Founders and dysfunctional families

Posted on May 18, 2009 by steve blank

Startup CEO Traits
I was having lunch with a friend who is a retired venture capitalist and we drifted into a discussion of the startups she funded. We agreed that all her founding CEOs seemed to have the same set of personality traits – tenacious, passionate, relentless, resilient, agile, and comfortable operating in chaos. I said, “well for me you’d have to add coming from a dysfunctional family.”  Her response was surprising, “Steve, almost all my CEO’s came from very tough childhoods.  It was one of the characteristics I specifically looked for. It’s why all of you operated so well in the unpredictable environment that all startups face.” 74HGZA3MZ6SV

I couldn’t figure out if I was more perturbed about how casual the comment was or how insightful it was.  What makes an individual a great startup founder (versus an employee) has been something I had been thinking about since I retired. My comfort in operating in chaos was something I first recognized when I was working in the Midwest.

The Rust Belt – (Skip this Section if I’m Boring You)
Out of the Air Force, my first job out of school was in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in the mid-1970’s installing broadband process control systems in automotive and manufacturing plants throughout the Midwest. I got to travel and see almost every type of Rust Belt factory – at the time, the heart and muscle of American manufacturing – GM, American Motors, Ford, U.S. Steel, Whirlpool.  Our equipment was installed in the manufacturing lines of these companies, and if it went down sometimes it brought the entire manufacturing line down.

I always made a habit of getting a tour of whatever manufacturing plant I was visiting. Most plant foremen were more than accommodating and flattered that someone actually was interested.  I was fascinated to learn how everyday objects (cars, washing machines, structural steel, etc.) that ended up on our shelves or driveways were assembled.

My favorite factory was the massive U.S. Steel plant by Lake Erie. On my first visit the foreman walked through this enormous building, not much more than a giant steel shed, where they had an open hearth furnace. We came in time to see the furnace being tapped, pouring steel out into giant buckets. (Years later I realized I watched the end of an era. The last open hearth furnaces closed in the 1980’s.)

We stood on a platform several stories up and light streamed diagonally through windows set high on top of the building cutting through the black soot particles created when the incandescent steel hit the bucket. It was too loud to talk so I just watched the steel pour through the clouds of soot backlit by the blinding bright liquid metal. It looked like an update of the iconic image of Penn Station writ large.

And as I stared through the billowing clouds of soot flashing between black and white took on fantastical shapes as tiny figures on the factory floor scurried around the bucket. I could have stayed there all day.

Automobile plants were equally fascinating. They were like being inside a pinball machine. At the Ford plant in Milpitas the plant foreman proudly took me down the line. I remember stopping at one station a little confused about its purpose. All the other stations on the assembly line had groups workers with power tools adding something to the car.

This station just had one guy with a 2×4 piece of lumber, a large rubber mallet and a folded blanket.  His spot was right after the station where they had dropped the hoods down on the cars, and had bolted them in. As I was watched, the next car rolled down the line, the station before attached the hood, and as the car approached this station, the worker took the 2×4, shoved it under one corner of the hood and put the blanket over the top of the hood and started pounding it with the rubber mallet while prying with the lumber.  “It’s our hood alignment station,” the plant manager said proudly.  These damn models weren’t designed right so we’re fixing them on the line.”

I had a queasy feeling that perhaps this wasn’t the way to solve the car quality problem.  Little did I know that I was watching the demise of the auto industry in front of my eyes.

Operating in Chaos
Repairing our equipment could be time critical. One day, I was at the Ford Wixom auto assembly plant training my replacement and I was at met at the door by an irate plant manager.  He welcomed us by screaming, “Do you know how much it costs every minute this line is down.” As I’m troubleshooting our equipment scattered across the plant, (in the computer room, above the steel, in NEMA cabinets next to line, etc.,) the manager followed us still yelling.  My understudy looked at me and said, “how can you deal with this chaos and still focus?”  And until that moment I had never thought about it before.  I realized that what others heard as chaos, I just shut out.

A Day in the Life of A Founder
For those of you who’ve never started a company, let me assure you that it never happens like the pleasant articles you read in business magazines or in case studies.  Founding a company is a sheer act of will and tenacity in the face of immense skepticism from everyone – investors, customers, friends, etc.  You literally have to take your vision of the opportunity and against all rational odds assemble financing, and a team to help you execute.  And that’s just to get started.

