heard
time and time again from the students
who were going through the gain pain
evaluation is that they have a hard time
actually putting this into numeric form
into you know a scorecard as it were so
we talked a lot about that i won't go
into it today about how do you score
this how do you really get to a basis
for evaluating but in the end i think we
all agreed something which probably
won't surprise anybody here which is in
many instances unless you have at least
an order of magnitude impact
on your potential customer you probably
won't get over that inertia you won't
get over that risk that so many of them
feel uh is inherent in taking a startup
into their organization
so i'm delighted to say that i wasn't
doing all the talking in fact really all
i was was a shell to get the case
studies in play and we had some great
case studies and i want to thank
appearing uh some of whom are here in
the audience carlos and alan and and
reinhardt thank you
who shared with us their own gain pain
evaluation and as an investor i saw it
first hand and i'll just tell you the
pain to start off with and then you'll
hear the gain when we first invested
they had a product which is going to
sound obvious which was an enterprise
app store
and it turns out that enterprises don't
want to put their apps on the itunes
store because they don't want everybody
to have to go up there use a credit card
to buy them especially if the procter
and gamble have tens of thousands of
users or one of our customers cisco's
that have 60 000 users they just want
them rolled out to the sales force
securely etc so there's a real
need that they had very fundamental but
they were having a problem with the pain
that the customer was experiencing and
implementing them because they had to go
through apple get credentials then they
had to install the thing it would
typically take about 10 days
and that pain was so great for the
customer to go through we just weren't
getting the adoption that people wanted
we were hand holding them through it
and they literally sat down as a team to
their credit and said you know what
we're getting nothing other than focus
on live in five building a product that
you could literally go to on the web and
in five minutes have your
app store up and running and enable
companies to instantly not only upload
but then manage the entire lifecycle of
their applications for the ipads and
ipods or android devices and their
business took off probably no surprise
to you but it was entirely because of
them doing their own evaluation of this
gay and pain equation and they gave a
great case study of how estee lauder is
actually getting 40 uplift at all of
their stores 17 000 of them around the
world by having this application for
guiding people through what makeup they
should buy turns out people trust ipads
more than they trust humans
go figure uh
so uh and you know great bottom line
savings and they were able to actually
show those you know get those from the
customers so i again i encourage you to
participate as we get into this in the
future and bring your case studies
forward because we all learn from and
thank you appearance for sharing yours
now i have to tell you i learned a ton
too this was our blackboard that very
bored uh after the first
session after everybody gone off and
done their workshops and what i learned
was something that i never expected
because you know i'm obviously a
different generation to those that are
coming up in this always-on world and it
is that community is having more impact
than anything else in this new world of
you know evaluating products so i
learned how important it is to think
about you know who are the influences in
your community and we've all got used to
now things like social reviews ratings
and so forth uh but it's obviously
becoming an important part of the
landscape as people think about you know
how do they change the buyer behavior so
thank you everybody who shared that uh
i'll incorporate it in future workshops
and it was a lot of fun
so we then went on finally to
uh company formation obviously those who
had an idea had come forward and there
were actually 10 teams who started out
quite intensely
going after their ideas and many who
couldn't even you know we couldn't even
get to so again i thank you all for
stepping forward for that and as i say
this was the softer piece that turned
out to be harder for people to grasp so
i'm going to spend a little bit more
time on and bring a few examples to play
and what we were talking about here was
a framework for how do you build an
enduring company
and people came forward with the obvious
thing which is you know okay so you've
told us what the value proposition is
what are some of the steps we need to
think about along the way to realizing
our vision of going and owning and
dominating a marketplace and of course i
said the obvious which is well it's
certainly not going to get done in four
workshops and it could be as simple as
hire the right people who know how to
execute because execution counts for so
much in this so all the theory that i
might share with you i will say it does
come down more than anything else to
hiring the right people and really
having the conviction passion
persistence and everything else to go
after pursuing that vision with the kind
of execution that it takes to become a
leader but having said that obviously it
starts with people
so we talked about what is it that helps
you get the right kind of people and i'm
a big fan now of not only jefferies who
helped me with sort of first ideas of
how do you iterate things but now people
like eric reese have come up with the
idea of pivoting which jeffrey and i
were just talking about is is classic
change in lingo but it's really the same
theory coming over again but there's one
area that i really firmly believe you
don't pivot
and those who are in the audience before
will probably know can anybody tell me
what you wouldn't pivot in your startup
if you could keep it constant it would
really make a big difference
anybody
yeah
founder co-founder would be great
change
okay anybody else
change is is a is i would say something
that is a constant so in that regard
yeah
anybody else
yes that's the answer i was looking for
i'm not saying it's the only answer all
of these might be right but the reason i
feel that that's such an important piece
is that it's really really hard for
people to join a company if they don't
understand what the culture of the
company is and what it stands for and so
if they do join it and it changes guess
what they're probably going to leave
it's kind of like deciding that you're
going to be a red sox fan and finding
that the red sox will decide they want
to play basketball ah probably not going
to be great at it for starters and it's
going to be a little difficult for you
to follow them
so we really think that cultural
consistency and we see it in our
startups like for example the company we
just took public last quarter demandware
it had the same culture from day one it
was very focused on making the customer
successful they even built it into their
business model with a shared revenue
model and they really focused on it so i
was at that conference just yesterday
hundreds of customers and partners there
and that's the one thing you'd pick up
if you went and talked to any of them is
they know they have a shared success
with us and that cultural consistency
went through everything hiring execution
vision how they defined where they went
with their products the business model
and everything so
i think it's a very big deal
and uh now to make a little bit of fun
out of it i did ask in the audience i
made the mistake of saying so culture
starts with the word cult so the
question is have you had anything to do
with any cults
and uh we'll see what you hear you hear
it's okay it could be could be a simple
cult doesn't have to be a
religious sect that got you into
difficulty
right your picture shows rocky horror
picture shows can you say one time yeah
i was to go at midnight uh in san
francisco uh with the ring a group of
people and
you'd celebrate by dressing up and
throwing rice and squirting squirt guns
how the hell did i hide you
too late now
so tom is in the audience thank you for
sharing it so uh
openly but i really believe that culture
has that kind of conviction behind it
obviously i remember the rocky horror
picture shows at midnight too i just
wouldn't admit it
but it takes somebody of strength and
character like tom to be able to do that
but that is one of the things i think we
took away from this workshop is that if
it's genuine it really makes a big
difference
now why is it important we talked about
this some of the softer things are
harder to measure so i tried to bring
some research to bear and actually
there's a lot out there but i just
brought some of the top places to work
for from the fortune tech survey these
are the top five tech companies out of
the top 100 places to work for and if
you go and read this particular article
or any other you will find that these
companies have distinct cultures
google's culture is very distinct it's
very different for example the sas's
culture
which is you know owner run and owner
managed it's also very distinct to
zappos which is very execution focused
but the point is they all have a single
culture they don't have 10 cultures
running around that company and one of
the points i wanted to make here was
that it does make a top bottom line or
in fact genuine value impact you can see
these companies outperform their peers
by 300 percent so this might be soft
stuff but it makes a big difference and
so as much time as we get in the future
to devote to it i'm happy to spend on it
because it makes
a big impact
i'm not going to give aqua a chance to
recover from tom um because they
actually went to the trouble of putting
a video together to share with us what
is their culture and so let me share
that with you now and you'll have a
little bit of fun
[Music]
working at aqua it's very fast-paced
it's very entrepreneurial it's
challenging and it's a lot of fun
working at awkward is probably the one
of the greatest jobs i've ever had in my
life aqueous founding changed my life in
a pretty big way helping to build one of
the you know fastest growing startups in
boston i came to acquia because i saw
an opportunity that i hadn't seen since
i got into this industry you know the
opportunity of getting involved with a
platform as
significant as drupal as open as it was
with such a passionate developer
community working with the open source
project drupal is great it is it's
really the highlight of the job just
felt like the right place right time
amazing opportunity i looked at the
vision for drupal and i said this is the
future and and i want to be part of that
so we're hiring like crazy and it's a
real challenge the challenge of growing
is is making sure that we continue to
communicate we continue to find new
great people i think the important thing
when you're hiring people though is to
look not so much for raw experience what
does the resume show but instead look at
who they are as a person i think good
people like to work with good people
instinctive drive to accomplish
something in the world that passion and
the smarts to go with it i'm being with
people that i like to be with who share
those common interests and that makes it
a heck of a lot of fun we're a company
that has a very very bright and
promising future we're enabling a lot of
um individuals and companies to do
things that that um you know they've
never really been able to do before so
it's very exciting it's it's a once in a
lifetime chance i mean we we're we're on
a company that is just a rocket ship
it's really a tidal wave that i'm happy
to be riding
[Music]
so thank you to the acqua team who put
that together we really appreciate it
and i think however they did it it was
what they wanted it was what they wanted
to show and so again that's an example
of a company doing something very
specific to say this is our culture
now for some of the harder stuff again
it's soft but it's hard
and it's extremely important i always
hear from students you know we hear that
people want to hire a players what does
an a player look like
and i'm always astounded because we see
this happen over and over again people
hire
on one a which is ability and i'm fine
with that there's nothing wrong with
getting a players who are off the charts
in ability but i'll tell you in my own
experience there are at least two other
a's that are just as important in some
cases more important one is aptitude
because it's so critical that people
have the aptitude for what you're giving
them an opportunity to do why because by
the very nature of what you're doing as
a startup you are changing things you're
making breakthroughs or you should be
and when you change and break through
things you're going to unknowns and so
when you're in the unknown i don't care
what anybody's abilities were in the
past what are they going to do when
they're dealing with the unknown they
better have the aptitude and then the
third a the attitude to deal with that
and so to me the three a's are those
three and we talked a lot about that and
i then talked about you know this new
thing that's i want a plus players it's
like okay there's always a plus even
google's got one now so what are the
pluses
the pluses for me were three as well
really authentic you know we talked
about how many times people get foiled
by sales people sales people are good at
selling themselves so guess what in an
interview you probably will find out
nothing of the truth about them unless
you ask a basic question like so what
are your hobbies
get them outside of what they can sell
about and get them to tell you something
and we had some great examples that come
up in the workshops in fact one of the
guys said hey the guy came through with
a job interview for a job interview and
he read the specs so well he sold me the
whole spec and then i asked him a basic
question and said why does he think he's
a fit for it that was a great question
of course the whole interview changed at
that point
so authentic but awareness to me is the
next key one and in particular
self-awareness if i observe one thing
about the great entrepreneurs and i
would pull this category of
self-awareness after having learned all
the mistakes of trying to think i knew
too much and realizing how little i know
in fact older i get the more i realize
how little i know and how much i have to
learn it's that if you really are open
about that if you can say look i love
doing these things i'm passionate about
doing x y and z but why am i lousy at a
b and c and i need some help there well
guess what you then open everybody
around you to being able to team with
you to fill in those attributes that can
make you successful but it starts with
you being self-aware if you don't know
what your strengths and weaknesses are
that's okay but i would encourage you to
go figure them out and start with
something basic like what are you
passionate about because that tends to
drive to you know what you enjoy and
what you do well therefore and then the
last one was was around this what we
talked about cq if you get to the
workshop online you'll see more about it
which is really people like us
uh the plus there being literally the
acronym for it in other words are people
going to be additive to your culture or
diluted to it and obviously if they're
additive to it and they can really help
reinforce it and drive it forward for
