How to Keep Your Job As Your Company Grows

Posted on November 13, 2018 by steve blank

I know a change is going to come

If you’re an early employee at a startup, one day you will wake up to find that what you worked on 24/7 for the last year is no longer the most important thing – you’re no longer the most important employee, and process, meetings, paperwork and managers and bosses have shown up. Most painfully, you’ll learn that your role in the company has to change.

I’ve seen these transitions as an investor, board member and CEO. At times they are painful to watch and difficult to manage. Early in my career I lived it as an employee, and I handled it in the worst possible way.

Here’s what I wish I had known.

I had joined MIPS Computers, my second semiconductor company, as the VP of marketing and also took on the role of the acting VP of Sales. During the first year of the company’s life, I was a fireball – relentless in creating and pursuing opportunities – getting on an airplane at the drop of a hat to fly anywhere, anytime, to get a design win. I worked with engineering to try to find product/market fit (big endian or little endian?) and get the chip designed into companies building engineering workstations – powerful personal computers, all while trying to refine how to find the right markets, customers, and sales process. I didn’t get much sleep, but I was having the time of my life.

And after a year there was good news. Our rent-a-CEO was being replaced by a permanent one. Our chip was nearing completion, and I had convinced early lighthouse customers to design it into their computers. I had done amazing things with almost no resources and got the company on the radar of every tech publication and into deals we had no right to be in. I was feeling 10 feet tall. Everything was great… until the new CEO called me in for a chat.

I don’t remember much about the details, but I do remember hearing him tell me how impressed he was with what I had accomplished so far, then immediately the visceral feeling of shock and surprise when his next words were that now the company needed to scale, and I wasn’t the right person to do that… Wait! What??

For a minute I couldn’t breathe. I felt like I had been punched in the gut. How could that be?  What do you mean I’m not the right person??? Hadn’t he just listed all the great work I had done? He acknowledged it was a lot of progress but offered that it was a flurry of disconnected tactics without a coherent strategy. No one knew what I was doing, and I couldn’t explain why I was doing it when asked. “You’re just throwing stuff against the wall. That doesn’t scale.” I was speechless. Wasn’t that what the first year of a startup was supposed to be like?

Scrambling to save my job, I regained the power of speech, and asked him if I could be the person to take the company to the next level. And to his credit (which I only appreciated years later) he agreed that while he was going to start a search, I could be a candidate for the job. And to top it off he got me a coach to help me understand what taking it to the next level meant. In preparation I remember buying all the management books I could find and reading what little literature there was at the time about how small company management transitioned into a larger one.

And herein lies the tale….
I vaguely remember going to lunch with my coach, a nice white-haired “old guy” who was trying to help me learn the skills to grow into the new job. The problem was I had shut down. Even as we were meeting, I was obsessively thinking about the change in my role, my title and my status. “I don’t get it, I did all this work, and everything was great. Why does anything have to change?”  But I never shared any of how I felt with my coach. To do this day I am really embarrassed to admit that I have no idea what my coach tried to teach me over multiple lunches and weeks. As we went to lunch, all I could think about was me and how I was being screwed. I literally paid zero attention. In my righteous anger I was unreachable.

I shouldn’t have been surprised, but yet again I was, when a month later the CEO said, that the report from the coach said, “I had a long way to go”. The company was going to hire a VP of Marketing. I was devastated.

I quit.

It’s Not About Change – It’s About Loss
If you had asked me a decade later what had been going on in my head and why I handled this so badly, I would have simply said, that: 1) I was resistant to change, and that 2) I had made this all about me and never once considered that our new CEO was right. All true – to a point.

It took me another decade to realize if I had been really honest with myself it wasn’t about fighting change at all. Heck every day something new was happening at our startup. I was agile enough to keep up with innumerable changes and I was changing lots of things myself. It was actually about something much more personal I wouldn’t admit to myself – it was that these changes made me fear what I was losing;

  • I felt a loss of status and identity – I had been judged inadequate to continue in my role and my stature and the value of my skills and abilities had dropped.
  • I felt a loss of certainty – I was now competing to hold a job I thought was mine forever in the company. At least that’s what I thought my business card said. Now I was adrift and didn’t know what the future held.
  • I felt a loss of autonomy – Up until now I used my best judgment of what was needed and I was doing what I wanted, when I wanted it. I was fine making up a strategy on the fly from disconnected tactics. Now we were going to have plans and a strategy.
  • I felt a loss of community – we had been a small tight team who had bonded together under extreme pressure and accomplished amazing things. Now new people who knew none of that and appreciated little of it were coming in. They had little trust and empathy with us.
  • I felt the process lacked fairness – no one had warned/told me that the job I was doing needed to change over time, and no one told me what those new skills were.

What was going on?
Researchers have found there’s a link between social connection and physical discomfort within the brain. “Being hungry and being ostracized activate similar neural responses because being socially connected is necessary for survival. Although a job is often regarded as a purely economic transaction, the brain experiences the workplace first and foremost as a social system.”

Looking back over the decades it’s clear that the new CEO was right. Even though these losses triggered something primal, I did need to learn discipline, pattern recognition, time management, separating the trivial from the important and the difference between tactics and strategy. I needed to learn to grow from being a great individual contributor to being a manager and then a leader. Instead I walked away from learning any of it.

I probably added five unneeded years to my career.

What should I have done?
Today it’s understood that all startups go through a metamorphosis as they become larger companies. They go from organizations struggling for survival as they search for product/market fit, to building a repeatable and scalable business model, and then growing to profitability. And we are all hard-wired for a set number of social relationships. This mental wiring defines boundaries in growing an organization – get bigger than a certain size, and you need a different management system. The skills needed from employees differ at each stage.

What I wish I knew was that if you’re an early company employee, it’s not likely that the skills you have on day one are the skills needed as the company scales to the next level. This sentence is worth reading multiple times as no one – not the person who hired you, the VC’s or your peers -is going to tell you when you’re hired that the company will likely outgrow you. Some (like your peers or even the founders) don’t understand it, and others (the VCs) realize it’s not in their interest to let you know. The painful reality is that products change, strategies change, people change…things have to change for your company to stay in business and grow.

What should my CEO have done?
When my CEO was explaining to me how the company needed to change to grow, he was explaining facts while I was processing deeply held feelings. The changes in the organization and my role represented what I was about to lose. And when people feel they’re going to lose something deeply important, it triggers an emotional response because change feels like a threat. It’s not an excuse for my counterproductive behavior, but explains why I acted out like I did.

Startup CEOs need to think about these transitions from day one and consider how to address the real sense of loss these transitions mean to early employees.

Loss of status? It’s almost impossible to take away a title from someone, give it to someone else and still retain that employee. Think hard about whether titles need to be formal (VP of Engineering, VP of Marketing, VP of Sales, etc.) before the company finds product/market fit and/or tens of people – as you can almost guarantee that these people won’t have those roles and titles when you scale.

Loss of Certainty? Startups and VC’s have historically operated on the “I’ll deal with this later” principle in letting early employees know what happens as the company scales. The common wisdom is that no one would want to work like crazy knowing that they might not be the ones to lead as the company grows. I call this the Moses-problem – you work for years to get the tribe to the promised land – but you’re not allowed to cross over. The company needs to give formal recognition for those individuals who brought the tribe to the promised land.