Next, you have to deal with the daily crisis of product development and acquiring early customers.  And here’s where life gets really interesting, as the reality of product development and customer input collide, the facts change so rapidly that the original well-thought-out business plan becomes irrelevant.

If you can’t manage chaos and uncertainty, if you can’t bias yourself for action and if you wait around for someone else to tell you what to do, then your investors and competitors will make your decisions for you and you will run out of money and your company will die.

Great founders live for these moments.

Creating the Entrepreneurial Personality – A Thought Experiment
Fast forward three decades back to today.  The lunch conversation was an interesting data point to add to a hypothesis I’ve had.

I’ve wondered, just as a thought experiment, how would we go about creating individuals who operate serenely in chaos, and have the skills we associate with one type of entrepreneurial founder/leader?

One possible path might be to raise children in an environment where parents are struggling in their own lives and they create an environment where fighting, abusive or drug/alcohol related behavior is the norm.

In this household nothing would be the same from day to day, the parents would constantly bombard their kids with dogmatic parenting, (harsh and inflexible discipline,) and they would control them by withholding love, praise, and attention. Finally we could make sure no child is allowed to express the “wrong” emotion. Children in these families would grow up thinking that this behavior is normal.

(If this seems unimaginably cruel to you, congratulations, you had a great set of parents.  On the other hand, if the description is making you uncomfortable remembering some of how you were raised – welcome to a fairly wide club.)

Over the last 5 years I’ve asked over 500 of my students how many of them grew up in a dysfunctional family (participation was voluntary.) I’ve been surprised at the data. In this admittedly very unscientific survey I’ve found that between a quarter and half of the students I consider “hard-core” entrepreneurs/founders (working passionately to found a company,) self-identified as coming from a less than benign upbringing.

Founders as Survivors
My hypothesis is that most children are emotionally damaged by this upbringing.  But a small percentage, whose brain chemistry and wiring is set for resilience, come out of this with a compulsive, relentless and tenacious drive to succeed.  They have learned to function in a permanent state of chaos.  And they have channeled all this into whatever activity they could find outside of their home – sports, business, or …entrepreneurship.

Therefore, I’ll posit one possible path for a startup founder – the dysfunctional family theory.

Throwing hand grenades in Your Own Company
One last thought. The dysfunctional family theory may explain why founders who excel in the chaotic early phases of a company throw organizational hand grenades into their own companies after they find a repeatable and scaleable business model and need to switch gears into execution.

The problem, I believe, is that repeatability represents the extreme discomfort zone of this class of entrepreneur. And I have seen entrepreneurs emotionally or organizationally try to create chaos — it’s too calm around here — and actually self-destruct.

So What?
Lets be clear, in no way am I suggesting that growing up in a dysfunctional family is the only path to becoming a founder of a startup.  Nor am I suggesting that everyone who does so turns out well. And in particular I’m not suggesting that every employee who joins a startup fits this profile, it just seems more prevalent in the founder(s).

And this hypothesis might be a good example of confusing cause and effect. Yet I am surprised given how much is written about the attributes of a startup founder, how little has been written about what “makes” a founder.

Let me know what you think.   Does any of this match your experience or people you know?

Comments and brickbats welcomed.

Filed under: Customer Development, Family/Career/Culture, Technology | Tagged: , , , , | 41 Comments »

The Curse of a New Building

Posted on May 15, 2009 by steve blank

At some point in my career as I began to ponder how/why startups morph from agile, “can do” companies to ones that have lost their edge. I didn’t need to look much further than the “new building” debacle I had a hand in.

Signs of Success
One of the things you do right in a startup, is you move from one cheap and cramped building to another as you grow, with desks, cubicles and engineers piled cheek to jowl.  74HGZA3MZ6SV

One of the signs of success is when you outgrow your last cramped quarters and can afford a “real” building. This happened to us at SuperMac when our sales skyrocketed.

That’s when things went south.

Lets Fix Everything that Was Broken
At SuperMac we were excited to finally get out of the crummy tiltup we had occupied since the company emerged from bankruptcy. Now with cash in hand, we wanted to fix everything that seemed broken and annoying about our office environment. We made what seemed to be a series of logical and rational decisions about what to do with our next office building.