you that's a fundamental basis on which
to you know help getting the company's
uh focus of energy but if it's it's
dilutive as we often see people hire for
example i've seen it too many times
great engineers into the organization
early on who are off the charts in some
dimension or other but they have no
interest in participating in the team
and they're diluted with the culture
because they don't want to deal with
change because they think they know all
the answers you then end up with more
problems than you can possibly get from
the value of just their abilities so
this is an area that will spend more
time on the future based on people's
feedback at least hopefully that's a
taste of it
so what were our learnings
well we had some great thoughts um in
particular the audience gave us this
feedback of hey you guys
does this apply to you know hiring
everybody and i didn't really understand
the question start off with but what
came out of it was a learning for me
which is absolutely right you actually
should hire all your stakeholders early
on you should hire the first customers
in the same way really be careful about
who they are get the same uh you know
out of your partners because there are
many instances gonna have to be aligned
to in your supply chain or or literally
in supporting you in your
you know breakthroughs and even your own
stakeholders and so uh it's a little
self-promotional i'll admit but uh david
gave us this uh little cue after that
came out so
we had about seven different term sheets
and so it really came down to us
deciding who we wanted to to work with
the deal process was really what gave us
that confidence in terms of northbridge
in fact we even took a lower valuation
to get you guys
so i didn't know he took a low
evaluation but thank you david wherever
you are um
in the front row very good
maybe you're going to claim it back
later so i'm sure we'll get you'll get
your own piece of this
but in any event uh we tried to help
people boil it down to so where should
you start we came up with a bunch of
interview questions and then i revealed
one of my favorites which is sometimes
in an interview if i really know i've
only got a little bit of time i'll only
ask one question and i'll keep asking it
until i get to the depths of it which is
what are you passionate about because as
i talked about earlier that will so
often signal people's real aptitudes and
intentions as well as obviously what
they've got conviction to go after and
pursue so uh it was a lot of fun
watching people ask that question
i certainly remember one which i
purposely did not put on film which was
a young lady being asked what her
passion was and sharing it in a much
more graphic detail than i think it was
intended to be but it lent it led to a
date i'm happily to say
[Laughter]
now
giving chalmer a chance to redeem
himself at this point uh he wanted to
talk about what it meant for acquia so
here's a little snippet of that
and it's something we look for in every
candidate who ohio is hired in the
company and starts with passion p for
passion and we want people who are
really you know
love it i i had a conversation with one
of our people on our engineering team
last week and i asked him he's been with
us a year i said how's work going he
said work i looked him kind of funny he
said yeah work he said i don't work he
said i come here because i love it
and that's what it's really all about
none of us should feel like it's a
single day of work we've really got the
true passion around it now it doesn't
always work out that way we all know
that there's parts of life that are the
reality check but guess what they become
trivial compared to what you're doing if
you really have the passion around your
full-time job
and aqua has been recognized for it many
times
but you'll now know that i switched from
being you know an entrepreneur to a vc
so i became a skeptic so whenever i see
awards go up i start worrying it's kind
of like you know when people start
buying buildings you start worrying
about that too uh so i cold called
somebody in the true style of you know
harvard decided it was important that we
actually you know cold call somebody
from the acquired team and figure out
what they would say
and you see whether they ended up
reflecting what tom wanted as a culture
here and
acquia has by far exceeded my
expectations because not only can you
learn but you're expected to and if i
want to test something out if i want to
try something new i'm empowered and
encouraged to do that and i love that
so i would say that's a great aspect to
the culture that tom probably would talk
about now which is it's a learning
culture
but we hadn't talked about it up to that
point and learning cultures are usually
a great basis for people to feel good
too because nobody wants to stand still
in their career everybody wants to learn
and evolve and grow
so it was great that she brought that
out it was a fun piece of the cold
calling i promise if you join my
workshops i won't do that to you too
often but we had a lot of fun with that
and thank you for the accurate team for
bringing so much energy to it
then we moved on to the
more tricky subject of business model
this tends to be something that people
say oh you vcs get all hung up on
business model i didn't want to get into
the details of the business model in
that regard i didn't want to turn it
into a financial discussion
but i did want to turn it into something
of an agenda where people could
understand how it could be something
that made an impact in their startup
finding something that could be
disruptive finding something that could
leverage as jeffrey would say the core
rather than the context
and that would bring some real truth to
how you get advantage from it from what
i'd call multipliers and levers
so we talked about it in the context of
what's the perfect startup storm
obviously if you've got a disruptive
technology and you can bring a
breakthrough business model to it too
and then get really clearly defined uh
on a really focused on a segment where
you can uniquely serve it you'll
probably be in a great spot
and i challenge people and i was very
pleased in the workshop to see how many
people came up with different business
models so a lot of people who started
out with technology business models came
back and said you know what we really
have a data business model so one of the
peer-to-peer companies for example was
developing a model around learning
actually realized that what their real
value was was data and we talked about
some examples in the real world of how
these companies have changed the idea of
what the value of of their real
product or services and and we'll see
for example how that gets valued
tomorrow with probably one of the
largest ipos we've ever seen in the
industry and it certainly isn't based
around the idea of software
which is obviously you know how you
might first experience it or encounter
it it's really based around a number of
different things such as the network and
the power of the data that's producing
so i think that was a fun discussion
but it still turned out to be something
that people had hard time with so we
talked about
you know some examples we try to bring
it to life with some examples about how
could your core where you really can
gain competitive advantage give you a
basis to monetize your business and
indeed where is it that you'll be able
to you know out compete people
i dated myself
so uh it just so happened that the week
i was building this workshop i got
invited the symantec 20-year reunion for
the people who'd been there for the
first 10 years so if you do the math
that's 30 years it's kind of ugly
but it was fun
and i had my own first experience and in
fact john bruce who's in the audience
today gosh we're both dating ourselves
that we know that uh will have
experienced this first hand with me on
the team that built this so we were
starting a business in the uk that at
the time i think we had 16 or 17
products across everything from mac to
pc languages to databases it was a tough
business we had a really hard time
figuring out how to get above the noise
and then one of our sales guys
uh started to really kill it and we
found out all he was doing was selling
one product and it was semantic
antivirus for the macintosh because he
realized guess what that was where the
easy money was people actually didn't
want to lose their data and it became a
whole data security campaign and we did
great with it but we still hadn't really
changed the game and we still had a lot
of competitors
and the thing that really changed the
game was stopping selling software
what we actually did and i can take no
credit for it because it was a actually
that same sales guy in the team who came
up with this
was he said why don't we give the
software away because when the pc
version came out viruses did this
and in fact the real challenge became
how do you keep up with the virus
definitions
so this really was just a platform to
get the virus definitions out there the
software was irrelevant the really
valuable thing was that subscription
service and if you look back at
symantec's business
you will see the inflection point at
when that company took off was around
this product and that change in business
model when we started selling antivirus
subscriptions the company took off like
a rocket we went public we blew through
a few hundred million dollars in fact it
seemed like we just jumped to a billion
dollars
so i'm a huge believer that this makes a
difference and that is not a unique
example
we then talked about some fun cases
where you could actually bring down to
earth in the startup world uh a real
understanding of what would be the
multipliers and levels around your core
and i won't go into this in too much
detail again it's up on the site if you
want it we talked about how can you get
multipliers that increase your reach get
to greater coverage in the in the base
and also
multiply your revenue what kinds of
levers could you employ that would
reduce the time for you to take uh
products to market your costs associated
with supporting them and the resources
behind them
and we came to a place where we said we
need some examples of how those both
could come together and i brought up one
of my favorite ones which again i'd like
to credit jeffrey for because we had one
of our first discussions uh in our
conference room where he looked at our
product which was in the analytics space
we did real-time inline analytics but
analytics is a tough space it turns out
you know it's a bit like an iceberg we
do that and we do it incredibly well we
were unique in doing it in the sense
that we could build it in line and we
could do it real time while everybody
else was doing reporting but the problem
is getting the data there in the first
place and organizing it in such a way
that we could do it was a whole industry
it was etl and olap and all sorts of
other things and jeffrey helped me
realize that and helped me realize how
important it is to create the whole
product model and in fact if we did it
we could just slip into a partnership
and very quickly become at the core
exactly what would change the game and
that's what we did and we got some
fabulous multipliers and levers out of
it uh in fact we ended up being able to
increase increase our revenue as part of
a bigger solution initially with
hyperion and then later with with
ibm
by the way the end of that story is ibm
ended up acquiring us we got it reached
through their sales force and their
channels and we of course reduced our
time to market too because we weren't
developing the entire stack we were only
developing the core piece that we did so
well so again thank you jeffrey and it
was a great example for the class they
all seemed to glom onto it and we had
some great case studies that came out of
it
but i got posed the question which is
okay but how do i do that without giving
away my whole value for example if i do
an oem deal etc
and so that make a little bit more
lively we came up with this
notion of what we call russian dole
packaging which is there's lots of ways
you can do this you can actually build
different versions of your product for
different channels you can also build
them in what i call progressive
disclosure so that users can have a
first experience small taste that then
they take more of more bytes of as they
want to but in the end this idea of a
russian doll packaging model i believe
is hugely powerful for startups trying
to build everything right from the
get-go in an indigestible huge product
doesn't work and in fact it's not
effective in going to market and it's
difficult in business models
so there's plenty of that on the site
too
and then other fun acronym by this stage
people beginning to realize what i will
now confess again which is i was a
horrible learner at school
i had to create acronyms for everything
so mine for taking the friction out of
products going to market was slippery
and as you'll see from this there's
there'll be a another post in more
detail on it the idea here was to come
up with ways to make your product really
easy for people to install adopt and
integrate with other things and use so
that it was obviously valuable and made
customers just say why can't i have this
not why can i have this or why wouldn't
i have this
we brought a case study into play at
that point uh demandware was
unfortunately on the roadshow so jameis
could show very little uh we were in
that lock-up period uh but he did share
how important it was that demandware
created their own whole product so for
those who don't know demandware was the
first company to create an e-commerce
platform on demand in other words as a
service so that people didn't have as
retailers to take on all the pain of
creating the infrastructure they could
get straight to working on what they do
best which is merchandising and
marketing and then using multi-channel
which is becoming the whole challenge
for them and they're not technologists
they're merchandisers so that made a
huge impact to them but what we quickly
found out was that unfortunately that
means different things to different
people in fact some people find it
incredibly important that you involve
things like power reviews down here for
example or you have analytics for things
like omniture and that there were all
sorts of these systems that are out
there and in the back office there were
things like obviously how you dealt with
tax and logistics and everything else so
even though we thought we had an
incredibly complete platform the
ecosystem around us did not think that
and to their credit the team responded
very quickly to that and i'll give you a
chance to hear in their own words how
that played out for them
the early going it was one of those you
know very shallow curves and then all of
a sudden once you start to prove the
value it spiked quickly and because of
our disruptive business model of
on-demand and shared success another
multiplier is the fact that because all
of these technologies are revenue
generating technologies it actually
boosts another
aspect up for the customers
and yesterday as i mentioned i was at
that conference there were actually over
100 partners that were there and they
actually were all bidding for sports to
be at the conference paying us money now
after years of you know us having to do
this to be part of this platform because
it had reached critical mass so it's
really turned out to be a win-win in
particular for the customer too so again