Loss of Autonomy? This is the time you and your employees get to have a discussion about the next steps in their career. Do they want to be an individual contributor? Manager of people and process? Special projects? These shouldn’t be random assignments but instead, offer a roadmap of possible choices and directions.

Loss of Community? Your original hires embody the company culture. Unless you have them capture the unique aspects of the culture, it will become diluted and disappear among the new hires. Declare them cultural co-founders. Help them understand the community is growing and they’re the ambassadors. Have them formalize it as part of a now needed on-boarding process as the company grows. And most importantly, make sure that they are celebrated as the team that got the company to where it is now.

Loss of Fairness? Just telling employees “a change is going to come” it is not sufficient. What are the new skills needed when you scale from Search to Build to Grow – from tens to hundreds and then thousands of people? How can your existing employees gain those new skills?

Lessons Learned

  • VC’s, Founders and CEOs now recognize that startups grow through different stages: Search, Build and Grow
    • They recognize that employees need different skills at each stage
    • And that some of the original employees won’t grow into the next stage
  • But while these changes make rational sense to the CEO and the board, to early employees these changes feel like a real and tangible personal loss
    • Loss of Status and Identity
    • Loss of Community
    • Loss of Autonomy
    • Loss of Certainty
    • Loss of Fairness
  • CEOs need to put processes in places to acknowledge and deal with the real sense of loss
    • These will keep early employees motivated – and retained
    • And build a stronger company
  • For employees, how you handle change will affect the trajectory of your career and possibly your net worth

This post appeared in AngelList

Filed under: Family/Career/Culture, MIPS Computers | 17 Comments »

Why Founders Need a Moral Compass

Posted on October 26, 2018 by steve blank

I’ve been thinking why the ethical boundaries of todays founder/VC interactions feel so different then they did when I was an entrepreneur. I’ve written about the root causes in an HBR article here and an expanded version here. Worth a read.

Stanford eCorner captured a few minutes of what I’ve been thinking in the video below.

If you can’t see the video click here

Filed under: Family/Career/Culture | 4 Comments »

This 1 Piece of Advice Could Make Or Break Your Career

Posted on July 9, 2018 by steve blank

There’s no handbook on how to evaluate and process “suggestions” and “advice” from a boss or a mentor. But how you choose to act on these recommendations can speed up your learning and make or break your career. Here’s what to keep in mind:

I had a team of students working on an arcane customer problem. While they were quickly coming up to speed, I suggested that they talk to someone who I knew was an expert in the area and could help them learn much faster. In fact, starting in the second week of the class, I suggested the same person several times – one-on-one, in class and in writing. Each time the various team members smiled, nodded and said, “Yes, we’ll get right on it.”  Finally, eight weeks later when they were about to fly across the country to meet the customer, I reminded them again.

When they returned from the trip, I asked if the advisor I suggested was helpful.

I was a bit surprised when they replied, “Oh, we’ve been trying to connect with him for a while and he never responded.”  So, I asked:

Team,
As per our conversation about the lack of response from your advisor John Doe -please forward me copies of the emails you have sent to him.

Thanks

Steve

The reply I received was disappointing — but not totally surprising.

Dear Steve, 

Unfortunately, I believe our team has painted the wrong picture due to miscommunication on our part. It was our responsibility to reach out to John Doe, but we failed to do so.

We did not attempt to reach out to him up until Week 8 before our flight, but the email bounced. We got caught up in work on the trip and did not follow-up. What we should have done was to clarify the email address with our Teaching Assistant and attempt to contact him again.

Best regards,

Taylor

Extra credit for finally owning that they screwed up – but there was more to it.

Combine Outside Advice with Your Own Insights
Upon reflection I realized that this student team was missing a learning opportunity. They were soon heading for the real world, and they had no idea how to evaluate and process “suggestions” and “advice.”  Ironically, given they were really smart and in a world-class university, they were confusing “smart” with “I can figure it all out by myself.”

Throughout my entrepreneurial career I was constantly bombarded by advice – from bosses, mentors, friends, investors, et al. I was lucky enough to have mentors who took an interest in my career, and as a young entrepreneur, I tried to pay attention to what they were trying to tell me. (Coming into my first startup from four years in the military I didn’t have the advantage of thinking I knew it all.) It made me better – I learned faster than having to acquire every bit of knowledge from scratch and I could combine the data coming from others with the insights I had.

Have a Process to Evaluate Suggestions and Advice
Here was my response to my student team:

Dear Team:

Throughout your work career you’ll be getting tons of suggestions and advice; from mentors – people you don’t work for but who care about your career and from your direct boss and others up your reporting chain.

  1. Treat advice and suggestions as a gift, not a distraction
    • Assume someone has just given you a package wrapped in a bow with your name on it.
    • Then think of how they’ll feel when you ignore it and toss it aside.
  2. When you’re working at full speed just trying to get your job done, it’s pretty easy to assume that advice/suggestions from others are just diversions. That’s a mistake. At times following up on them may make or break a career and/or a relationship.
    • The first time your boss or mentor will assume you were too busy to follow up.
    • The second time your boss will begin to question your judgment. Your mentor is going to question your willingness to be coached.
    • The third time you ignore suggestions/advice from your boss is a career-limiting move. And if from a mentor, you’ve likely damaged or ended the relationship.
  3. Everyone likes to offer “suggestions” and “advice.” Think of these as falling into four categories:
    • Some bosses/mentors offer “suggestions” and “advice” because it makes them feel important.
    • Others have a set of contacts or insights they are willing to share with you because they believe these might be useful to you.
    • A few bosses/mentors have pattern-recognition skills. They’ve recognized the project you’re working on or problem you’re trying to solve could be helped by connecting with a specific person/group or by listening to how it was solved previously.
    • A very small subset of bosses/mentors has extracted some best practices and/or wisdom from those patterns. These can give you shortcuts to the insights they’ve taken years to learn.
  4. Early in your career it’s hard to know whether a suggestion/advice is valuable enough to spend time following up. Here’s what I suggest:
    • Start with “Thanks for the suggestion.”
    • Next, it’s OK to ask, “Help me understand why is this important? Why should I talk to them? What should I learn?” This will help you figure out which category of advice you’re getting.If it’s a direct boss and others up your reporting chain, ask, “How should I prioritize this? Does it require immediate action?” (And it most cases it doesn’t matter what category it’s in, just do it.)
    • Always report back to whoever offered you the advice/suggestion to share what you learned. Thank them.

If you open yourself to outside advice, you’ll find people interested in the long-term development of your career – these are your career mentors. Unlike coaching, there’s no specific agenda or goal but mentor relationships can result in a decades-long dialog of continual learning. What makes these relationships a mentorship is this: you have to give as good as you are getting. While you’ll be learning from them – and their years of experience and expertise – what you need to give back is equally important – offering fresh insights to their data.

If your goal is to be a founder, having a network of mentors/advisors means that not only will you be up to date on current technology, markets or trends, you’ll be able to recognize patterns and bring new perspectives that might be basis for your next startup.