  • Engineers were packed in cubicles or desks right on top of each other?
    Now every engineer can have their own office.
  • We can’t bring customers to this rundown building.
    The new building needs to reflect that we’re a successful and established company.
  • The lobby of the last building didn’t “represent” the company in a professional manner.
    Lets “do it right” and have a lobby and reception area that projects a professional image.
  • We had used, crummy and uncomfortable furniture.
    Lets get comfortable chairs and great new desks for everyone.  None of this used stuff.
  • The last building has stained carpets and walls that haven’t been painted in years.
    Now we can pick out carpets that look good and feel good and we can have clean walls with great artwork and murals.
  • We didn’t have enough conference rooms.
    Lets make sure that we have plenty of conference rooms.
  • Everyone left the building for lunch.
    We need our own cafeteria so employees don’t have to leave the building.

Designing the Perfect Building
Once the commitment to fix everything wrong was in place, we were off and running on the design phase. We hired an interior designer and a great facilities person to manage the process. The exec staff started meeting about the design of the new building.

The company decided that now engineers can have their own offices rather than cramped cubes. The staff got involved about what color the carpet and walls are. And there was lots of discussion of what style of furniture is appropriate.

Our exec staff spent time worrying about who had the corner office, and what departments had the “prime” location. (I was great at “office wars.”) There was lots of talk about the importance of natural lighting and maybe we needed our own cafeteria. And even better, marketing got to design the graphics for the lobby and hallway (bright and colorful neon) to better represent the color graphics business we were in.

We kept the board informed, but they didn’t have much to say since business was going so well, and a new building was needed to accommodate the growing company.

None of This is Good News
This is when things started to go downhill for SuperMac. The most obvious problem; the time we spent planning the building distracted the company from running the business. But there were three more insidious problems.

  1. While offices for everyone sound good on paper, moving everyone out of cubicles destroyed a culture of tight-knit interaction and communication. Individuals within departments were isolated, and the size and scale of the building isolated departments from each other.
  2. The new building telegraphed to our employees, “We’ve arrived. We’re no longer a small struggling startup. You can stop working like a startup and start working like a big company.”
  3. We started to believe that the new building was a reflection of the company’s (and our own) success. We took our eye off the business.  We thought that since we in such a fine building, we were geniuses, and the business would take care of itself.

While our competitors furiously worked on regaining market share, we were arguing about whether the carpets should be wool or nylon.  The result was not pretty.

The Curse of a New Building
If this was just a sad story about a single company, it would be interesting, but not instructive.  However, I’ve seen this story repeated time and again, and not just in Silicon Valley. There’s a mindset that says, “By the dint of our hard work, we are “entitled” to a building upgrade and this is our just reward.”  And on an emotional level it makes sense.  But if you are lucky you have a board of directors who have seen this before. (And they’ll take the CEO out for a trip to the woodshed.)

  1. An upgraded new building is a premature transition away from a startup culture.
  2. It’s a tipping point to a big company culture.
  3. This is a culture and values issue worth fighting over.

Letting this happen is a failure of a board. If the management team is thinking they’ve made it, the new building is just symptomatic of a company heading for a crash.  It’s a company that’s lost sight of the values that got it there.

Don’t let it happen to you.

Stay hungry, stay lean.

Lessons Learned

  • New buildings are a distraction. You should avoid them at all costs
  • Building upgrades can destroy a culture

Filed under: Customer Development, SuperMac, Technology | Tagged: , , , | 25 Comments »

SuperMac War Story 10: The Video Spigot

Posted on May 11, 2009 by steve blank

I was lucky to have been standing in the right place when video became part of the Macintosh.  And I got to experience a type of customer buying behavior I had never seen before –  the Novelty Effect.

Present at the Creation
It was early 1991 and Apple’s software development team was hard at work on QuickTime, the first multimedia framework for a computer.  At the time no one (including Apple) knew exactly what consumers were going to do with multimedia, it was still pre-Internet. But the team believed adding video as an integral part of an operating system and user experience (where there had only been text and still images) would be transformative. 