just more examples of the whole product
why that's so important and uh for those
of you who haven't read it in geoffrey's
book you'll find it in my well dog
marked well bookmarked uh piece here and
there's a really good discus description
of it there
now i always wanted to position myself
with one simple statement and that was
giving my entrepreneurs unfair
competitive advantage and so here's one
of the things that i learned the hard
way which is it's great to have
disruptive innovations but if it's
really disruptive to the point where
customers have a hard time adopting it
that's actually a problem that comes
back to the pain question and so i
wanted to find an example of a company
that actually had come up with
disruptive innovation but had made it
non-disruptive to adopt
and in the bigger world i think the best
one i have is vmware who really found a
way to take utilization on servers from
a few you know
into the teens up into you know the 80
90 percent but without changing the
applications by just virtualizing them
and of course there's some disruption
involved in that but it was minimal and
it's to me become one of the most
valuable examples of this kind of
innovation
in the startup world though i was
challenged to find it and the keeban
provided it
so david who had talked a little bit
earlier as in the front row shared his
example of how they've been able to
build one to two orders of magnitude
import
performance improvement for their
customers without them changing a line
of code in the application
that's a big deal if you think about it
and they brought it right to life by
talking about one of their customers
named media who has literally you know
got this challenge in spades because
people were literally dropping out of
the purchasing process as they went to
buy domain names because it was taking
too long to query whether they were
unique or not and now they've got it to
fractions of a millisecond their
revenues doubled now that is a
non-disruptive
and very uh non-disruptive adoption
curve but obviously a very disruptive
output so we thought it was a great
example thank you david for sharing it
and i hope there'll be many others i'd
love people to bring these forward this
is what this is all about is learning
from those
and we brought that right down to the
thing that people spend most time on now
which is actually
measuring cost of acquiring customers
and and figuring out whether they're
really in balance with
the life cycle value that they get out
of it we talked about it's not just
lifetime value because in almost all
companies that i'm involved with at
least it turns out it's important to
keep your customers engaged and the
re-engagement needs to be built into the
process in fact i will tell you right
now that having just been through three
sas ipos this year one is in
registration that turns out the most
single effective
point of leverage in the financial model
is upsell
two percent increase in upsell in your
model will generate about a 28 increase
in your market cap
so this piece that i introduced to
people isn't just
fun to talk about it makes a huge impact
and if you've got a sas model and you've
got customers locked in and you can find
a way to re-engage them cheaply which
should obviously be much easier than
buying them in the first place or
acquiring them in the first place you
can have a huge impact on your bottom
line so we talked a little bit about
that and we talked about therefore
adjusting the this to being a life cycle
value of customer and the cost of
acquiring and re-engaging or reacquiring
customers and how important it is to
look at both of those things
now i have a company that is probably
by their own admission in a relatively
boring space they're in the middleware
space you might say well how do you make
middleware easy to acquire and i really
have to give them a lot of credit so
this was an example shared by active
endpoints of
how they sell middleware in a slippery
fashion and reduce the cost of customer
acquisition so in their words uh let me
let them share that with you plymouth
rock energy down in the new york city
area traditionally had been an old mine
supplier of coal and oil to large
facilities that business isn't such a
great business anymore so they
transformed themselves into a broker of
energy including electricity natural gas
and they use salesforce.com for all of
their new customer signups so they had
to customize salesforce.com tremendously
when you sign up a new customer as an
energy broker you have to specify the
supplier who the distribution channel is
going to be whether they're going to pay
a premium for green energy sources
and it turned out for the salesforce.com
users the sales reps signing up a new
customer it was a very complex process
they had to go through the salesforce
screens so we met a gentleman down at a
salesforce.com
event in new york city on wednesday the
following monday we gave him a demo via
a go to meeting via a web meeting
he was able to get on our cloud-hosted
product started building his little
process wizard the next day that his
sales reps could use
to go through this complex process of
onboarding a new customer
by the end of the week he had it working
and the following month he placed the
order with us so you know going back to
some of the points you can probably map
what happened there into these points
but installs easily he was able to sign
up on the web he could prove value in
just a couple of days by creating a
wizard that walked their users through
these complex processes and what else do
i want to take plays well with others
having the salesforce.com
integration has been tremendously
valuable to us mike i would call it both
a lever because it reduces our marketing
cost tremendously we know who our market
is and we're able to get to them through
salesforce and it's a multiplier because
uh we're able to uh increase revenue by
so many users
so i think a great example of a very
tough space and by the way this is a
company that's generated
not six but seven figure deals over the
phone no external sales reps selling
very complex middleware software so
they've actually cracked it and it was
through real focus on some of the
concepts that we talked about in the
workshop so again i hope some of you get
to bring these examples forward and
experience what these guys did
we then moved on to to me one of the
more interesting uh areas for startups
which is thinking ahead of time about
their go to market strategy go to
market's such a big area that i was very
open up front we wouldn't cover anything
in the in the full extent of it but we
talked about how you have to break down
your initial cycle from awareness all
the way through to purchase we talked
about what some of the strategies and
tactics are how inbound is now becoming
popular whether that's appropriate or
not
and indeed what channels you might use
to reach your audience and indeed how
you might segment and target your
audience and just share some highlights
from that
i was lucky enough to have adam berry as
our eir here and he gave a very
passionate speech
on the essence of brand it's tough to uh
cut him to a few seconds but i think
you'll catch it in an essence here it's
a single core idea that unifies
everything you do
now if you know adam that could have
gone on
but he did a fantastic job and i thank
him for it uh and it was really very
passionately shared and he did a
fantastic job afterwards too of helping
people think about what do they want to
represent themselves as we got some
great feedback from people again people
realized that suddenly brand wasn't just
something that should be you know
written down as a single statement but
instead could really flow through things
so a single tidbit i'll share with you
that was a learning that we discussed
actually had it many times myself too a
lot of people had a product that was
called one thing and that a company was
called another that's tough as a startup
now you've got two things you've got to
promote if you can find one that lines
right up from the get-go it's an easy
thing to do you've now got one brand to
promote so there was an example of a
learning that came out there people had
a lot of fun discussing it
now a fun harvard uh case study um you
know what's the two by two you can map
yourself on and we talked about this
everybody has a positioning statement
everybody wants to be in the top right
and find some white space etc but what
came out of the learning which was
really much more fun was to define axes
that really cause barriers so usually
what we see is wrong with the charts
that come in it's not that they're not
beautifully diagrammed like this
it's that it becomes very easy for
somebody to say well i'm faster
or i'm cheaper or better
that's really easy for somebody to then
break through and ultimately compete
with you especially as in many startups
you don't have the resources to compete
with larger players so they can easily
just catch up with you so we had a lot
of fun talking about what would be
examples of barriers that you just
couldn't cross we talked about well you
know in this day and age for example
cloud computing if somebody's constantly
having to install their software uh to
update it then they're going to have
tough time keep keeping up with you and
so we talked about companies where well
where are the industries that have such
fast-moving change for example in
regulations that you have to have
continuous innovation to keep companies
up to speed and therefore if you have a
cloud solution versus
an on-premise solution you're going to
have a barrier to anybody else chasing
you
and those are the kinds of things we
were looking for we had some great
examples from the students
in fact one of the companies came up
with a brilliant idea which was how to
use downtime uh from some of the the
suppliers that
were in their industry as a means to
actually capture capacity and get scale
for a startup that would enable them to
compete with larger players and then
they talked about how they'd create a
barrier by locking up the agreements to
the key players that would enable it be
would make it impossible for anybody
else to to come in and play with them so
just some great examples and i learned a
lot from that
next thing we talked about segmentation
and um segmentation's a whole science
center of itself too but um there were
at least three people who wanted to do
mobile apps uh actually i think there
were a lot more than that and so i try
to bring an example to life not to be
brutal but just to be brutally honest
about why that's a tough business
and especially in the b2b space but
probably even more so in the b2c i just
that's not my particular area
and one of the people asked me to share
an example of what might make a
compelling mobile app so what we did was
we said well instead of just saying i've
got a generic app that's interesting to
uh anybody's got a mobile phone what if
you said well it's for mobile
professionals actually field workers no
in services oh and by the way
specifically medical equipment that's
sold to hospitals that needs to be
serviced so it saves lives well now i
think you've got to a place it's pretty
well defined and it's mission critical
and you might have some value there
turns out by the way that is a real case
study for one of our companies called
antenna
which didn't get it right to start off
with but is now you know the the giant
in that industry and along the way by
the way they consolidated 117 million
dollars worth of venture capital from
seven other companies sorry six other
companies today um there'll be a seventh
uh that
went to waste for the companies that had
generic mobile platforms in the first
era and we bought them for by the way 12
million so tells you what happens when
you get it wrong real examples of why
segmentation is important and then i
shared something that i learned from
geoffrey a long time ago which is
you shouldn't be afraid to focus jeffrey
brings it to to life in his book around
building beach heads but it's still a
struggle for me when we listen to
startups all along and in fact more so
as i've come on to being a vc is
realizing people want to do too much
i would just ask you one question which
would you rather build on success or
downsize and contract on failure
i'll tell you unfortunately we see the
latter happening much much more often
than the former and so if you could just
start on one thing and get it absolutely
right and target it in such a way that
it can be something of a success even if
it's in the narrowest segment of one
person and build on it so much the
better as jeffrey will share with you
it's usually in many instances better if
you can do that in an area where it can
be referenceable and then build on
itself through that referencing so we
talked a little bit about that and
brought up the demandware case study
and again uh i'll let them uh jameis the
head of marketing to share with you how
he thought about it uh and actually a
little bit of context here so demandware
was in a in an it's early stage
struggling with something that everybody
struggles with which is okay you have an
e-commerce platform now who do you sell
it to do you sell it b to c or do you
sell it b to b to c okay which kinds of
retailers do you go after do you go out
to branded manufacturers do you go off
to brands you know it was a big
challenge
and i would say a big part of why we
were successful at one point was through
james's segmentation
how do we really focus in on a place
where we can win we thought about uh not
just even verticalized segments but
segments within segments within segments
and the particular segment by the way
that really became so successful was was
really high fashion brands because guess
what they all love to talk to each other
they're very competitive they will for
example you go down to new york you can
even geographically cluster them and
they have in many instances multiple
brands like if you took jones the jones
group for example they have many brands
within that and so it became a
multiplier in our business model when he
segmented it that well
now here's another thing i find startups
really struggle with so we got into this
in a little bit of detail too which is
in this funnel people make the the
assumption that you're selling to one
customer and that's very rarely true
the guy who at the top is buying as a
visionary is very rarely the same guy
who's actually writing the check for you
he probably has a lot of people to go
through and along the way you'll come
across people who are technocrats who
are perhaps the devops people who have
to implement this in the back office uh
the influences for political reasons and
ultimately people that obviously make
the decisions so we talked about how do
you actually get the persona of those
people into your buying cycle because i
can tell you sitting in the boardroom
the number one issue that i'm always
dealing with is the pipeline stuck we
can have that discussion in tremendous
detail but this will be one of the top
reasons that will come up is that people
haven't really thought about who they're
selling to and at what stage they are on
the cycle and what the value proposition
is that's moving them from one step to
the next so it was a fun discussion
and then i brought out the truth which
is unfortunately you don't control a lot
of this and so the model i've shared
with people was uh it's really like
driving except the bad news is all you
own is the gears
the customers own the accelerator the