Lessons Learned

  • Suggestions/advice at work are not distractions that can be ignored
    • Understand the type of suggestions/advice you’re getting (noise, contacts, patterns, insights)
    • Understand why the advice is being given
    • Agree on the priority in following it up
  • Not understanding how to respond to advice/suggestions can limit your career
  • Advice is a kickstarter for your own insights and a gateway for mentorship
  • Treat advice and suggestions as a gift, not a distraction

Filed under: Family/Career/Culture, Teaching | 13 Comments »

Why Entrepreneurs Start Companies Rather Than Join Them

Posted on April 11, 2018 by steve blank

If you asked me why I gravitated to startups rather than work in a large company I would have answered at various times: “I want to be my own boss.” “I love risk.” “I want flexible work hours.” “I want to work on tough problems that matter.” “I have a vision and want to see it through.” “I saw a better opportunity and grabbed it. …”

It never crossed my mind that I gravitated to startups because I thought more of my abilities than the value a large company would put on them. At least not consciously. But that’s the conclusion of a provocative research paper, Asymmetric Information and Entrepreneurship, that explains a new theory of why some people choose to be entrepreneurs. The authors’ conclusion — Entrepreneurs think they are better than their resumes show and realize they can make more money by going it alone.  And in most cases, they are right.

I’ll summarize the paper’s conclusions, then share a few thoughts about what they might mean – for companies, entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial education. (By the way, as you read the conclusions keep in mind the authors are not talking just about high-tech entrepreneurs. They are talking about everyone who chooses to be self-employed – from a corner food vendor without a high school diploma to a high-tech founder with a PhD in Computer Science from Stanford.)

The authors’ research came from following 12,686 people over 30+ years. They found:

  1. Signaling. When you look for a job you “signal” your ability to employers via a resume with a list of your educational qualifications and work history. Signaling is a fancy academic term to describe how one party (in this case someone who wants a job) credibly conveys information to another party (a potential employer).
  2. Capable. People choose to be entrepreneurs when they feel that they are more capable than what employers can tell from their resume or an interview. So, entrepreneurs start ventures because they can’t signal their worth to potential employers.
  3. Better Pay. Overall, when people choose entrepreneurship they earn 7% more than they would have in a corporate job. That’s because in companies pay is usually set by observable signals (your education and experience/work history).
  4. Less Predictable Pay. But the downside of being an entrepreneur is that as a group their pay is more variable – some make less than if they worked at a company, some much more.
  5. Smarter. Entrepreneurs score higher on cognitive ability tests than their educational credentials would predict. And their cognitive ability is higher than those with the same educational and work credentials who choose to work in a company.
  6. Immigrants and Funding. Signaling (or the lack of it) may explain why some groups such as immigrants, with less credible signals to existing companies (unknown schools, no license to practice, unverifiable job history, etc.) tend to gravitate toward entrepreneurship. And why funding from families and friends is a dominant source of financing for early-stage ventures (because friends and family know an entrepreneur’s ability better than any resume can convey).
  7. Entrepreneurs defer getting more formal education because they correctly expect their productivity will be higher than the market can infer from just their educational qualifications. (There are no signals for entrepreneurial skills.)

Lemons Versus Cherries. The most provocative conclusion in the paper is that asymmetric information about ability leads existing companies to employ only “lemons,” relatively unproductive workers. The talented and more productive choose entrepreneurship. (Asymmetric Information is when one party has more or better information than the other.) In this case the entrepreneurs know something potential employers don’t – that nowhere on their resume does it show resiliency, curiosity, agility, resourcefulness, pattern recognition, tenacity and having a passion for products.
This implication, that entrepreneurs are, in fact, “cherries” contrasts with a large body of literature in social science, which says that the entrepreneurs are the “lemons”— those who cannot find, cannot hold, or cannot stand “real jobs.”

So, what to make of all this?
If the authors are right, the way we signal ability (resumes listing education and work history) is not only a poor predictor of success, but has implications for existing companies, startups, education, and public policy that require further thought and research.

Companies: In the 20thcentury when companies competed with peers with the same business model, they wanted employees to help them execute current business models (whether it was working on an assembly line or writing code supporting or extending current products). There was little loss when they missed hiring employees who had entrepreneurial skills. However, in the 21stcentury companies face continuous disruption; now they’re looking for employees to help them act entrepreneurial.  Yet their recruiting and interviewing processes – which define signals they look for – are still focused on execution not entrepreneurial skills.

Surprisingly, the company that best epitomized this was not some old-line manufacturing company but Google. When Marissa Mayer ran products at Google the New York Times  described her hiring process, “More often than not, she relies on charts, graphs and quantitative analysis as a foundation for a decision, particularly when it comes to evaluating people…At a recent personnel meeting, she homes in on grade-point averages and SAT scores to narrow a list of candidates, many having graduated from Ivy League schools, …One candidate got a C in macroeconomics. “That’s troubling to me,” Ms. Mayer says. “Good students are good at all things.”

Really.  What a perfect example of adverse signaling. No wonder the most successful Google products, other than search, have been acquisitions of startups not internal products: YouTube, Android, DoubleClick, Keyhole (Google Maps), Waze were started and run by entrepreneurs. The type of people Google and Marissa Mayer wouldn’t and didn’t hire started the companies they bought.

Entrepreneurship. When I shared the paper withTina Seelig at Stanford she asked, “If schools provided better ways to signal someone’s potential to employers, will this lead to less entrepreneurship?”  Interesting question.

Imagine if in a perfect world corporate recruiters found a way to identify the next Steve Jobs, Elon Musks, or Larry Ellisons. Would the existing corporate processes, procedures and business models crush their innovative talents, or would they steer the large companies into a new renaissance?

The Economic Environment. So, how much of signaling (hiring only by resume qualifications) is influenced by the economic environment? One could assume that in a period of low unemployment, it will be easier to get a traditional job, which would lead to fewer startups and explain why great companies are often founded during a downturn. Those who can’t get a traditional job start their own venture. Yet other public policies come into play. Between the late 1930s and the 1970s the U.S. tax rate for individuals making over $100,000 was 70% and 90% (taxes on capital gains fluctuated between 20% and 25%.) Venture capital flourished when the tax rates plummeted in the late 1970s. Was entrepreneurship stifled by high personal income taxes? And did it flourish only when entrepreneurs saw the opportunity to make a lot more money on their own?

Leaving a Company. Some new ventures are started by people who leave big companies to strike out on their own – meaning they weren’t trying to find employment in a corporation, they were trying to get away from it.  While starting your own company may look attractive from inside a company, the stark reality of risking one’s livelihood, financial stability, family, etc., is a tough bar to cross.  What motivates these people to leave the relative comfort of a steady corporate income and strike out on their own?  Is it the same reason – their company doesn’t value their skills for innovation and is just measuring them on execution? Or something else?

Entrepreneurial Education. Is entrepreneurship for everyone? Should we expect that we can teach entrepreneurship as a mandatory class? Or is it calling? Increasing the number of new ventures will only generate aggregate wealth if those who start firms are truly more productive as entrepreneurs.

Lessons Learned

  • Entrepreneurs start their own companies because existing companies don’t value the skills that don’t fit on a resume
  • The most talented people choose entrepreneurship (Lemons versus Cherries)
  • Read the paper and let me know what you think

 

Filed under: Corporate/Gov't Innovation, Family/Career/Culture | 30 Comments »

The Difference Between Innovators and Entrepreneurs

Posted on April 3, 2018 by steve blank

I just received a thank-you note from a student who attended a fireside chat I held at the ranch. Something I said seemed to inspire her:

“I always thought you needed to be innovative, original to be an entrepreneur. Now I have a different perception. Entrepreneurs are the ones that make things happen. (That) takes focus, diligence, discipline, flexibility and perseverance. They can take an innovative idea and make it impactful. … successful entrepreneurs are also ones who take challenges in stride, adapt and adjust plans to accommodate whatever problems do come up.”