But Apple had planned to announce and demo QuickTime without a way to get video into the Mac. They had this great architecture, and Apple had figured out to get movies into their own computers for a demo, but for the rest of us there was no physical device that allowed an average consumer to plug a video camera or VCR into and get video into a Mac.

A month or two before the QuickTime public announcement in May, the SuperMac hardware engineers (who had a great relationship with the QuickTime team at Apple) started a “skunk works” project. In less than a month they designed a low-cost video-capture board that plugged into the Mac and allowed you to connect a video camera and VCR. But to get video to fit and playback on the computers of the era, they needed to compress it. So SuperMac engineering also developed video compression software, called Cinepak. The software was idiot proof.  There was nothing for the consumer to do. No settings, no buttons – plug your camera or VCR in and it just worked seamlessly. (The Cinepak codec was written by the engineer who would become my cofounder at Rocket Science Games.) It worked great on the slow CPUs at the time.

Something Profound
Engineering gave us a demo of the prototype board and software and asked, “Do you guys think we can sell a few of these boards?”  Remember, this is the first time anyone outside of Apple or the broadcast industry had seen moving images on a Macintosh computer. (A company called Avid had introduced a $50,000 Mac-based professional broadcast video editing for two years earlier. But here was a $499 product that could let everyone use video.) Our engineers connected a VCR, pushed a button and poured in the video of the Apple 1984 commercial.  We watched as it started playing video at 30 frames/second in a 320 x 240 window.

Up until that moment Quicktime had been an abstract software concept to me. But now, standing there, I realized how people felt when they saw the first flickering images in a movie theater. We must have made them play the demo twenty times. There were a few times in my career I knew at that moment I was watching something profound – (Holding the glass masks of the Z80 microprocessor. My first IPO at Convergent. First silicon of the MIPS RISC processor.) I stood there believing that video on computers was another – and equally as memorable.

Lets Sell it Like There’s No Tomorrow
When we all regained the power of speech, our reaction was unanimous, “What are you talking about – can we sell it?  This is the first way to get video into a computer, we’re going to sell and market this board like there’s no tomorrow. Even though we won’t make a ton of money, it will be an ambassador for the rest of our product family.  People who aren’t current customers of our graphics boards will get to know our company and brand.  If we’re smart we’ll cross-sell them one of our other products. We might even sell a few thousand of these.”

Everyone laughed at such an absurd number.

The Video Spigot
“What are we going to call it?” Lets see…, it’s video input, … how about we call it the Video Spigot?”

Now, in hindsight, with a spigot, you’re actually pouring stuff out, and, in fact, the ad actually shows you stuff pouring stuff out, but into your Mac. It made no logical sense (a fact engineering reminded us about several times.) But it made the point that this device could pour video into your Mac and consumers instinctually got it.

Our CEO and our VP of manufacturing were incredibly nervous about manufacturing more than a few hundred of these boards. “There’s nothing to do with this product once you get the video in. You can’t manipulate it, you can’t do anything other than playback the video in QuickTime.”  And they were right. (Remember there were no video applications available at all. None. This was day zero of consumer video on the Mac.)

Our answer was, “People will love this thing, as long as we don’t oversell the product.” We knew something our CEO didn’t. We had seen the reactions of people playing with the prototypes in our lab and when we demo’d it to our sales force. When we saw our salespeople actually trying to steal the early boards to take home and show their kids, we knew we had a winner. All we had to do was tell customers they could get video into their computer – and not promise anything else.

But the rest of the management team really skeptical. We kept saying, “Don’t worry, we’re going to sell thousands of these.”  Little did we know.

We launched the product with this ad that said “Video Spigot, now pour video into your computer,” and this just hit a nerve.

We sold 50,000 Video Spigots in six months.

video-spigot-supermac-ad

(As an aside, we saved money by putting my daughter in the ad. (That’s every marketeers excuse for putting their kids in an ad.) She’s in the little car on the monitor, and she’s also, if you look very carefully, in the water. We had that little car around the house for a while.)

They’re All Coming Back
So, manufacturing ramped up our factory, and as we’re selling 10,000 Video Spigots a month, our CEO is now concerned that maybe all these boards were all going to be returned to us because they didn’t really do anything once you got video into your computer. (A rational fear, as the sum of all of our other graphics boards shipped was about 7,500/month.)