brake and the clutch
and the reality is that is very much how
it's true and we talked about what are
some of those abc's that celebrate
accelerated brakes and clutches that the
customer owns and what are some of the
gears that you have that can change the
momentum when the customer gives you the
opportunity
puts the clutch in and you can change it
so it was a fun discussion um what came
out of it for me is that's a whole topic
we definitely you know need to expand on
that
and it'll be fun to do because there are
lots of things to learn from it
one of the things i learned in the last
decade and i'm sure everybody's seen the
change is the web changes everything and
it changes everything in such a dramatic
way in fact it makes everything very
much a closed loop you can actually
measure everything and you can close the
loop and see what the impact is of what
you're doing in campaigns so we brought
up
one of one of my companies unidesk
to talk about this and actually they
gave a whole guerrilla marketing pitch
in my opinion which was great because
they talked about even before they
launched their product how they started
to create influence and uh get awareness
for their solution before they even had
a product and by the way it was nine
months before
so let me again let them share a little
bit of uh you know their own voice here
as to what they did there the cool thing
that about unidesk is that we have very
passionate customers who want to tell
their story about their success it gives
the customers confidence that gee if i
go with unidesk i'm going to be part of
this growing community you know listing
of all the partners ranking them
identifying who we wanted to target how
we wanted to message to them how they
performed with vmware what our unique
value was going to be you needed to be
crisp you had to have your buyer
personas baked i mean all of those
things needed to be aligned
so it was it was great fun doing that
and then we again boiled it down to
reality which is if you can't measure it
you can't manage it and the new world to
me it's about results-oriented metrics
driven execution and this is something
that's becoming more and more a part of
the challenge in marketing in fact we
ended up having an innovators and
entrepreneurs dinner around just the
subject with a whole bunch of people
from uh the boston area to talk about
what is the new challenge for cmos and
what we heard at that dinner was
something really interesting which is
cmos these days are having to become
almost data scientists as well as you
know uh people who architect their own
platforms for measurement and there's a
whole set of challenges now that just
didn't exist so i think this will be an
interesting subject as it continues to
emerge too but unidesk brought forward
this incredibly detailed spreadsheet
which just went to the point of showing
how much they measured and again in
their own words i'll let them share with
you what they think at the end of this
all is measure everything everything you
do you got to refine it you got to
measure it so we've got spreadsheets we
track everything we do to refine that
funnel then when you think you've
measured enough
go a level deeper
believe me that is exactly right and the
number of times we've learned how we've
got a sticking point somewhere because
we actually didn't
measure it somewhere else and actually
you know if you move it one place during
the final you've got to figure out where
the next blockage comes but if you
measure it everywhere you can get to
that place so it was a lot of fun and we
ended that on high uh with a number of
great presentations from people about
how they take their companies to market
which ultimately came forward in the
next session and that's the pitch
session
so as i bring this to a near conclusion
i do want to stop for a second and say
thank you because there were so many
people who brought so many great
learnings back both for me and for the
audience as a whole and that
participation was really what this was
all about it was really about the
workshops so if i have any criticism of
myself and i'd like lots from you it was
that i'd probably cut the content in
half next time
and start the workshops with twice as
much time
and maybe just you know do more of them
in uh you know in the set in the
coverage of the various different pieces
if people want them
but love your feedback on that and again
thank you for participation i want to
thank also
all the companies uh from my portfolio
and one who outside of it from the
materials group mc10 that came in to
help um to pitch their own experience it
was incredibly valuable
frankly for me it was what the value was
i also want to thank
all the mentors and coaches who are
involved uh too too numerous to mention
actually all the others that could be on
this list because a lot of people came
in uh on the evening and and just jumped
in
but i particularly want to say
that one of the things that touched me
here was that i didn't ask these people
formally for that time they kept
volunteering it and they kept engaging
month after month and in many instances
helped and coached behind the scenes as
people started to put their pictures
together
and i also want to thank the judges who
came in again many ceos and one of my
partners i decided we had to have a one
at least vc on there uh he was quietly
overruled many times which was good um
and uh i loved the feedback actually i
thought i will tell you that the
entrepreneurs were much more brutal
about themselves than we would be and so
i kind of learned wow i think we should
get more entrepreneurs into our partners
meetings
i was learning a bunch of things there
it was great fun so with that let me
share a few minutes of video it's about
five minutes of video because we
couldn't obviously have the pitch
competition today here for you to hear
the pitches and the judges and then
we'll be wrapping up
just what is it that you want to do
we want to be free
we want to be free to to do what we want
to do and for us this core knowledge
base that we're building up around user
experience is going to give us important
information on the multiplier side and
drive engagement on the lever side
really challenge yourself to think about
what is 10 times better
i think an excellent pitch from sarah
[Music]
so sarah you raised sixteen thousand
dollars congratulations
my research at the school of public
health is focused on infectious diseases
and how they're transmitted among people
i think the value proposition business
model part on the health agency part was
very clear it was how you define the
white space
because that
it
it seemed it really made sense
but i do think that there's an
opportunity for you to to package that
information up
and slice it and dice it in a way that's
meaningful to the potential customer
next regina you raised 48 000
and with a cold imagine what you can do
when you're healthy fantastic job
when you look around today in this room
and you look and you ask what's the most
amazing technology in the room i think
the answer is right in front of us
it's biology
because these are the most advanced
machines that exist in the world
it certainly seemed to me like the idea
was compelling in terms of value
delivered to society as a whole
where i had trouble figuring out is how
does that value accrual breakdown of
different segments i mean first of all
that was great and certainly um uh you
might have cornered the big idea market
here today so
definitely i love the fact that the
second round is 25 million that's one
for northbridge eric kelsey
eric you raised 39 000 congratulations
[Music]
and to that question you raised may you
find a way to answer it it's quite
inspiring so i'm catherine wolf and i'll
be sharing with you organjet
uh just to tell you in one sentence what
we do
so organ jet helps patients um get organ
transplants faster
that saves lives uh saves money
increases uh improves efficiency by
increasing the supply of transplants
through the creation of a profitable
business i thought you did an excellent
job there there was no question in my
mind what the problem that you're
solving is
this team and again you oriented us very
well with the team this is the team
that's a credible team to solve this
problem
there were a lot of really detailed
slides in the problem statement i bought
into right away i didn't need the extra
six slides to go through the problem
statement i'll be really impatient while
you're going through the six slides
telling me the problem over and over
again as opposed to getting into these
questions so of course i'm more patient
than abc
our team of katherine and cecilia
you raised 58 000 congratulations you
guys
may one day that be real money and be
saving real lives
so to analyze the market
we found that the market opportunity
there is less than 10 percent of grants
get funded in the scientific community
the second thing there are around 40
percent of scientists time spent
submitting these grants so there's a lot
of wasting time for the scientists
trying to do that so the way we envision
poster for is creating a forced channel
for the researcher to crowdfund their
ideas through the public it was
beautifully presented
really tremendous ways that the service
that you're talking about could gain
significant revenue traction
and provide a tremendous service for
researchers in getting their projects
funded more swiftly so far uh you know
we've seen someone with a new
uh
you know desktop or info worker
productivity tool we've seen uh social
media community health
data play
we've seen something that had to do with
bioengineering
and now we're on to crowdsourcing
our winner this evening ahmed
69 000
come on up
and three tickets
may the red sox thrash the yankees in
your honor congratulations
[Music]
so congratulations to all of you and
thank you very much
so now we have at least a couple of our
uh winners here so sarah i'd love you to
come up and receive your book from
jeffrey and he'll get a chance to sign
you a note a little later on
and regina are you still here
congratulations regina
[Applause]
so unfortunately we don't have our other
winners here as uh somebody showed up
ahmed's here oh fantastic sorry one more
ahmed please come on up as the ultimate
winner too
i have one question for you
did the red sox win
dangerous to ask questions like that on
the fly
okay
next year
i'll get you another seat
so uh as we wrap up here i i do want to
say one thing that's very personal to me
there was no workshop without you and um
i hope in some small way that each of
you takes away something that inspires
you to help
be an entrepreneur or help other
entrepreneurs because what happens here
is always a very simple thing
people make things happen
and the great entrepreneurs find what
their passion is they pursue it with the
kind of conviction that it takes to make
something really impactful in the world
and in my experience no amount of
sharing or learning or anything else
makes any more difference than you
finding out what that is and so thank
you for the opportunity to do it thank
you for the people who inspired me
who came up time and time again and
shared their thoughts brought their own
passion and conviction
also were very personal about it and
indeed brought a lot of fun it was great
fun thank you all very much
so while jeffrey you come up and get
settled here um i want to say just one
last thank you because they often get
forgotten and gotten in the scene and i
don't want them to be the ilab made this
all possible so a big thank you to jody
to neil and to gordon for enabling this
jeffrey really needs no introduction but
i just want to share it to you in a
personal way he i think is officially an
author and an advisor but he's actually
behind the scenes an all-around great
human being he's uh somebody who
actually started as an english lit major
i believe is that right yeah and you can
tell that in his writing but he's one of
those people who when he got into for
example regis mckenna and worked with so
many startups realized there was a
fundamental problem why startups weren't
making it to the promised land instead
of just watching that he did something
about it and i have greatest admiration
for the fact that he not only did
something about it but he put in a
framework that has made the impact that
it has on so many people so jeffrey
thank you it's a great pleasure to have
you here thank you very much thanks
great
um
so i kind of feel like you've already
gotten your money's worth i mean like
you know maybe five minutes won't be
done uh what michael was doing and
what's so important about about the
startup world is frameworks really
really count
because at the beginning you have that's
all you got
there's no data there's no history
there's no there's no inertial momentum
there's only projections into the future
and using frameworks to create common
vocabulary is the way you navigate in a
startup
and what i want to do is share with you
and by the way that's what makes
people who love startups they love that
act of mind
that active mind begins to be
selected against
as
organizations get larger and larger and
larger and that creates a new set of
problems which are kind of reflected in
the title this book that i've been
working on so for the first 10 years of
my career i worked almost entirely with
startups entirely around disruptive
innovation got to know clay christensen
innovators dilemma that was what it was
about those we call it the 90s
particularly the late 90s we call the
time of the great happiness
it was just it was just great and then
the bubble popped and when the bubble
popped one of the things that happened
was the companies that were left
standing were the established large
enterprises
and we begin part
and we begin and we begin working with
them and and what i want to share with
you is that is that
the books that michael was referring to
crossing the chasm inside the tornado
that was from from the point of view of
taking the first your first
enterprise kind of all the way through
the life cycle
what with the later books about what
this book is about is more about
a new tech challenge
and the old tech challenge was sort of
you know leveraging disruptive
innovations breaking into developed
markets navigating the life cycle
crossing the chasm and a lot of it is
emotional i mean i thought what was
really cool about what michael did for
the last hour is
it's your life right i mean it's it
comes as much from here as it comes from
anyplace else
looking at the new challenge it's a
different situation and it's it's not
it's harder to have that personal energy
if you're in a company of 10 000 people
it's just it's a very very different
beast right it's just and but society
needs these companies it's not like we
can say well you know we'll just all be
startups it doesn't work okay the world
wants to sum things to scale and but if
you're going to scale and if the
innovations that you're bringing to
market as an entrepreneur are going to
have the biggest impact they must scale
then we have to figure out a new set of
issues and i kind of want to share some
of the learnings that have come out of
that so the the challenge now is how do
you leverage established enterprises and
how do they break out of not break into
we were breaking and entering in the 90s
now we're trying to actually break out
escape the kind of the inertial pull or
the gravitational field of your past
right and and solve for this thing that
clay called the innovator's dilemma he
wrote that book in 1997.