Over the last decade I’ve watched hundreds of my engineering students as well as ~1,500 of the country’s best scientists in the National Science Foundation Innovation Corps, cycle through the latest trends in startups: social media, new materials, big data, medical devices, diagnostics, digital health, therapeutics, drones, robotics, bitcoin, machine learning, etc.  Some of these world-class innovators get recruited by large companies like professional athletes, with paychecks to match. Others join startups to strike out on their own. But what I’ve noticed is that it’s rare that the smartest technical innovator is the most successful entrepreneur.

Being a domain expert in a technology field rarely makes you competent in commerce. Building a company takes very different skills than building a neural net in Python or decentralized blockchain apps in Ethereum.

Nothing makes me happier than to see my students getting great grades (and as they can tell you, I make them very work hard for them). But I remind them that customers don’t ask for your transcript. Until we start giving grades for resiliency, curiosity, agility, resourcefulness, pattern recognition, tenacity and having a passion for products and customers, great grades and successful entrepreneurs have at best a zero correlation (and anecdotal evidence suggests that the correlation may actually be negative.)

Most great technology startups – Oracle, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Tesla – were built by a team led by an entrepreneur.

It doesn’t mean that if you have technical skills you can’t build a successful company. It does mean that success in building a company that scales depends on finding product/market fit, enough customers, enough financing, enough great employees, distribution channels, etc. These are entrepreneurial skills you need to rapidly acquire or find a co-founder who already has them.

Lessons Learned

  • Entrepreneurship is a calling, not a job.
  • A calling is something you feel you need to follow, it gives you direction and purpose but no guarantee of a paycheck.
  • It’s what allows you to create a missionary zeal to recruit others, get customers to buy into a vision and gets VC’s to finance a set of slides.
  • It’s what makes you get up and do it again when customers say no, when investors laugh at your idea or when your rocket fails to make it to space.

Filed under: Family/Career/Culture, Teaching, Technology | 20 Comments »

Leadership is More Than a Memo

Posted on March 19, 2018 by steve blank

I just read Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys’ Club of Silicon Valley. It was both eye-opening and cringe-worthy. The book explores the role of gender in the tech industry – at startups and venture capital firms – and the interaction between men and women in the two. While Silicon Valley has grown to have global influence, in many ways the cultural leadership from the venture community has dramatically shrunk in the last decade. Chasing deal flow has resulted in many VCs leading the race to the bottom in startup ethical behavior.

Among other things the book reminded me how important leadership is in setting startup culture – both consciously and implicitly.

Here was the day I got that lesson.

—-

With the reckless and naïve abandon of founders who had no clue what they were about to tackle, we had just started Ardent, a supercomputer company. Ben Wegbreit, the VP of Engineering (one of my mentors and then co-founder of Epiphany), broke his foot skiing just as the company started. So every day Ben hobbled into our very small office nattily dressed in his suit but wearing sneakers over his cast. (Yes, in the dim past of Silicon Valley the execs really wore suits.)

At first the company just consisted of the founders, but Ben soon started to hire his engineering team. Since this was the pre-Hoodie era, they interviewed in various types of then engineering attire – most with jeans, some with khakis, etc. (And back then they were all men.) But as each engineer was hired and started work I began to notice that after a few days they started to wear suits… wait for it… with sneakers. Obviously, this was a pretty bizarre fashion statement – and no one had sent out a memo announcing this as the engineering dress code. After six weeks of furious staffing and recruiting Ben had a team of 10 or so engineers and I have vivid memories of all of them trying to look like Ben.

Yet Ben was oblivious to the suit-and-sneaker clone army he had created.

With my now decades of hindsight, I realize I should have just let the engineers know that Ben had broken his foot and there was no attempt at sartorial innovation. But I remember just being mesmerized by this lesson in implicit leadership unfolding before me.

I knew that the cast was going to come off, and Ben would show up one day wearing regular shoes. What I didn’t know was what would happen to the engineering dress code then– would they all then adopt suits and shoes? Drop the suits all together? Keep their suit and sneaker style?

And how long would the change in engineering dress take? The next day?  A week?

And then it happened. Ben showed up wearing a suit and … shoes.

I’m sure engineering productivity took a big hit that week as cognitive dissonance set in.  Some of the engineers literally went home at lunch and changed – some into shoes, some dropping the whole suit.  Most started wearing regular shoes the next day, and by the second day no one was wearing sneakers.

Decades later Mark Zuckerberg would run the experiment at scale.

Lessons Learned

  • Culture gets set both explicitly with rules and implicitly by example
  • The bro culture of the Valley is a failure of leadership – by VC’s who should know better and CEO’s who need to be taught
  • Ironically, it would take a Los Angeles VC, Mark Suster at Upfront Ventures and the Inclusion Clause to lead the change in venture capital culture

Filed under: Family/Career/Culture | 11 Comments »

Janesville – A Story About the Rest of America

Posted on February 2, 2018 by steve blank

I just read book – Janesville – that reminded me again of life outside the bubble.

Janesville, tells the story of laid-off factory workers of a General Motors factory that’s never going to reopen. It’s a story about a Midwest town and the type of people I knew and worked alongside.

When I got out of the Air Force after Vietnam, I lived in Michigan and I installed process control systems in automobile assembly plants and steel mills across the industrial heart of the Midwest. I got to see the peak of America’s manufacturing prowess in the 1970s, when we actually made things – before we shipped the factories and jobs overseas. I hung out with the guys who worked there, went bowling and shooting with them, complained about the same things, wives, girlfriends, jobs, the union and bosses, and shared their same concerns. Janesville is their story.

On the surface the book is an incredibly well written narrative over the course of five years, from 2008 to 2013, that connects the laid off auto workers, job center retraining, union organizers, community and business leaders, and politicians. Five stars for the reporting.

But what makes the book great is that the story is deeper than just the people it follows. On closer reading it busts the shared delusions about our economic system that requires our faith in order for it to survive.

First, America was built on workers who believed that their hard work would allow their children to have opportunities to do better. The hard truth is that part of the Janesville story is about a generation of blue collar workers who grew up thinking that a factory job wasn’t just an entry into the economy, but instead was a multi-generational entitlement. They believed the posters that said, “Our employees are our greatest asset” and assumed it meant forever – instead of reading the fine print which said, “Until we can reduce our labor costs by moving your jobs overseas.”

To be clear it doesn’t mean they didn’t work hard or that they deserved what happened to them. Far from it. But it does mean, that even as evidence was piling up around them that this couldn’t last, they took for granted that a high-paying factory job was a never ending economic cornucopia. The grim reality is that the 50 years of post WWII factory work in GM and other places was a golden age of blue collar jobs – in the U.S. – it’s gone and not coming back. 

Second, the jobs aren’t coming back because while our economy has continued to grow, in the name of corporate efficiency and profitability we’ve closed the shipyards and factories and moved those jobs overseas. In board rooms across the country we traded jobs for short-term corporate profits – while selling out the very people who believed they had a social contract with their company – and their country. And while we gave those policies polite names like globalization and outsourcing, the consequences have wreaked havoc on towns like Janesville. Oh, and the jobs we moved overseas, or never even attempted to build here, (think iPhones)? They helped build the blue collar working class in China and India.