Marketing knew who the Spigot customers were; we had all the registration cards and all the data. So we turned to our customers, surveying a few hundred people who had bought the product and asked:

  • Question: Were you the person who bought the board? Answer: Yes.
  • Question Are you happy with the board? Answer: Oh, it’s great.
  • Question Are you using the board? Answer: No.
  • Question And … wait a minute, you’re not using it anymore? Answer: No.
  • Question So do you want a refund? Answer: No, no.
  • Question Why not? Answer: It did everything you said. We loved this product.

It didn’t do anything else. People loved it, they used it, and they put it in their desk drawer.

We accidently had a product with the Novelty Effect.

The Novelty effect
I didn’t recognize the behavior at the time, but anyone who loves technology and gadgets has at one time or another has bought a technology toy – USB memory sticks, iPod Shuffles, umbrellas with LED lights, alarm clocks that talked, Flip Video Cameras, etc. – used them for a while and then stuck them in the drawer. The product does what it said it would, and amuses you for a while. You don’t regret the purchase price because you got entertained and then you lose interest – the Novelty Effect. 

Unintended Consequences – Video Editing
As these boards are flying out the door, one of the software engineers at SuperMac got to thinking about what did you do with video once you did get it into a computer – so he wrote the first Quicktime-based video editor which we called ReelTime.

But you probably never heard of ReelTime.  You may know it by its final name.

Since we had gotten out of the software business when we came out of Chapter 11, and our sales channel didn’t know what to do with software, we licensed ReelTime to Adobe.  And, of course, Adobe said, “Oh, by the way, you don’t mind if the software engineer comes with us, do you?”

Adobe renamed ReelTime to Adobe Premiere.  And Randy Ubillos, its author, went on to author Mac-based video editing software for the next 18 years. His team wrote what became FinalCut Pro at Macromedia; it was bought by Apple, and now he’s at Apple doing new versions of iMovie.

So an unintended consequence of the VideoSpigot, and to the benefit of video editors everywhere, video editing for the masses was invented at SuperMac.

Thanks to Bruce Leak and the Apple QuickTime team, Peter Barrett for Cinepak and Randy Ubillos for giving us video editing on the Mac.  It was fun watching it happen.

Filed under: Customer Development, Marketing, SuperMac, Technology | Tagged: , | 41 Comments »

Love/Hate Business Plan Competitions

Posted on May 7, 2009 by steve blank

I love business plan competitions.

I hate business plan competitions.

I Love Business Plan Competitions
I had a breakfast with a friend who has founded a few companies in Thailand and started the New Ventures Program at one of their universities. He was visiting Stanford and mentioned how proud he was that several of his Thai students were here in the States for a business plan competition. 74HGZA3MZ6SV

For those of you who don’t know, business plan competitions are held by universities who get their students to enter and compete to see who has the best business idea. Local venture investors and/or companies offer cash prizes for the winners.  In exchange, these VCs/companies get early looks at new deal flow and offer aspiring entrepreneurs feedback and advice on their business plan.

These competitions started in the early 1980‘s at the University of Texas and have sprouted like mushrooms in the last 10 years.  Just Google the term and you’ll be amazed.  Almost every university, region and car wash now has a business plan competition; the rules, who can participate, how large the prizes and who are the judges vary by school.

Over scrambled eggs and diet coke, I listened to this seasoned startup veteran describe the excitement of his students who came to the U.S. to compete. I finally understood how valuable these contests can be for students in cities or countries without a venture capital or entrepreneurial infrastructure.  At a university business plan competition, for the first time they can swim in the sea of expertise that we/I take for granted in the middle of Silicon Valley.  Win, lose or draw, these students have a life changing experience where they can network and get smarter as they see what good startup thinking looks like.

I love business plan competitions (and with my valley-centric bias, I think Berkeley and Stanford have two of the best.) If you are outside of Silicon Valley, you ought to jump into them with both feet.  You’ll learn a lot.

I Hate Business Plan Competitions
Yet this same conversation reminded me why every time students at Berkeley or Stanford tell me they’ve entered a technology business plan competition, I question whether they are wasting their time.