it's been 15 years you might think we
might actually solve for it right
somebody's just well no it's
it's a problem we'll just live with it
it's like no no and so that's what
escape velocity is kind of focused on so
just to give you a feeling of this you
know i've been around michael's been
around for 20 years i've been around
longer but i just this is a kind of a
credit list
of companies that did not escape
many of whom were headquartered within
probably 50 miles of where we're
standing right now
and you look at that list of companies
and the drill here is these were not bad
companies this this was the best of the
best this was us right
so you think whoa
okay so maybe maybe it's a little more
serious than i thought however to be
fair when i would put up that list a lot
of people would say to me jeff wrong
century dude come on come on 21st
century come on wake up wake up wake up
so what i want to do with you now i'm
going to share with you just six slides
that are comparing
10-year histories in this century
of major established companies to the
nasdaq okay
so that you you may not be able to read
but this is microsoft intel and sap the
orange line in every case is the nasdaq
and the other line the blue line is the
company now you can't you really can't
see but must see but just look at the
orange number at the top that tells you
how high does this access go so this is
a hundred percent access so what this
thing says is over the over the first
last 10 years the nasdaq's gone up about
60 percent microsoft's gone up about
looks like about maybe four to eight
maybe nine percent
intel's actually gone down a little bit
and sap is tracked almost exactly to the
nasdaq okay
so those are three kind of okay pretty
close the next one's 150 thing and again
you know so uh the nasdaq's outperformed
cisco uh at least
recently ibm has outperformed the nasdaq
recently nokia took a kind of a header
with with the ender and with the iphone
coming into the world uh adobe's kind of
had a good run this kind of come back we
call it regression to the mean or coming
back to the norm you look at the next
ones you say okay uh this is hp the sort
of the the herd moments where they got
had quite good stock volatility came
right back oracle has kind of have a
sustained i think their whole
consolidation pitch i think people are
saying wow that that's real new added
value mc with emc and
netapp with storage i think the
categories are helping them a lot
this is now 400 variability google
obviously is still kind of on their
first run
way to go
uh autodesk i made i think a significant
change in in their world getting more
into in design and the consumer world
ebay big run kind of came down you got
to hand it to john he served doing some
good things there
citrix quite quite an interesting
company
of recently uh yahoo
more trials more tribulations kind of
kind of tough
uh and intuit interestingly maybe coming
into a new world with with this new sas
uh and smb world and then there are two
other stocks
there's amazon
and there's our friends at apple and the
one at apple by the way goes to 5 000
okay
now you look at that and you think
okay
what
what's going on i mean
what is and i think the conventional
wisdom here and what
what i've heard all my life is well
the winners outperform the losers right
or their peers
well if outperformed means the line went
higher yes
well what is what does outperform mean
and i don't believe this
i don't believe i know the companies
that quote
did not outperform the nasdaq i got to
tell you those are some of the most
remarkable performance cultures you will
ever see
so these i mean there's a couple of
exceptions of places but in general
these companies performed unbelievably
well for the last 10 years i was very
close to cisco for the last 10 years and
very close to to sap and there's a lot
there's just really really strong
performance capabilities
my belief is that this is not about
performance
which is a little bit anathema since i'm
on the board of directors and
shareholders really believe in
performance and i'm probably going to
get fired but the deal here is
that if the delta in stock price is not
about performance
what is it about
i think it's about power
and what i mean by power is
i mean the reason i think changes in
power affect changes in stock price is
because investors care about your future
performance
and they actually value a share of stock
as a share of the future earnings of
your company not the past earnings
so what they want to know is do i think
if i buy your stock today you will
outperform your past going forward
when microsoft is dead flat that doesn't
mean microsoft isn't performing it means
microsoft is not outperforming its own
past
okay
it is captured in the gravitational
field of its own past
and so i think the p
in power is the p and p e ratio
and that when these companies change
their stock prices what happens is it's
not that they've changed their
performance it's that people see them
having
much more power and so for example
if you think about apples with this five
thousand percent
why do you believe why is apple worth 50
times more now than it was 10 years ago
well dude
the ipod itunes iphone ipad where you
been jeff okay so the point is they had
three net new earnings engines
added to a fourth one which has become
revitalized by the other three
so they've now got four
massive earnings engines where 10 years
ago arguably they had none or
15 years ago when steve came back in 97
arguably they had not okay
so this issue around power what i think
this means to me is what i want to spend
time with uh with larger companies and
this is a conversation that that
investors always have with small
companies and startups in a startup
there is only power
there is no performance on a startup
right there's powerpoints but that's
pretty much it right right so so so so
if you invest in startups you're only
investing in power that's the only thing
that there is to invest in now you want
to translate that power into performance
but what's interesting about large
established companies is that things
gotten reversed and it's gotten reversed
to the point that that people look at at
quarterly returns which is which is
their version which is in fact the
classic metrics of performance are built
around quarterly financial returns
and they start trying to play
they're trying to guide the future of
their company and make management
decisions
based on quarterly returns which are
performance metrics and i will tell you
if you don't perform you need to pay
attention to them
but so it's not that they are that they
are unnecessary but they are
insufficient
and in fact i think what's happened is
that the performance dialogue has become
so articulate and the mba curriculums
have become so effective at managing
performance were wildly out of balance
and what we need to say is look it's not
anything about performance is wrong
because it's a yin-yang right you create
power in order to consume it through
performance in order to create returns
to invest in more power
let me say so it's a yin and yang right
so so but the game there has got to be
we got to talk more articulately about
power when we come to talk about power
in large corporations and i'm a strategy
consultant so that's kind of what we
talk about
the conversation goes from like
post-graduate to third grade okay it
just sucks
so the intent of this book and the
intent of the work for the last five
years is
we need to have a more articulate
conversation so it's back to frameworks
and just like michael will put up i
don't actually use quite as many uh uh
uh
acronyms or slipperies and flips and
cubes and roams and you know all that
kind of cool i just five but but but the
frameworks are are the key here because
again when you're talking about the
future you're talking about stuff there
is no data from the future okay there's
kind of a basic rule so therefore you
have to have frameworks to project into
the future so this framework says when
you're talking about business power
you need to sub segment that
into five kinds of power
and that a lot of the conversations
about strategy that are bad happen
because the vice president of sales is
thinking about you know about market
power the engineering guys thinking
about offer power the you know company
power the cfo thing about company power
you know some vice president of business
development's thing about canada and
they're all talking past each other so
here's how it works
the first and i by the way this is the
order of importance i think the most
determinative
predictor of your future returns i
believe is what category you're in
this is sort of like pretty much
investor 101. you know do you want to be
invested you know if you could be in in
printing right
or you could be in search
or you could be in storage you sort of
think or you could be in desktop pcs
it's like okay you know you could be the
best house in a bad neighborhood
or you could be kind of a mediocre house
in a great neighborhood and the first
predictor of your of your future for the
next few years is going to be what
category are you in so if you're a large
company the challenge is could we get
into a new category
could we i mean obviously because
because basically we're getting credit
for all the categories we're in already
could we get into a category because
category moves a whole bunch of money
into a new place could we do that could
we do that so that's a pretty important
question for companies to ask themselves
every year many years the answer is no
sometimes the answer is yes if
and of course part of what we're going
to talk about today is large companies
are spectacular at not being able to do
this
like just world class at not achieving
this objective okay and they spend a
fortune against it so it's a big deal
but what we've got to do here is like
damn it clay told us that 1997 we have
to solve for this we can't just we can't
just shake our heads and feel superior
okay
company power
company power is
are you the go-to company in your
category do people do the partners in
your ecosystem bring the business to you
first
then you've got company power if they
don't you've got a challenge now you're
swimming uphill all the time you're
trying to earn a thing that actually
will get you into market power which is
okay if i can't be the gorilla
if i'm playing a chimp game i got to
have some place where they like chimps
my chance the fact that apple was around
to do the five thousand percent was
because it had a set of incredibly loyal
customers that carried it through a very
very very tough patch
so markup and
when you're small and when you're
crossing the chasm and when you're an
entrepreneur the whole key there is i
need to find some market that will be a
home where i can grow my company and
that the market itself will protect me
my customers will defend me against my
competitors because they're that loyal
to me why because i made such a deep
commitment to a problem that respects
especially unique to them that pain gain
thing that michael was talking about i
made a whole product commitment that
nobody else is willing to make i'm so
little it looked big to me
right but all the big guys it just
looked like sand in their shoe so they
wouldn't do it okay and then there's
offer power which is you know the thing
itself the price the performance the 10x
effect that michael was talking about
that's offer power and it's great but
you got to understand offers are
ephemeral right so offers come and go
but they are the only thing on this list
that customers can buy so they're pretty
darn important but you got to realize
they can move and then finally execution
power and you think well jeff i thought
performance and execution the same thing
for most of the time it is the place
where i don't think it is is in this
thing here which i'm going to talk to
you uh i want to talk a little bit about
execution in terms of strict anything
that is a strategic initiative which
requires you to cross a tipping point
it's a subset of execution problems the
claim i'm making is that for most
classes of execution problems large
corporations are extremely good at doing
them particularly if they've done them
before
but in the class of problems where you
have to actually change state and pass a
tipping point
large corporations are very bad at it
and that's
that's a huge huge problem for them
so so the whole book just this book here
this red book it's organized around
those five there's a chapter on each of
the five powers and sort of
how would you play it and it's told from
the point of view
of a larger company of a large company
who's trying to do this
there's two reasons for the
entrepreneurs in this room to maybe
still say
well why would i even open this thing
the first is you might get acquired by
one of these guys okay and then you'll
learn about a phrase called an earn out
okay
so there it will be a period and further
when you marry off your only child to
someone you you actually care about the
future of that child so you're so if
your company goes and gets acquired by a
larger company you're going to care
you're going to care
so hopefully there's some things to play
there and also the second thing is
particularly in this next section i'm
going to talk a little bit about the
learning around execution power and i'm
going to close with a little bit of
learning around the category
not going to try to do the ones in the
middle but but the ones at the beginning
this execution power there's something
in here which i think will be fun for
those of you who are not b to b
but who are in fact either b to c or b
to b to c one of the things we learned
about crossing the chasm as michael uh
championed it it is a b to b book it's a
b to b book about b to b problems the
last 10 years has been a whole lot of
b2c stuff going on crossing the chasm is
nowhere near as important as inside the
tornado and the way you play the tornado
is very different so i'm going to
actually show you a companion model to
the crossing the chasm model for b2c
stuff which i think will be kind of
interesting and but i want to make the
point in this context it's about
crossing both cases about getting past a
tipping point
the tipping point that an entrepreneur
has to get back for past is at the
margin do i have a persistent company
what an accountant will call a going
concern
and until you've crossed the chasm you
do not
meaning if you withdraw your personal
energy your company will go away okay if
you don't get the next round of funding
your company will go away there's a
point at which you cross a tipping point
and if you go away and the funding goes
away the company still persists it has
enough of a flywheel of market reality
customer commitment partner commitment
working capital et cetera et cetera it
is a going concern
that's the fundamental tipping point
that entrepreneurs worry about the
tipping point that established companies
have to worry about is is it possible
for us to onboard a net new earnings
engine in this enterprise or not
and if you can't
then you cannot then using stock
performance is going to be a very very
very unhappy compensation
uh uh mechanism for you for decades to
come as it has been at microsoft as it
has been at cisco as it has been at sap
because it's damn it the stock doesn't
move
and what does it take to move the stock
and the claim is it takes a net new
earnings engine to move the stock
okay that's the idea and so that is a
kind of an entrepreneurial idea as well
okay so the execution thing so this is
transitioning to scale growth born from
reaching tipping points both think about
this both as an entrepreneur who's at
northbridge or mdv or some other
incredibly high-class vc firm i don't
know if there are any others but there's
those two
i'm a venture partner at more davidow
uh where we funded michael at that time
anyway um execution so you might be
there or you might be you've just been
bought by
ibm cisco microsoft google whomever
so the arc of execution where in the
execution life cycle are you so when you
look at execution you have this thing
okay we're inventing it
and at some point we're going to deploy
this thing at scale
and eventually if it's out in the world
long enough we're actually going to
worry about how to optimize this thing
and the scalability is is the key thing
that i'm going to be focused on there's
a subsequent transition around
profitability
the consulting ideas about deploying and
optimizing
are about 30 to 45 years old they're
extremely good they're based on using