And with campaign donations spread equally, both parties supported this exodus and no one in the government stood in their way – in fact, they encouraged it. The result was that the bulk of those corporate profits have ended up in the pockets of the very affluent. The contrast is pretty bitter in towns like Janesville where income inequality stares you in the face. When towns do recover, the new jobs are most often at a fraction of the salary the closed factories once offered. The level of despair and anger of the workers the companies and politicians and the rest of the country abandoned is high. The Janesville’s across the U.S. really didn’t care about Hacker News, TechCrunch, etc, Hollywood gossip in Variety, or the latest financial moves in the Wall Street Journal. They wanted to hear people talking to them about how to get their lives back. They voted their interests in 2016. 

Third, when those jobs moved in the name of maximizing profits, no one (other than unions) pointed out that all the supporting jobs would disappear as well. Not only the obvious ones like machine tool makers, direct suppliers, etc. but that the supporting service jobs would also disappear in the community. Restaurants, movie theaters, real estate agents, etc.

Fourth, this was the story of just one town and one factory. If we believe any of the predictions of autonomous vehicles and disruption in the trucking business, and machine learning disrupting other industries, Janesville is just the harbinger of much larger economic upheavals to come.

Fifth, and a critical insight that I almost missed, because it was buried in Appendix 2, (and a real surprise to me) was that, “laid-off workers who went back to school were less likely to have a job after they retrained than those who did not go to school.” Wow. Talk about burying the lead. Skill retraining is a core belief of any economic recovery plan. Yet the data the author and her associated researchers gathered shows that it’s not true. People who went through skills retraining were worse off than those who went out on their own.

Sixth, this means that in spite of their well-meaning efforts, both the jobs training people and the local boosters of “Janesville will rise again” were actually doing the laid-off workers a massive disservice. The very things they were advocating were not going to help this generation of laid-off workers. I wonder if they’ve come to grips with that.

Seventh, This raises the question of what kind of skills training, if any, should be given to laid-off workers when the factory shuts down in a one-company town. My conclusion from the narrative that followed the families is that they would have been better served by basic training in the reality of their new economic context, financial management and new life skills. For example, teaching a few days of, “Lessons learned from families in other one-industry cities” and “the mortgage meltdown – how to get out from underneath an underwater mortgage,” and practical job search tips outside their community, along with organized trips to other cities and paid-for car pools for they gypsy workers commuting to far off GM plants. In addition, skills training in resilience, agility, etc. would have provided these workers with an education and relevant tools for surviving in the new economy.

A great book that made me sad, angry and make me think long about the consequences of not having a national industrial policy. And why by using the fig leaf of “maximize shareholder value” corporations and financial institutions have set it by default.

It truly feels like a return to the Gilded Age.

Worth a read.

Filed under: Family/Career/Culture | 25 Comments »

Why Uber is The Revenge of the Founders

Posted on October 24, 2017 by steve blank

A version of this article is in the Harvard Business Review

Uber, Zenefits, Tanium, Lending Club CEOs of companies with billion dollar market caps have been in the news – and not in a good way.  This seems to be occurring more and more.  Why do these founders get to stay around?

Because the balance of power has dramatically shifted from investors to founders.

Here’s why it generates bad CEO behavior.

—

Unremarked and unheralded, the balance of power between startup CEOs and their investors has radically changed:

  • IPOs/M&A without a profit (or at times revenue) have become the norm
  • The startup process has become demystified – information is everywhere
  • Technology cycles have become a treadmill, and for startups to survive they need to be on a continuous innovation cycle
  • VCs competing for unicorn investments have given founders control of the board

20th Century Tech Liquidity = Initial Public Offering
In the 20th century tech companies and their investors made money through an Initial Public Offering (IPO). To turn your company’s stock into cash, you engaged a top-notch investment bank (Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs) and/or their Silicon Valley compatriots (Hambrecht & Quist, Montgomery Securities, Robertson Stephens).

Typically, this caliber of bankers wouldn’t talk to you unless your company had five profitable quarters of increasing revenue. And you had to convince the bankers that you had a credible chance of having four more profitable quarters after your IPO.  None of this was law, and nothing in writing required this; this was just how these firms did business to protect their large institutional customers who would buy the stock.

Twenty-five years ago, to go public you had to sell stuff – not just acquire users or have freemium products. People had to actually pay you for your product. This required a repeatable and scalable sales process, which required a professional sales staff and a product stable enough that customers wouldn’t return it.

Hire a CEO to Go Public
More often than not, a founding CEO lacked the experience to do these things. The very skills that got the company started were now handicaps to its growth. A founder’s lack of credibility/experience in growing and managing a large company hindered a company that wanted to go public. In the 20th century, founding CEOs were most often removed early and replaced by “suits” — experienced executives from large companies parachuted in by the investors after product/market fit to scale sales and take the company public.

The VCs would hire a CEO with a track record who looked and acted like the type of CEO Wall Street bankers expected to see in large companies.

A CEO brought in from a large company came with all the big company accoutrements – org charts, HR departments with formal processes and procedure handbooks, formal waterfall engineering methodology, sales compensation plans, etc. — all great things when you are executing and scaling a known business model. But the CEO’s arrival meant the days of the company as a startup and its culture of rapid innovation were over.

Board Control
For three decades (1978-2008), investors controlled the board. This era was a “buyer’s market” – there were more good companies looking to get funded than there were VCs. Therefore, investors could set the terms. A pre-IPO board usually had two founders, two VCs and one “independent” member. (The role of the independent member was typically to tell the founding CEO that the VCs were hiring a new CEO.)

Replacing the founder when the company needed to scale was almost standard operating procedure. However, there was no way for founders to share this information with other founders (this was life before the Internet, incubators and accelerators). While to VCs this was just a necessary step in the process of taking a company public, time and again first-time founders were shocked, surprised and angry when it happened. If the founder was lucky, he got to stay as chairman or CTO. If he wasn’t, he told stories of how “VCs stole my company.”

To be fair there wasn’t much of an alternative. Most founders were woefully unequipped to run companies that scaled.  It’s hard to imagine, but in the 20th century there were no startup blogs or books on startups to read, and business schools (the only places teaching entrepreneurship) believed the best thing they could teach startups was how to write a business plan. In the 20th century the only way for founders to get trained was to apprentice at another startup. And there they would watch the canonical model in action as an experienced executive replaced the founder.

Technology Cycles Measured in Years
Today, we take for granted new apps and IoT devices appearing seemingly overnight and reaching tens of millions of users – and just as quickly falling out of favor. But in the 20th century, dominated by hardware and software, technology swings inside an existing market happened slowly — taking years, not months. And while new markets were created (i.e. the desktop PC market), they were relatively infrequent.

This meant that disposing of the founder, and the startup culture responsible for the initial innovation, didn’t hurt a company’s short-term or even mid-term prospects.  A company could go public on its initial wave of innovation, then coast on its current technology for years. In this business environment, hiring a new CEO who had experience growing a company around a single technical innovation was a rational decision for venture investors.

However, almost like clockwork, the inevitable next cycle of technology innovation would catch these now-public startups and their boards by surprise. Because the new CEO had built a team capable of and comfortable with executing an existing business model, the company would fail or get acquired. Since the initial venture investors had cashed out by selling their stock over the first few years, they had no long-term interest in this outcome.