For all the reasons why business plan competitions are wonderful for students from outside the U.S., or even outside of Silicon Valley, I am left speechless when a student in a 50-mile radius of Sand Hill Road (who tells me they’re serious about starting a company) thinks their time is better spent entering one.

I have seen students spend well over a year refining a business plan competition pitch when they have could have gotten the same advice within a month by literally stepping out the door and aggressively pursuing it.  And with the other 11 months, they could have been well into actually building a company.

In the real world, most business plans don’t survive the first few months of customer contact.

And even if they did – customers don’t ask to see your business plan.

Here’s a simple heuristic: if you are one of the lucky few who are within one- or two-degrees of separation of venture capital and startup resources (law firms, patent attorneys, etc.) and you are chasing a technical business plan competition, you are signaling that you really don’t want to start a company.  (And that may be fine with you. Just don’t confuse the time you’re spending with actual progress in building a company.)

I hate business plan competitions – when they encourage students to write a “winning plan” rather than teaching them how to get out of the building and use locally available resources to start a company.

Filed under: Marketing, Technology, Venture Capital | Tagged: , , , , | 17 Comments »

Customer Analytics – From Those Who Should Know

Posted on May 6, 2009 by steve blank

I ran into an interesting paper about thinking about analytics – A Tradecraft Primer: Structured Analytic Techniques for Improving Intelligence Analysis.

It’s a useful read to explore and challenge analytical arguments and mind-sets.

BTW, I don’t know to be hopeful or concerned that that this is the state of the art of analytical thinking at this agency.

Filed under: Customer Development, Technology | Tagged: , | 2 Comments »

SuperMac War Story 9: Sales, Not Awards

Posted on April 30, 2009 by steve blank

While this story is about my experience in packaging for computer retail channels, if you substitute the word “web site” for retail, you’ll get the idea why these lessons were timeless for me. 74HGZA3MZ6SV

SuperMac sold our graphic boards for the Macintosh through multiple distribution channels: direct sales to major accounts, national chains, independent rep firms, etc.  But the computer retail channel was a large part of our sales.  That meant that our boards were packaged in boxes sold to retailers and were displayed on shelves in their computer stores. Customers went into the store either looking for the SuperMac product by name (if our demand creation activities had been effective) or went in unsure of which brand of board to buy.  If they were in the store but teetering on the edge of a purchasing decision, there were only two ways to influence them: incent the sales staff (give the salespeople a special bonus to sell your product) and/or have box packaging sell itself by screaming “buy me.”

Maybe It’s Me
When I got to the SuperMac, our Marketing Communications group told me about our “award-winning” retail packaging for our graphics boards.  Yet when I saw our retail package, I was confused.  Confused because while I knew absolutely nothing about retail packaging, as a consumer I knew this box was not something I would pay attention to. It was black with absolutely no compelling reason to buy – no awards, no why-to-buy message, nothing.

black-supermac-box

While I wasn’t an expert in retail packaging, even as a consumer I knew that when I was in a store, I scanned four or five products on a shelf, grabbed the most interesting one, read what was on the box, and picked one.  And the product that “talked to me”, the loudest and most seductively, was the one that went home with me.

“Black Hole of Packaging” Strategy
Since we had no facts, other than my opinion that something wasn’t right, I took our staff on a field trip.  (You can’t do marketing from inside the building.)  We visited a couple of retail stores to look at how other companies were packaging their products and how ours looked next to theirs.  Standing in the aisles we collectively got a sinking feeling.  Our choice of black had made our retail box invisible on the shelf.

But worse, we had been relegated to the bottom shelf (death valley, since very few people look at their feet when shopping.)  We were down on the bottom because no one had done any “shelf merchandizing” – that is we did not employ “rack jobbers” or the retail stores themselves to put our boxes at eye level in the right place on the shelf.  (These are basic practices for companies selling through retail stores.)

We were on the bottom row – with an invisible box.  We labeled this our “Black Hole of Packaging” strategy. The package had won awards all right – for the ad agency.  The design was actually a negative drag on selling anything off a retail shelf.