data dramatically they're not based on
very much on frameworks but the stuff on
scaling has to be still based on
frameworks because again you're
inventing the future so in this model
that didn't work very well okay so in
this model
there's a tipping point
and the claim about this tipping point
is
prior to the tipping point
every day it is harder
you wake up and it's actually a harder
day than the previous day
what it's a little bit like bicycling
you know if you start bicycling and you
go over a hill
you're kind of going initially on the
flat your bike you're starting up you
know you got your bike going okay it's
going it's going pretty good pretty good
and then you start up the hill and
you're still pedaling pretty good and
then they're just like
okay there's some point in here in my
case sooner than your case but but but
you at this point and until you're going
to get to the top of the hill
every next 10 yards you're actually
performing
worse than you did the prior 10 yards
okay
so so if if i'm using performance
metrics
your performance is degrading
systematically as you go forward and
sooner or later if i'm using if i'm
looking at you through a performance
lens i'm going to say
jeff you're not much of a bicyclist are
you huh dude dude she'll like maybe
drive or walk you know get off the bike
we're not going to fund the bike any
longer okay
that's what happens to strategic
initiatives okay in other words they get
to that point and and
so the key concept here and it's a real
challenge is to say to people
until you've reached the tipping point
no performance metric matters unless
it's related to getting to the tipping
point past the tipping point
so return on invested capital return on
equity uh you know operating ratios cost
a cost to traffic revenue every
conceivable operating metric that the
corporation runs all of its annual
planning all of its investor relations
around
it's not that they're irrelevant they're
toxic
they're toxic okay that's why there is a
venture industry because venture you
know venture and what venture does
though to be fair to it it just takes it
completely out of that environment
and says we're just going to play in an
environment we've raised capital with
the understanding that operating metrics
aren't important until after the tipping
point that's the fundamental contract
with the limited partner that is not a
contract you have in a large corporation
it is not the contract with a public
shareholder
so understand if you're running a large
corporation you've got a real challenge
and by the way we can say well that's
their problem not our problem except we
live in a society that needs jobs
and large corporations have a lot of
jobs okay okay so why tipping points
this uh
michael was talking about this but this
notion that adoption is social people do
what they see other people doing that's
what creates a tipping point
junior high dance problem right boys on
one side of gym girls on the other side
of a gym right adoption is social right
i'm not going you go out there i'm not
going out there right and then at some
other point it's like everybody's out
there and oh my god i gotta get out
there right
it was very harder by the way in my day
because in my day a boy and a girl had
to dance in pairs right it's a little
easier now you just get out there go
ahead dance like a round like this
you'll look good you'll look good okay
it leads to two mirror image phenomena
which is the chasm which is i'm not
going out there and the tornado which is
i'm not standing i'm not stand back
right but both cases it's peer pressure
right it's peer pressure in both ways
uh pre-tipping point no progress is
sustainable
and post tipping point there's no going
back
i mean the the tipping point is
fundamental to this game and any
strategic initiative has a tipping point
idea behind it so
so managing to the tipping point became
a really powerful notion and i kept on
challenging managers i'd say you know do
you guys manage to the tipping point do
you even have any metrics about where
you think the tipping point is do you
have any do you have any
how do you know how will you know
finally one ceo said jeffrey stop
tipping points are really easy to see in
retrospect right
how do you see them looking the other
way
good question let me get back to you on
that right it's like okay how do you and
the issue is you so you have to start
using frameworks and you have to start
making guesses
and you may just arbitrarily invent it
and we say you know what we believe that
250 customers will have passed the
tipping point
you don't know that you you you you your
gut tells you something you say and in
addition to that if 80 if 18 of those
customers cross reference to another
customer or you know if i see you know a
a return to my site of you know more
than 30 percent of the customers come
back more than once a week and they'd
stay there more than six minutes who the
hell knows what it is right but you have
to have something to say let us drive to
that place and see if we got to the
tipping point
and
and and then
kind of playing playing it forward so
the tipping point in the b to b world
this is the one that that michael and i
spent all the time with the knights
it is a great b2b model it is not a b2c
model but it just said look
in this social adoption of things
there's got people that go really early
the innovators then the early adopters
the early majority the late majority the
laggards
the key thing that the crossing the
chasm was about was guys the first two
groups secede
from the bell curve and create something
we call the early market and that also
however the pragmatists will not the
pragmatists are hanging back now
and that created the chasm
and the whole idea behind this was if
you could find a subset of pragmatists a
very focused segment remember michael
took you through all those circles and
we got down to field service personnel
the medical equipment in critical care
conditions right right there
fine we called them pragmatists in pain
because private is in pain are more
likely to convert before pragmatists in
general but eventually you do get the
killer app for pragmatists in general
that's what creates the tornado that is
no longer a niche market phenomenon
that's now a mass-market phenomenon or
at least a horizontal phenomenon and
then you get to mainstream and the key
lesson of this model was when you start
an innovation you have to do it twice
the first one flames out so when you
think you've lit the fire you've lit the
pre-fire it's an important fire to light
that's what steve blank was trying to
tell us with four steps to epiphany
that's what eric reese is trying to tell
us with pivot they're actually doing
pre-chasm entrepreneurship
there's a lot of work you got to do to
get to the chasm okay but the point of
this model is you got to light the fire
twice and the way you light the fire the
second time is totally different from
the way you lit it the first time
so first time you you light the fire on
optimism second time you light the fire
on pessimism right the marketing of the
first one is look at all the wonderful
things this technology can do look
marketing for the second one look how
deep the soup is that you're standing in
okay and i can get you out
but totally different totally different
that's why the whole product became so
important to the second one i can get
you out of that quick stand i have rope
i have i have a place to tie it i have a
winch i got the whole thing right that
that was the promise okay
in that world we developed a whole set
of metrics this is the set of metrics
it's been around for a long time but at
every stage it would say to you
are we here and if we've done these
things are we going to move on to the
next to the next move and
the b2b world has had a chance to play
with that for a while the problem with
these metrics is
and it started happening about four or
five years ago i'd start getting these
kind of nice
sort of deflecting comments from
students saying
you know that crossing the chasm
that was a great book
did you say was yeah yeah was yeah
yeah no really but really jeff it was it
was a great book right oh thank you
so it's like
they said well well jeff i mean google
facebook youtube i mean instagram where
was the chasm in instagram he got a
billion dollars
what effing chasm is usually what
they're usually saying you know it's
like what are you talking about
you are so clueless it's embarrassing
okay so
and you know it's that's not bad if you
hang out in adventure for me at least
try to look close i mean you have a clue
you don't have to actually have a clue
but you have to look like you have a
clue you can't stand on stage being
clueless because it makes your partners
embarrassed
so we said okay we got to come up with a
different way to think about this
and so
spend some time with people who are
doing these kinds of projects
so what what do you do
how do you make these things work and we
came up with this concept that the
entrepreneur is like a like a starter
motor and you're trying to start one of
these things
we're trying to start a tornado what we
realized is there it wasn't a chasm
problem it was a tornado problem
and you say well how do you start a
tornado kind of because particularly on
the web
and so they said well
you got to acquire traffic somehow so
part of the thing is i'm going to run
some experiments to figure out how can i
acquire traffic hopefully at low cost
hope maybe at no cost
then i have to come up with some way to
engage
i've got to engage this traffic in a way
that that causes them to participate and
value me
then at some point i've got to figure
out how to monetize this now in a lot of
these models monetization comes very
late in the game but you have to figure
out eventually
and then i need to figure out how to
enlist people to help me acquire the
next traffic so so whether that's an
upsell of myself personally or whether
i'm referring a friend you cannot you
you have to have the community has to
help you enlist uh to to get the next
the next round of acquisition so think
about zynga and you know how getting
your friends to play farmville with you
that kind of an enlistment idea right so
engagement is you participating but
enlistment is when you actually get
other people to come uh play in the
community as well so you think about
about how this works um the the the the
uh
the guy in the middle the starter motor
what he's doing is he's running these
experiments so he or she acquisition
engagement
you know monetization enlistment we're
just we're just kind of how would this
work and then if the enlistment could
get some more acquisition okay well
could that get some more engagement or
could that get some you know
can we
and could we get a tornado
and the answer is
maybe
maybe
not not so often but this apparently is
state of the art
you know and by the way uh prior to most
of this you were in the dorm room and
your parents were paying for the dorm
room anyway so what the hell right i
mean you know it didn't cost that much
um but but that's kind of what was going
on so when we looked at this we started
to decode it and say okay so
what's going on and why does it matter
and we realized that two of these gears
were performance gears now they were
those are the gears that people were
measuring
comscore they were measuring them on you
know any way they could
and the monetization gear and these are
the two gears that anybody who had
investment in the company you know is it
how much traffic are you getting well
how much are they spending on you give
me all give me all your operating
metrics
we call them the performance gears then
we looked at the other two gears and we
said you know what they're the power
gears
they're the power gears and they're
actually the gears that are going to
determine the future performance
so how engaged
our people in this operation
the consumer and how enlisted are they
and enlisted by the way there's a really
interesting very simple enlistment
metric called the net promoter score you
know that i think nps where the the
question the fundamental question they
ask you is
how likely one to ten are you to refer
this
offer to a friend
it turns out if a person says nine or
ten
that means you have a viral a positive
virality
if they say seven to eight
you have a neutral virality and if you
have less than six or less you actually
have churn you have a negative a
negative virality okay
so we're looking at i say okay so gosh
so so that led to a pretty interesting
idea so here are the four things you
want to measure
and you do want them and by the way the
person who said measure and then measure
underneath and then measure underneath
these are the four places you want to
start and then you want to go into
how what is your rate of gaining new
traffic or new users if it's a retail
game new customers whatever it is
what is their kind of engagement whether
that's length depth frequency of user
engagement obviously in different
situations those are different things
how well is this thing monetizing one of
the knocks on zynga is like three
percent of their traffic monetize
ninety seven percent of their traffic
does not monetize say well that seems a
little bit concerning
uh and then and then enlistment who
helps and by the way if you look at
different
properties right now you say well let's
look at linkedin
linkedin acquisition off the top off the
charts
uh
enlistment you bet people tell you to
get on linkedin okay monetization
the recruiters alone can monetize the
hell out of that thing right
engagement that's their concern
we don't spend enough time on linkedin
right that's their words that's where
they're worried facebook you've heard of
facebook perhaps okay so facebook what's
their issue well about a billion hundred
billion because they have an issue yes
they can have an issue acquisition
900 million i think they got that one
pretty good okay no no i don't think
it's a big problem engagement you got to
be kidding me people live on facebook
okay not a problem
enlistment
if you're not in if you're in the family
and you're not on facebook your
relatives will tell you get on facebook
okay
monetization interesting
desktop
not so bad
mobile
a disaster waiting to happen okay
the mobile monetization mechanism for
facebook does not exist in any reason
and anything that would correspond to
the valuation that's going to be hit
this week it just doesn't now could it
yes does everybody want it to yes is it
just facebook's problem hell no
everybody has this issue of how are we
going to because
50 of facebook's traffic is on mobile
devices
50
so the point about this thing is
in different situations you will have
different metrics matter you should use
this as an analytical filter to look at
your b2c or even your b to b to c
where you're the first b helping the
second b look over that second b's
shoulders and look at their c situation
and figure out which of these four
metrics is the one that they've got to
fix hopefully with your help
and so we have this concept called the
slowest gear theory
just says look the thesis is prior to
the tornado at any given point in time
one of these gears is probably going to
be slower than the other three
and so the actions that we are
suggesting here are identify the slowest
gear focus everyone on speeding that one
up but
don't take your eye completely off the
other three gears i mean you can't just
like be a serial
this is where serial entrepreneur
doesn't work you have to keep all four
gears spinning right
repeat every quarter until the tornado
happens or you run out of gas okay
and that's sort of that's sort of the
the new model so i'm going to stop there
for a second and just i'd love to get
your so maybe your crap detector went
off or or or
you know
how would you react to this model or
what what do you see in this model a
comment or a question i'd love to just
get a little bit of
feedback yeah are you saying that this
like your other framework is just a b2b
model or it should it doesn't strike me
that there's
obviously speaking b2b and b2c in this
case um i think it i think it is the
distinction is this is i think a b2c
model in the sense that
it it involves large number of peoples
largely acting on their own
whereas b2b models you remember when
michael showed that huge set of
constituencies that you all have to get
aligned in order to get a sale
so that that's the kind of inertial
resistance where where the b to b model
works better but in this one i mean and
in a sense you know a tornado is a