Not every startup ended up this way. Bill Hewlett and David Packard got to learn on the job. So did Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore at Intel. But the majority of technology companies that went public circa 1979-2009, with professional VCs as their investors, faced this challenge.

Founders in the Driver’s Seat
So how did we go from VCs discarding founders to founders now running large companies? Seven major changes occurred:

  1. It became OK to go public or get acquired without profit (or even revenue)

In 1995 Netscape changed the rules about going public. A little more than a year old, the company and its 24-year-old founder hired an experienced CEO, but then did something no other tech company had ever done – it went public with no profit. Laugh all you want, but at the time this was unheard of for a tech company. Netscape’s blow-out IPO launched the dot-com boom. Suddenly tech companies were valued on what they might someday deliver. (Today’s version is Tesla – now more valuable than Ford.)

This means that liquidity for today’s investors often doesn’t require the long, patient scaling of a profitable company. While 20th century metrics were revenue and profit, today it’s common for companies to get acquired for their user base. (Facebook’s ~$20 billion acquisition of WhatsApp, a 5-year-old startup that had $10 million in revenue, made no sense until you realized that Facebook was paying to acquire 300 million new users.)

2.     Information is everywhere
In the 20th century learning the best practices of a startup CEO was limited by your coffee bandwidth. That is, you learned best practices from your board and by having coffee with other, more experienced CEOs. Today, every founder can read all there is to know about running a startup online. Incubators and accelerators like Y-Combinator have institutionalized experiential training in best practices (product/market fit, pivots, agile development, etc.); provide experienced and hands-on mentorship; and offer a growing network of founding CEOs. The result is that today’s CEOs have exponentially more information than their predecessors. This is ironically part of the problem. Reading about, hearing about and learning about how to build a successful company is not the same as having done it. As we’ll see, information does not mean experience, maturity or wisdom.

3.     Technology cycles have compressed
The pace of technology change in the second decade of the 21st century is relentless. It’s hard to think of a hardware/software or life science technology that dominates its space for years. That means new companies are at risk of continuous disruption before their investors can cash out.

To stay in business in the 21st century, startups  do four things their 20th century counterparts didn’t:

  • A company is no longer built on a single innovation. It needs to be continuously innovating – and who best to do that? The founders.
  • To continually innovate, companies need to operate at startup speed and cycle time much longer their 20th century counterparts did. This requires retaining a startup culture for years – and who best to do that? The founders.
  • Continuous innovation requires the imagination and courage to challenge the initial hypotheses of your current business model (channel, cost, customers, products, supply chain, etc.) This might mean competing with and if necessary killing your own products. (Think of the relentless cycle of iPod then iPhone innovation.) Professional CEOs who excel at growing existing businesses find this extremely hard.  So who best to do it? The founders.
  • Finally, 20th century startups fired the innovators/founders when they scaled. Today, they need these visionaries to stay with the company to keep up with the innovation cycle. And given that acquisition is a potential for many startups, corporate acquirers often look for startups that can help them continually innovate by creating new products and markets.

4.     Founder-friendly VCs
A 20th century VC was likely to have an MBA or finance background. A few, like John Doerr at Kleiner Perkins and Don Valentine at Sequoia, had operating experience in a large tech company, but none had actually started a company. Out of the dot-com rubble at the turn of the 21st century, new VCs entered the game – this time with startup experience. The watershed moment was in 2009 when the co-founder of Netscape, Marc Andreessen, formed a venture firm and started to invest in founders with the goal of teaching them how to be CEOs for the long term. Andreessen realized that the game had changed. Continuous innovation was here to stay and only founders – not hired execs – could play and win.  Founder-friendly became a competitive advantage for his firm Andreessen Horowitz. In a seller’s market, other VCs adopted this “invest in the founder” strategy.

5.     Unicorns Created A Seller’s Market
Private companies with market capitalization over a billion dollars – called Unicorns – were unheard of in the first decade of the 21st century. Today there are close to 200. VCs with large funds (~>$200M) need investments in Unicorns to make their own business model work.

While the number of traditional VC firms have shrunk since the peak of the dot com bubble, the number of funds chasing deals have grown. Angel and Seed Funds have usurped the role of what used to be Series A investments. And in later stage rounds an explosion of corporate VCs and hedge funds now want in to the next unicorns.

A rough calculation says that a VC firm needs to return four times its fund size to be thought of as a great firm. Therefore, a VC with a $250M fund (5x the size of an average VC fund 40 years ago) would need to return $1 billion. But VCs own only ~15% of a startup when it gets sold/goes public (the numbers vary widely). Just doing the math, $1 billion/15% means that the VC fund needs $6.6 billion of exits to make that 4x return. The cold hard math of “large funds need large exits” is why VCs have been trapped into literally begging to get into unicorn deals.

6.    Founders Take Money Off the Table
In the 20th century the only way the founder made any money (other than their salary) was when the company went public or got sold. The founders along with all the other employees would vest their stock over 4 years (earning 1/48 a month). They had to hang around at least a year to get the first quarter of their stock (this was called the “cliff”).  Today, these are no longer hard and fast rules. Some founders have three-year vesting. Some have no cliff. And some have specific deals about what happens if they’re fired, demoted or the company is sold.

In the last decade, as the time startups have spent staying private has grown longer, secondary markets – where people can buy and sell pre-IPO stock — have emerged. This often is a way for founders and early employees to turn some of their stock into cash before an IPO or sale of company.

One last but very important change that guarantees founders can cash out early is “founder friendly stock.”  This allows founder(s) to sell part of their stock (~10 to 33%) in a future round of financing. This means the company doesn’t get money from new investors, but instead it goes to the founder.  The rationale is that since companies are taking longer to achieve liquidity, giving the founders some returns early makes them more willing to stick around and better able to make bets for the long-term health of the company.

7.   Founders take Control of the Board
With more VCs chasing a small pool of great deals, and all VCs professing to be the founder’s best friend, there’s an arms race to be the friendliest. Almost overnight the position of venture capitalist dictating the terms of the deal has disappeared (at least for “hot” deals).

Traditionally, in exchange for giving the company money, investors would receive preferred stock, and founders and employees owned common stock. Preferred stock had specific provisions that gave investors control over when to sell the company or take it public, hiring and firing the founder etc.  VCs are giving up these rights to get to invest in unicorns.

Founders are taking control of the board by making the common stock the founders own more powerful. Some startups create two classes of common stock with each share of the founders’ class of common stock having 10 – 20 votes. Founders can now outvote the preferred stock holders (the investors). Another method for founder control has the board seats held by the common shareholders (the founders) count 2-5 times more than the investors’ preferred shares. Finally, investors are giving up protective voting control provisions such as when and if to raise more money, the right to invest in subsequent rounds, who to raise it from and how/when to sell the company or take it public. This means liquidity for the investors is now beholden to the whims of the founders. And because they control votes on the board, the founders can’t be removed. This is a remarkable turnabout.

In some cases, 21st century VCs have been relegated to passive investors/board observers.

And this advent of founders’ control of their company’s board is a key reason why many of these large technology companies look like they’re out of control.  They are.

The Gift/Curse of Visionary CEOs
Startups run by visionaries break rules, flout the law and upend the status quo (Apple, Uber, AirBnB, Tesla, Theranos, etc.). Doing something that other people consider insanity/impossible requires equal parts narcissism and a messianic view of technological transformation.