tornado in both ones but i think this
one's more about you don't have to get
that kind of institutional buy-in but
you got to get critical mass whatever
that whatever that means so that's the
only reason i would call it it might be
b to e if
in an employee it could be that okay uh
if you have an order of magnitude
improvement on the present state of the
art as mike was speaking earlier is it
possible to jump over the early adopters
and go directly to a main line you're
solving their core problem
and just go straight to the bottom yeah
but it's interesting you know going
the the the uh
yes the question is how discontinuous is
your innovation if you just make
gasoline
that that is twice as effective and
sells for half as much money
there's no adoption life cycle just put
up the station dude uh so so the issue
then is is how disruptive is it or who
has to change their form of behavior
if the consumer doesn't have to change
that gives you enormous leverage against
whoever does have to change to make them
change look at what apple did when they
essentially gave itunes to their folks
they could then make the entire music
industry which did not want to change
change because they had this incredible
power and they got that power because
from the user's point of view there was
no technology adoption just
go to itunes and get your songs i mean
you paid for them that was strange by
the way because remember we had netapp
i'm not uh we had napster yeah napster
so yeah there was 99 cents but but it
was it was there was a de minimis enough
change so i think i think in the b2c
model it's not about chasms and bowling
pins i really do think it's about going
straight to the tornado just straight to
the tornado
whereas i think in b2b it is about
chasms and bowling pins because there's
enough inertial resistance to anything
new that you've got to overcome
i think b2b is more predictable i think
b to seats when they win are
more lucrative
but b2cs are still to be somewhat
mystical i think the grin the gears i
think help
but i think you know you're still trying
to figure out what does it take to get a
date you know i spent my entire
adolescence trying to answer that
question
and i broke it down into frameworks and
it didn't help okay
yeah
what you would say about sustainability
you know a lot of the opportunities you
talk about are ones which you know
one person does another person do it
very quickly and you've got to do it
right and build a market or build a
credit card i think i think there's
something inherently
i think this is a fad business to a
large degree i look at the movie
business look at the music business look
at look at all the great consumer
businesses uh
there are some that have sustained
mcdonald's is a sustained consumer
franchise um
but but boy there are awful lot that
that you know
don't don't don't get there so it's it's
a
it's a different game now and you try to
institutionalize it like they made movie
studios we'll have dreamworks you know
dreamworks will always create hit movies
not so much you know
and so uh john carter yeah okay uh that
wasn't dreams that was disney i know uh
but uh but that would be the other half
of that there's a question in the back
or a comm in the back
that was basically my question but you
know kind of building on that so
it seems to me you know kind of thing
i'm not i don't know a lot about b2c but
you know just basically between b to b
and b to c
for b to c it just seems like a lot of
people who are just kind of spending
this goals in the link and it's kind of
i think you're like kind of like you're
solid stupid people you know like like
zynga is basically selling people like a
big time sink and stuff like that
is that kind of
you know good thing is that kind of what
our entrepreneur
i think if you were talking about
let me make it put more honor into this
system
all of human culture is going online and
is being consumed through digital
devices and i mean
all of human culture
i mean education i mean health care i
mean war and i mean love
and and i mean literature and i mean
film and i mean music and i mean art and
i mean sports and i mean news and i mean
being a citizen and i mean being a
criminal right it's all online
and and it's becoming more online so i
think
i think there's a i think zynga is a
good example of wasting time online
and i think all of us waste a certain
amount of time online because we're
usually standing in line at starbucks
and so therefore wasting time why not
waste
you know in a more interesting way
but but but but it's and i think and by
by the way and the economics isn't that
i'm buying stupid stuff as often as i'm
being advertised to one of the scary
things about this is the way that model
was monetized was is media advertising
right brand advertising media
advertising and the problem is we
haven't cracked the code on these small
i think on an ipad you're fine but on
anything smaller that's the spooky thing
yeah
i think when you say repeat every
quarter is way too slow
okay
i i i'm old so just bear with me but
yeah i think i think it probably is too
slow i think in a large company it's
probably not too slow uh because that
actually is light speed in some large
companies but you're right so what do
you think is a better is a more likely
cadence
weekly repeat every week
yeah yeah yeah yeah no no i'm with you i
think i i actually i buy that i think i
would do it weekly until if it maybe
after a while you'd say that maybe even
weekly is too little but i don't think
it is but maybe you'd go i think it's a
that's a good fix yes
first of all thank you for your
presentation yeah and i want to ask you
according to your framework for example
in the case of linkedin
when they went into japan they tried the
same formula and they have half a
million users in a country with a
so do you apply this framework in each
single market again because every single
new market it's a new revenue stream by
the end of the day so and i think it may
be a different gear it may be a
different gear so for example in japan
i'll bet you that the enlistment gear
runs at the speed of a glacier
just think about japanese culture you're
going to reach out to another business
person in japan and tell them to join
not in any of the meetings i was in in
japan so so i do so i so i think i think
they're so i think you're right you have
to solve for different dynamics in
different places
maybe if they could get the engagement
gear to go faster in japan that would
give them some help but if they try to
work directly on the enlistment gear
directly well maybe i don't know but
you're right but but so they haven't
they have an engagement gear problem in
the us they i would argue have an
enlistment one in japan yeah is there a
bit of a timing issue and that
seems like you got to get enough of a
funnel cloud going before you focus on
the other ones if you're facebook and
you focus on the monetization
really hard really early doesn't work
i would argue for media models in
general and i would say that facebook is
a media property um you don't you
actually monetize it monetize very very
late we used to have a thing in the in
in the 90s which was called url stood
for ubiquity now revenue later
and and that that is the media model i
think so you would that would be example
you just set monetization aside google
didn't remember google had gone public
really before it really had a
a clear monetization model
and and and so yeah yeah how do you see
this model playing into this trend
towards the
sort of consumerization of enterprise
you look at apple and google as kind of
examples of that where consumers let
first enterprise adopt later and
facebook's kind of scary and then
who knows right now this is a this is
important it relates a little bit to the
question that came out of here so i i'm
sort of dining out on a speech i'm
giving these days about enterprise
i.t which says from systems of record to
systems of engagement so i think of this
consumerization thing as systems of
engagement and i think of the old
database oracle stuff as systems of
record so two things have to happen this
model would work for the employee side
of adoption so and in general what
people are doing because sometimes
people say well
it's just like facebook
and it's this dweeby thing that hr came
out with that just sucks right so it's
not just like okay so so there's still a
kind of a engagement problem you got to
get there
come to our corporate website and learn
about all the exciting things hr wants
you to learn about
even in starbucks i wouldn't do that
right
so okay so but then the other half of it
if it's like so now what is happening at
it is bring your own device so people
are saying you know bring anything bring
mac pc
android ipod whatever the hell ipad
whatever it is so that okay so now i've
got the b the e is already in there but
now that the cio is going hang on
i have a
boatload of very very very tough
problems to solve and i and i have a
restricted talent base and by the way
it's not fit for this purpose
so that's where the chasm problem is
happening so i would argue jive chatter
yammer
all that stuff i don't think it's across
the chasm i i think it's still on the
early side of the chasm because the
problem is the i.t guys are still trying
to balkanize it bucket it
keep it at some distance because there's
some very very real liability security
issues and and i know sometimes they use
security as a head fake but in this case
it probably is real yeah i hate the idea
of putting a hole in the framework
actually no you can't even know it helps
to put a hole yeah examples you bring it
seems like they didn't focus on
increasing the speed of their slowest
gears they instead looked at what gears
were spinning the fastest and helped
make those spin even faster and
capitalize on those and eventually that
compensated for whatever wow so
that should be that should be an
alternative game plan let's call that
game plan b
which is screw
the brakes let's just hit the
accelerator right or you know no but but
well but kind of you know you know kind
of so so this guy he thinks we have to
run on four wheels no we can we're a
unicycle
okay
you know i feel it feels like there's
some truth in that it really does so so
no man just spin the hell out of one of
those gears and see if they can't like
drag the other ones around with them i
think that's i think it's a totally
viable hypothesis and i think it would
be called like
action hypothesis number two yeah
uh just a couple quick thoughts one is
uh i i think that putting monetization
before enlistment i just feel like
enlistment comes way way earlier like
right after acquisition
in the way these things tend to work
when they're successful i think the
other thing is that um
engagement is a little bit of a it's a
little bit of a tricky thing because
like you use the zynga example and i
think people are very engaged in those
games they're in them all the time and
then you take google which is obviously
a much more effective monetization
effort and i think
you know the google folks will say our
goal is to get people off the page off
the serp page as fast as possible right
um and so it's almost i mean i think
there's another concept that is maybe
fits under engagement which has to do
with delight yeah which has to do with
like how it triggers pleasure yeah and
google triggers pleasure by getting you
out of here get get in get out and get
get on with your life
yeah yeah yeah yeah
very happy when this happens i think
that's true the other one by the way the
reason monetization is where it is well
part of it was because i couldn't redraw
the diagram let's be clear
but
but but uh
power no expense was spared on this
presentation because none was incurred i
i just
but but um but in a retail model in a
retail model it's where it belongs and
actually the last time i gave this talk
was to a online e-commerce situation
where you had to monetize early on and
so you had to put in there but i agree
with adam i think in the media game it's
totally correct the the monetization
gear comes forth and often comes very
late in the game and lightly and you
kind of like it's almost like a clutch
it's almost like not you know in it
don't don't slow it down too much you
know kind of i think just sorry of one
thing you're comparing the b2b and the
bbc models yeah and i think a lot of
startups have gotten obsessed with what
i think is a b2b model which is this
idea of minimally viable product yeah i
don't think it works in b2c i mean i
think viable sounds like you're still in
the icu and nobody wants to hang out
with people in the icu it's kind of like
it's kind of like yeah yeah no this is
like this is like valentine's day
minimally viable bouquet
probably not probably not the romance
winner you know if she sees the
cellophane around it you know and like
kroger's in the
i gave her flowers on valentine's day
for god's sake what did she expect right
well more than that more than that okay
yeah so it's okay yeah yeah delighting
that's a delighter issue yeah you bet so
you know why i want to push back a
little bit on the idea of the time frame
how long has it been
and i think a lot of the rhetoric now in
the like sort of methodology is that
it's when you're testing hypotheses
as a scientist so it's really a question
of statistical significance yeah where
if you have a large user funnel and you
get a lot of data and feedback there's
no reason why you can't iterate you know
five times in the same day if you
actually have a large pipe going in to
test certain hypotheses and you can do
these things in power so there's no
reason why you can't run five tests at
the same time right and pick the best
one i think if so fair enough so if you
could do design of experiments and
actually are smart enough to be able to
do multi-variant kind of regression
analysis yes and i think the point
that's coming out here that we all
should absorb is jeff it isn't a
specific cycle of time it's how fast can
we close the loop in in a reasonably and
expect to learn something and and then
move on and also obviously on the web
speed the faster this is such a fast
medium that the faster you can do it the
better you can do it without burning out
your company okay
i think one thing that might be subtly
missing but i'm not sure if the missing
gear just sort of behind the scenes is
that uh importance of
adoption support innovation from other
business partners
i think part of the reason why
monetization comes so late in media is
that the advertisers the advertising
agencies don't have a clue
at first how to use it right so it takes
a while for them to figure out what the
ad unit is what the interaction is and
with of itunes you know you could have
itunes but until you
until you bring the music industry right
yeah in the backlist yeah yeah
i think that's fair i think i think you
should be always looking for kind of
like the inherent inertial resistance to
the new phenomenon uh and and
in some cases like with with with zynga
i think they actually were able to spin
up pretty quickly because they used
virtual goods as their own thing but
that's their partner
and their partner was facebook fair
enough and and they got that kind of
going there okay
okay well that was that so that was some
of the stuff i wanted to share i just
want to close with one thing i've been
taking another place and then if we have
some time for talking about it or maybe
we'll talk about over lunch but
but this is the one
that has to do this is when i spending
time in boardrooms with ceos and
executive teams
making myself pretty thoroughly
unpopular
and here's kind of so it says look guys
we this is this category power idea you
know we've talked a lot about the
venture world where they are this is the
the great place for a big companies to
be in the b section of this thing no
adoption problems you just scale it the
c is where you have to actually worry
about optimizing margins you know the d
is where you start worrying about oh my
god if i stayed too long in this
category i will have a kodak moment and
that's
that's the kodak moment at the end okay
kind of thing well but yeah
that i would argue that kodak was one of
the five best brands in the world for
most of my life at least in the top ten
so so it i mean this is brutal right
uh so your choir power utilize power you
the best power and then and then the
idea what what what what you're trying
to do when you reinvent yourself you're
not trying to recross the chasm because
frankly that that's too small you've got
to have something that's big enough to