Bad CEO behavior and successful startups have always overlapped. Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Tom Seibel, etc. all had the gift/curse of a visionary CEO – they could see the future as clearly as others could see the present. Because they saw it with such clarity, the reality of having to depend on other people to build something revolutionary was frustrating. And woe to the employee who got in their way of delivering the future.

Visionary CEOs have always been the face of their company, but today with social media, it happens faster with a much larger audience; boards now must consider what would happen to the valuation of the company without the founder.

With founders now in control of unicorn boards, with money in their pockets and the press heralding them as geniuses transforming the world, founder hubris and bad behavior should be no surprise.  Before social media connected billions of people, bad behavior stayed behind closed doors. In today’s connected social world, instant messages and shared videos have broken down the doors.

The Revenge of the Founders – Founding CEOs Acting Badly
So why do boards of unicorns like Uber, Zenefits, Tanium, Lending Club let their CEOs stay?

Before the rapid rise of Unicorns, when boards were still in control, they “encouraged” the hiring of “adult supervision” of the founders. Three years after Google started they hired Eric Schmidt as CEO. Schmidt had been the CEO of Novell and previously CTO of Sun Microsystems. Four years after Facebook started they hired Sheryl Sandberg as the COO. Sandberg had been the vice president of global online sales and operations. Today unicorn boards have a lot less leverage.

  1. VCs sit on 5 to 10 or more boards. That means most VCs have very little insight into the day-to-day operation of a startup. Bad behavior often goes unnoticed until it does damage.
  2. The traditional checks and balances provided by a startup board have been abrogated in exchange for access to a hot deal.
  3. As VC incentives are aligned to own as much of a successful company as possible, getting into a conflict with a founder who can now prevent VC’s from investing in the next round is not in the VCs interest.
  4. Financial and legal control of startups has given way to polite moral suasion as founders now control unicorns.
  5. As long as the CEO’s behavior affects their employees not their customers or valuation, VCs often turn a blind eye.
  6. Not only is there no financial incentive for the board to control unicorn CEO behavior, often there is a downside in trying to do so

The surprise should not be how many unicorn CEOs act badly, but how many still behave well.

Lesson Learned

  • VC/Founder relationship have radically changed
  • VC “Founder Friendly” strategies have helped create 200+ unicorns
  • Some VC’s are reaping the downside of the unintended consequences of “Founder Friendly”
  • Until the consequences exceed the rewards they will continue to be Founder Friendly

Filed under: Corporate/Gov't Innovation, Family/Career/Culture, Harvard Business Review, Venture Capital | 4 Comments »

Working Outside the Tech Bubble

Posted on August 12, 2017 by steve blank

Annual note to self – most of the world exists outside the tech bubble.

—–

We have a summer home in New England in a semi-rural area, just ~10,000 people in town, with a potato farm across the street. Drive down the road and you can see the tall stalks of corn waving on other farms. Most people aren’t in tech or law or teaching in universities; they fall solidly in what is called working-class. They work as electricians, carpenters, plumbers, in hospitals, restaurants, as clerks, office managers, farmers, etc. They have solid middle-class values of work, family, education and country – work hard, own a home, have a secure job, and save for their kids’ college and their retirement.

This summer I was sitting in the Delekta Pharmacy in the nearby town of Warren having a Coffee Cabinet (a coffee milkshake).  It’s one of the last drugstores with a real soda fountain. The summer tourists mostly come through on the weekend but during the week the locals come by to gab with the guy behind the counter. There are four small wooden booths along the wall in front of the fountain, and as I drank my Cabinet I got to overhear townie conversations from the other three booths.

Unlike every cafe I sit in the valley or San Francisco, their conversations were not about tech.

While they own tech, smartphones and computers, most can’t tell you who the ex-CEO of Uber is, or the details of the diversity blowup at Google. More important issues dominate their daily lives.

I was listening to one guy talk about how much his mortgage and kid’s college expenses were increasing while he hadn’t gotten a raise in three years and was worried about paying the bills. A woman talked about her husband, and how after 21 years as an electrician in the local hospital, he had just been laid-off. Others chimed in with their stories, best summarized by a feeling of economic anxiety. Of being squeezed with no real exit.

It was a long time ago, but I knew the feeling well.

I grew up in New York in a single-parent household that teetered on the bottom end of what today we’d call working class. My parents were immigrants and when they were divorced my mother supported us on the $125 a week she made as a bookkeeper. The bills got paid, and we had food in the house, but there was nothing extra left. No vacations. New clothes were bought once a year before school.

Years later when I got out of the Air Force, I installed broadband process control systems in automobile assembly plants and steel mills across the industrial heart of the Midwest. I got to see the peak of America’s manufacturing prowess in the 1970s, when we actually made things – before we shipped the factories and jobs overseas. I hung out with the guys who worked there, went bowling and shooting with them, complained about the same things, wives, girlfriends, jobs and bosses, and shared their same concerns.

Listening to these conversations in the Pharmacy, and the other stories I have heard as I explored the small towns here, reminded me that people I grew up with, served with and others I worked with, still live in this world. In fact, more than half of Americans fall into the working class. And the conversations I was listening to were a real-life narrative of the “middle-class squeeze.” While the economy has continued to grow, in the name of corporate efficiency and profitability we’ve closed the shipyards and factories and moved those jobs overseas. The bulk of those gains have ended up in the pockets of the very affluent. Income inequality stares you in the face here. The level of despair is high. The small city next to us has been hard hit in the opioid crisis: 63 people died last year.

My annual trek out here reminds me that that I live in a Silicon Valley bubble—and that a good part of the country is not reading what we read, caring about what we care about or thinking about what we think about. They have a lot more immediate concerns.

It’s good to spend time outside the bubble –  but I get to go back. My neighbors here, people in that pharmacy and the many others like them can’t. In the U.S. people used to move to where the jobs are. But today, Americans are less mobile. Some are rooted, embedded in their communities; and some are trapped — because housing is unaffordable where the better paying jobs are. And the jobs that are high paying are not the jobs they built their lives on. Likely their circumstances won’t have changed much by the time I return next year.

I don’t know how the people I listened to and talked to voted, but it’s easy to see why they might feel as if no one in Washington is living their lives.  And that the tech world is just as distant as Hollywood or Wall Street.

There isn’t an app to fix this.

Filed under: Family/Career/Culture | 59 Comments »

Why Some Startups Win

Posted on March 15, 2017 by steve blank

If you don’t know where you’re going, how will you know when you get there?

I was having a second coffee with an ex student, now the head of a marketing inside a rapidly growing startup.  His company had marched through customer discovery, learning about the customer problem, validated solutions and was now scaling sales and marketing.  All good news.

But he was getting uneasy that as his headcount was growing the productivity of his marketing department seemed to be rapidly declining.

I wasn’t surprised. When organizations are small (startups, small teams in companies and government agencies) early employees share a mission (why they come to work, what they need to do while they are at work, and how they will know they have succeeded). But as these organizations grow large, what was once a shared mission and intent gets buried under HR process and Key Performance Indicators.

I told him that I had learned long ago that to keep that from happening, you need to on-board/train your team about mission and intent.

—-

Why Do You Work Here?
I had taken the job of VP of Marketing in a company emerging from bankruptcy. We’d managed to secure another infusion of cash, but it wasn’t going to last long.

During my first week on the job, I asked each of my department heads what they did for marketing and the company. When I asked our trade show manager, she looked surprised and said, “Steve, don’t you know that my job is to take our booth to trade shows and set it up?” The other departments gave the same type of logistical answers; the product-marketing department, for example, said their job was to get the product specs from engineering and write data sheets. But my favorite was when the public relations manager told me, “We’re here to summarize the data sheets and put them in press releases and then answer the phone in case the press calls.”

If these sound like reasonable answers to you, and you are in a startup, update your resume.

Titles Are Not Your Job
When I pressed my staff to explain why marketing did trade shows or wrote press releases or penned data sheets, the best response I could get was, “Why that’s our job.” In their heads their titles were a link back to a Human Resources job spec that came from a 10,000-person company (ie. listing duties and responsibilities, skills and competencies, reporting relationships…)

It dawned on me that we had a department full of people with titles describing process-centric execution while we were in environment that required relentless agility and speed with urgency. While their titles might be what their business cards said, titles were not their job – and being a slave to process lost the sight of the forest for the trees.  This was the last thing we needed in a company where every day could be our last.

Titles in a startup are not the same as what your job is. This is a big idea.

Department Mission Statements – What am I Supposed to Do Today?
It wasn’t that I had somehow inherited dumb employees. What I was hearing was a failure of management.

No one had on-boarded these people. No one had differentiated a startup job description from a large company job. They were all doing what they thought they were supposed to.

But most importantly, no one had sat the marketing department down and defined our department Mission (with a capital “M”).

Most startups put together a corporate mission statement because the CEO remembered seeing one at his last job or the investors said they needed one. Most companies spend an inordinate amount of time crafting a finely honed corporate mission statement for external consumption and then do nothing internally to make it happen. What I’m about to describe here is quite different.

What our marketing department was missing was anything that gave the marketing staff daily guidance about what they should be doing. The first reaction from my CEO was, “That’s why you’re running the department.” And yes, we could have built a top-down, command-and-control hierarchy. But what I wanted was an agile marketing team capable of operating independently without day-to-day direction.

We needed to craft a Departmental Mission statement that told everyone why they came to work, what they needed to do while they were at work, and how they would know they had succeeded. And it was going to mention the two words that marketing needed to live and breathe: revenue and profit.

Five Easy Pieces – The Marketing Mission
After a few months of talking to customers and working with sales, we defined the marketing Mission (our job) as:

Help Sales deliver $25 million in sales with a 45% gross margin. To do that we will create end-user demand and drive it into the sales channel, educate the channel and customers about why our products are superior, and help Engineering understand customer needs and desires. We will accomplish this through demand-creation activities (advertising, PR, tradeshows, seminars, web sites, etc.), competitive analyses, channel and customer collateral (white papers, data sheets, product reviews), customer surveys, and customer discovery findings.

This year, marketing needs to provide sales with 40,000 active and accepted leads, company and product name recognition over 65% in our target market, and five positive product reviews per quarter. We will reach 35% market share in year one of sales with a headcount of twenty people, spending less than $4,000,000.

  • Generate end-user demand (to match our revenue goals)
  • Drive that demand into our sales channels
  • Value price our products to achieve our revenue and margin goals (create high-value)
  • Educate our sales channel(s)
  • Help Engineering understand customer needs

That was it. Two paragraphs, Five bullets. It didn’t take more.

Building a Mission-focused Team
Having the mission in place meant that our team could see that what mattered wasn’t what was on their business card, but how much closer their work moved our department to completing the mission. Period.
It wasn’t an easy concept for everyone to understand.

My new Director of Marketing Communications turned the Marcom departments into a mission-focused organization. Her new tradeshow manager quickly came to understand that his job was not to set up booths. We hired union laborers to do that. A trade show was where our company went to create awareness and/or leads. And if you ran the tradeshow department, you owned the responsibility for awareness and leads. The booth was incidental. I couldn’t care less if we had a booth or not if we could generate the same amount of leads and awareness by skydiving naked into a coffee cup.

The same was true for PR. My new head of Public Relations quickly learned that my admin could answer calls from the press. The job of Public Relations wasn’t a passive “write a press release and wait for something to happen” activity. It wasn’t measured by how busy you were, it was measured by results. And the results weren’t the traditional PR metrics of number of articles or inches of ink. I couldn’t care less about those. I wanted our PR department to map the sales process, figure out where getting awareness and interest could be done with PR, then get close and personal with the press and use it to generate end-user demand and then drive that demand into our sales channel. We were constantly doing internal and external audits and creating metrics to see the effects of different PR messages, channels and audiences on customer awareness, purchase intent and end-user sales.

The same was true for the Product Marketing group. I hired a Director of Product Marketing who in his last company had ran its marketing and then went out into the field and became its national sales director. He got the job when I asked him how much of his own marketing material his sales team actually used in the field. When he said, “about ten percent,” I knew by the embarrassed look on his face I had found the right guy. And our Director of Technical Marketing was superb at understanding customer needs and communicating them to Engineering.

Mission Intent – What’s Really Important
With a great team in place, the next step was recognizing that our Mission statement might change on the fly. “Hey, we just all bought into this Mission idea and now you’re telling us it can change?!”  (The mission might change if we pivot, competitors might announce new products, we might learn something new about our customers, etc.)

So we introduced the notion of Mission Intent. Intent answered the question, “What is the company thinking and goal behind the mission?” In our case, the mission of the company was to sell $25 million of product with 45% gross margin. The idea of teaching intention is that if employees understand what we intended  behind the mission, they can work collaboratively to achieve it.

We recognized that there would be a time marketing would screw up or something out of our control would happen, making the marketing mission obsolete (i.e. we might fail to deliver 40,000 leads.) Think of intention as the answer to the adage, “When you are up to your neck in alligators it’s hard to remember you were supposed to drain the swamp.” For example, our mission intent said that the reason why marketing needed to deliver 40,000 leads and 35% market share, etc., was so that Sales could sell $25 million of products at 45% gross margin.

What we taught everyone is that the intention is more enduring than the mission. (“Let’s see, the company is trying to sell $25 million in product with 45% gross margin. If marketing can’t deliver the 40,000 leads, what else can we do for sales to still achieve our revenue and profitability?”) The mission was our goal, but based on circumstances, it might change. However, the Intent was immovable.

When faced with the time pressures of a startup, too many demands and too few people, we began to teach our staff to refer back to the five Mission goals and the Intent of the department. When stuff started piling up on their desks, they learned to ask themselves, “Is what I’m working on furthering these goals? If so, which one? If not, why am I doing it?”

They understood the mission intent was our corporate revenue and profit goals.

Why Do It
By the end of the first year, our team had jelled. (Over time, we added the No Excuses culture to solve accountability.) It was a department willing to exercise initiative, with the judgment to act wisely and an eagerness to accept responsibility.

I remember at the end of a hard week my direct reports came into my office just to talk about the week’s little victories. And there was a moment as they shared their stories when they all began to realize that our company (one that had just come off of life support) was beginning to kick the rear of our better-funded and bigger competitors.  We all marveled in the moment.


Lessons Learned

  • Push independent execution of tasks down to the lowest possible level
  • Give everyone a shared Mission Statement: why they come to work, what they need to do, and how they will know they have succeeded.
  • Share Mission Intent for the big picture for the Mission Statement
  • Build a team comfortable with independent Mission execution
  • Add a No Excuses Culture
  • Agree on Core Values to define your culture

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