scale pretty quickly what you really
like to do is kind of get into a new
category
kind of on the
on the right side of the chasm ideally
like right about there and and then kind
of scale that up going up that's what
you'd like to have happen
because what you're looking for is you
want growth
but you and that's what that and by the
way that means you need to acquire or
develop power but the issue is at some
size if you're a 10 billion dollar
company or 20 or 30 or 40 billion dollar
company just fig it's the law of large
numbers
you can't really change your stock price
until you have a new earnings engine
that's earning several billion dollars
so you're 100 million dollars like
you're a rounding error right so it's a
real problem if you think about that
and that's where the performance metric
so you have this real challenge you have
to have power and performance in order
to have this thing
move the needle in a large company
and so when you look at these a b c d's
they kind of go like that basically you
know the the early thing it's high
growth but it's not material revenues
you're going to try to get into the b
section of that curve which is going to
give you both high growth and material
revenues eventually you'll get into the
c section it'll become yet another
earnings engine it will be the 8086
architecture at intel or it will be
windows or it will be office at
microsoft or it will be you know the erp
suite at sap et cetera et cetera and
then and then the final one would be
would be d which is it's it's heading
toward e right so here's what you see in
in the world of large companies this is
a typical portfolio pattern in virtually
all companies that have those stock
prices which are close to the nasdaq
they're big franchises but they're not
growing very fast if you spend time in
them that's not visible in outside the
company but inside the company they have
way cool neat stuff but it's not
material in terms of the size of the
revenue and they've got some aging stuff
right
and the first question the board always
asks is why do we have more business in
quadrant two you know did you ever do
did you guys see quadrant two
how about quadrant two right
and so
you look at this problem and the way
this is this is how it happens so
it turns out the key to understanding a
large corporation is to understand that
there are three different
investment horizons that
interact with each other in a large
corporation that caused the dynamic
called the innovator's dilemma
the first horizon is if i spend money on
this i will make it back this year
i'll hire more salespeople my revenue
will go up okay it's a horizon one it's
all about operating expenses it's all
about getting things done you know what
large corporations are world-class of
this stuff
just really really really good
what we always say about large
corporations is you know what they can't
innovate for
for
some
soup right
uh yeah but anyway you know what not
true
totally untrue
the labs in large corporations have way
cool stuff venture would kill to get
that stuff and often does okay
so so i mean really i mean think about
xerox park it just like silicon valley
dined off of xerox park for like two
decades
it was really really cool stuff
the problem was when they tried to bring
it from horizon 3
which is i'm going to get a return on
this investment but not anytime soon and
by the way it comes out of a capex
budget more than the opex budget it's
kind of like the corporate tax that we
spend on the future
but when you try to get through horizon
2 which is a interesting horizon horizon
2 says we're going to spend money out of
our working capital budget this year
and we're actually not going to get
anything for it this year
we'll get something for it next year and
something really pretty exciting for it
the following year
and thank you for playing okay
so what what's going on here because
this is this is absolutely fatal to
innovation
so what's going on here horizon 3 coming
in horizon 2 is the one where i'm trying
to get from horizon three to horizon one
horizon one's the the all the where all
the material revenues are created
horizon zero if you want to worry about
is kind of where we're getting in danger
of running off the thing so performance
management is all about horizon one
we're really good at horizon one not a
problem horizon one manager is how do
you do that
how do you make your numbers quarter
after quarter after quarter you cheat
you lie and you steal and then you try
not to lie too much but you steal all
the time you hoard resources because you
can't get it done any other way there's
too much variability in the world so all
of a sudden h2 comes and the thing that
makes h2 different from h3 is h2 wants
the same resources that h1 uses and in
particular they want the same sales
resources the same go to market
resources marketing resources
professional service it's all the
customer facing stuff that really is is
in jeopardy here
and and and so
the h1 managers go ah
and you know and they by the way they
also cling they cling to the other
business they need more money but and
horizon 3 is not affected so the horizon
2 challenge is it's just it works like
this h1 during the annual planning
process gets first dibs at all the
resources by the time h2 gets to the
table there are no eight players left
right they're probably a few lingering
b's right i mean just because they
grabbed them all right
and so and so h3 by the way gets stars
but they're not stars that h1 wants
i mean they're weird people right but
but they're wonderfully weird but
they're not useful in h1 they're useful
as corporate entertainment right bring
your customer to corporate show them
it's like larry with whatever that weird
thing larry's doing
and then sell them some more storage
servers right you know come on okay so
it's a great relationship right
but h2 is like no dice h2 is now an
entrepreneurial business unit trying to
get a piece of my sales force a piece of
my marketing budget
it's like and no no so so and the
problem is in that model the h1 guy says
well i can support as many h2
initiatives you want i don't if you
don't want me to make my number
i mean it's black male it's pure and
utter black male but it's a black male
that works both ways because the ceo has
been pounding him to make his or her
number forever so this is not an r d
problem
this is a go to market problem okay
that's where this thing actually gets
killed and here was the big aha
innovation is not a funnel
it is an hourglass
that's that's that's the tweet that's
the tweetable remark for those who are
on hashtag you know startups whatever
because because
we can have as many things as you want
in h3 and as many things you want in h1
h2 is the problem statement so if you
look at that you say what's what's the
h2 challenge and then how do you solve
for it and then i'm uh that's all i want
to share with you the challenge is
pretty clear
if you were going to actually move those
stock chart things
you have to create a net new earnings
engine that i would argue is somewhere
between five and ten percent of total
revenues and looks like it's probably
going to go to 15 to 20 in the not too
distant future somewhere around here the
investors go whoo dude so it's
interesting so video at cisco hasn't
quite gotten there yet you think it
might
might but it hasn't sharepoint or xbox
at microsoft interesting not
i'm not not quite yet i don't don't feel
you're quite quite there yet because i
think still 85 of microsoft's net
revenue pretty much is office windows of
some variation thereof so you got to get
to a certain point but clearly clearly
ipod did it clearly i
phoned it clearly ipad did it clearly um
amazon web services has done it to
amazon so that's where they got that one
from okay so somewhere in there okay
right now when you start
you're if you're below somewhere between
one percent you don't even show you can
hide you can effectively be like a
horizon three
play
so if you think if you just sort of set
that as an order of magnitude move the
journey is i have to grow one order of
magnitude and the question is how much
time can a large public corporation give
you to do that
i will submit to you that they they'll
certainly give you one year and there's
no chance that you can do it one year
they will reluctantly give you two years
and there's probably no chance you can
do it in two years but if you make
enough progress they will grudgingly
give you the third year and if you don't
get it done in the third year i don't
think you get the fourth year
that would be my sort of order of
magnitude play here so that this means
when you take on this assignment you're
behind
probably somewhere between three and six
quarters right i mean it's brutal it's a
brutal assignment okay so horizon two is
not a stable state
you either get through it or you die and
by the way that that's the venture-like
thing here because venture capitals are
not stable institute you can't just say
i'll just raise more capital you know at
some point those nice friendly vcs
not so friendly right you know oh hi hi
no no no no no we're not funding no no
yeah okay that's not a stable state so
so so this is the issue inside the
corporation so then the question was
this is the last this is kind of the
money slide
so okay dude what would you do
differently how would you play this game
to actually win and and and and you know
don't fool around because you know
this is going to be painful we don't
want to do it twice
so the first thing is how many horizon 2
initiatives can you do at the same time
i this is the first place where i make
myself radically unpopular the answer is
one
only one and i don't care if you're 100
billion corporation the answer is
one
that sounds so wrong to so for so many
reasons to so many people that it almost
ends the conversation there except
they're too polite to kick me out of the
room because it's like that can't be
right it cannot be right look at the
odds of these things but my point is
this is a one-lane highway
if you put two cars onto a one-lane
highway
you've just guaranteed that neither of
them will get through right
so the only way to get this thing
through is one at a time now you could
have as many horizon 3 initiatives
waiting to get on the highway and you
can have as many horizon 1 businesses as
you want to run large corporations can
run many things in horizon 1 and they
can do many experiments in horizon 3 one
to get through the pipe second one
when do you plan and budget for this
initiative not with all the other
children
right you have to if you're going to
actually get the right resourcing for
this both in the field and in the
factory you have to plan do your annual
planning for your horizon two one
quarter before you do your annual
planning for everything else once the
annual planning the real annual planning
starts the knives are out it's a
zero-sum game there is zero chance the
horizon two guy is going to survive zero
okay that's number two three what kind
of a structure do you need you need a
venture-like structure the reason why
venture-backed companies can kick the
tail out of large corporations routinely
is because they have this fast cycle
time latency that we've been talking
about
and even in b2b really fast you're the
salesperson the engineering person oh my
god the customer said this doesn't work
you know i'll try to hack something
together can you give me a demo by
tuesday and then a large corporation it
was which tuesday
i'm booked for the next two tuesdays i
can get to it this month
but but the cycle time's completely
ruined so and by the way the sales force
is kind of slightly misdirected and the
services people are saying you know i'll
help you but you know my utilization
number is kind of
kind of low this month and i'm a little
bit worried about helping you too much
so you get all these messages back in
the corporation of you know
you're an irritant you know you just i
mean you're my friend but you're an
irritant right so that's number that's
you have to you have to be able to
organize this thing but you can't let it
persist at scale this business has to
melt back into the functional
organization of large corporation so
once you get to something
close to horizon one scale where the
business can survive then there's no
empire building the sales goes back to
the sales force the engineering goes
back to the engineering team the support
goes back to the support team but during
that that order of magnitude race it has
to report to a single entrepreneurial gm
who can move resources on a dime during
that during that period in order to
adapt and grow fast
fourth one metrics
tipping point metrics crossing the chasm
for b to b four gears for b to c and the
last one
this is the one where if i haven't been
kicked out now that's why i put it last
because this is almost always
so the compensation statement is
obviously you want to compensate the
general manager of the horizon 2
business unit with high variable
compensation on getting the material
size score got it
next who's the ultimate sponsor of this
initiative has to be the ceo
okay ceo step up
big part of your variable compensation
is did you get this horizon 2 initiative
to material socks okay that's number two
the painful one everybody who reports to
the ceo not the entrepreneurial gm this
is not in your business unit
all of your variable comp also is going
to ride on the success of this one
business unit that you did not fund and
that you do not believe in and you don't
even like the gm
you say you say this
you say that cannot be right that
violates every concept of compensation i
have no i can't do anything about this
it's all in his control or her control
what this is total this is totally wrong
and the only reply i have is well first
of all
we don't exactly have a very good
existence proof for doing it the other
way
but the other point is are you telling
me that if i told you that for the next
three years
your variable compensation program is
going to depend entirely on the
performance of this business unit
that you can do nothing to improve the
performance of this business unit
i mean how dumb are you
i'm sorry i don't believe that okay i
believe that if you really bite on that
bullet
that we'll take this thing through that
horizon two gap in record speed because
you're greedy individuals right and you
will think of way i can introduce them
to this customer i can get past this
objection i can tell that account guy
i'm sorry this comes first i can do a
million things
to make this thing happen i can make it
happen faster than venture i can kick
ventures ass
if i have the entire executive team
saying this is how i'm going to get
comped particularly in a
performance-driven culture so the point
about this exercise and leaders needless
to say that the ink is not even dry on
the slide
um it's a provocative controversial
pushing at it but but you know it's it's
saying well it's been 15 years since
clay threw down the gauntlet
somebody's got to pick it up so let's go
okay so that so that was it the the
concept here was just
the four things we're fighting against
the innovators to let me you know about
it's hard to take risk in big companies
annual planning gets all the good
resources for the for the existing
players and the con temporary financial
markets by the way there is a j curve
here which is just brutal and then your
stock price will get hammered they'll
get mad at you but but if that's what
another reason why you have to go fast
but here were the three the last slide
the three things it takes so it takes a
focus on power not performance the two
are together but the point about it is
we got to think much more
in a committed way about power and not
just keep on coming back to well now
let's get back to the numbers which is
the performance part of the equation the
second piece therefore is it puts more
pressure on leadership than management
it turns out management is the key to
performance
and leadership is the key to power
and there that's a yin yang it's a yin
yang sometimes you need more leadership
sometimes you need more management it's
not like one's better than the other but
you need both and then the third thing
is it's got to be about the tipping
point before the roi you just you have
to do this if we're going to get if
we're going to move the needle so
that was that was the last of that set
so first of all thank you very much for
letting me
[Music]
you
Can't find what you're looking for?
Get subtitles in any language from opensubtitles.com, and translate them here.