Getting Smarter
While we all had opinions about what we should do, we realized we needed some facts from someone with retail packaging expertise.  Luckily (or maybe because we were in Silicon Valley where there was a domain expert for everything) there was a very smart consultant in the retail computer space, Seymour Merrin, who preached about the importance of packaging. He had teamed up with a former product manager at P&G to deliver seminars on just this subject. We learned the basics of retail packaging: make the box eye-catching, ensure there was a “why-to-buy” message, include just enough information to close the sale, fight and pay for eye-level shelf space, etc. Her packaging class was so good that we sent every new marketer at SuperMac to take it. From grumbling skeptics, they all became packaging design converts.

We realized that we needed to take all these lessons and redesign our packaging.

You May Hate It, But You Won’t Ignore It
The results of our package redesigns were packages like “SuperMac Thunder II”.  They were bright, they were loud, and they had lots of reasons to buy front and back.  And for sure they were never going to win any design awards.

colorful-supermac-box

To check how effective our new packaging was, we ran tests at our local computer retailer. We would run in and put test versions of dummy boxes on the shelf and just watch what happened – we wanted to see if people picked up the box, and when they did what they looked at and what they read.  (We would interview them after they put the box back on the shelf.  And we had to convince a few of them the box was really empty.)  The most interesting thing we learned was that people felt more comfortable about a product when there were words of encouragement on the package.  So we started putting stickers on the packaging every time we’d win an award. People would go, “Oh, this one won the “best of MacUser Magazine benchmark” award,” and it would confirm that this was a safe purchasing choice.

Owning Marketing for our Entire Channel
 In thinking about the packaging story, it would have been easy to blame the agency who designed the box for poor package design.  Or blame my MarCom department who approved it.  But that wasn’t the root cause of the problem. It was a management problem.  We had been outsourcing an important part of our demand creation strategy – packaging – to an outside agency without having the expertise to judge or manage the results. We hadn’t taken the time to learn the basics of packaging ourselves. And the final lesson was that we were keeping score on our packaging with the wrong metrics – it wasn’t about awards, it was about sales in the retail channel.

So we not only sent everyone through packaging school, we also brought the packaging design in-house. From now on we would design the retail boxes ourselves, not because we could do a better design job, but because this was a critical skill that our company and department needed to learn – using packaging to increase retail sales.  When we had mastered the art, then I was ready to outsource it again, but not before this became a core competency of my department.

Oh yes, and retail sales doubled with the new product packaging.

New Century, New Channels
For many of you reading this, boxes sitting on a retail shelf may seem hopelessly outdated, but the same marketing lessons hold for “award winning” web sites or social media.  Your design or ad agencies can impress you with their awards, but if you’re not moving product or creating demand, you’ve missed the point.

Worry about the sales results.

What did we learn?

  • The only “award” in marketing that matters is sales revenue
  • Marketing needs to own all the marketing in a channel
  • Core competencies cannot be outsourced until they’re learned

Filed under: Marketing, SuperMac, Technology | Tagged: | 7 Comments »

Preparing for Chaos – the Life of a Startup

Posted on April 29, 2009 by steve blank

I just finished reading Donovan Campbell’s eye-opening book, “Joker One“, about his harrowing combat tour in Iraq leading a Marine platoon. This book may be the Iraq war equivalent of “Dispatches” which defined Vietnam for my generation.  (Both reminded me why National Service would be a very good idea.)

Campbell describes how he tried to instill in his troops the proper combat mentality.

I’ve paraphrased his speech into the language of a startup.  It’s eerily similar.

Startups are inherently chaos. As a founder you need to prepare yourself to think creatively and independently, because more often than not, conditions on the ground will change so rapidly that the original well-thought-out business plan becomes irrelevant.

If you can’t manage chaos and uncertainty, if you can’t bias yourself for action and if you wait around for someone else to tell you what to do, then your investors and competitors will make your decisions for you and you will run out of money and your company will die.  74HGZA3MZ6SV

Therefore the best way to keep your company alive is to instill in every employee a decisive mindset that can quickly separate the crucial from the irrelevant, synthesize the output, and use this intelligence to create islands of order in the all-out chaos of a startup.

Every potential startup founder should think about their level of comfort operating in chaos and uncertainty.  It may not be for you.

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The Secret History of Silicon Valley Part VIb: Every World War II Movie was Wrong

Posted on April 27, 2009 by steve blank

This is Part VI of how I came to write “The Secret History of Silicon Valley“. This post makes a lot more sense if you look at the earlier posts as well as the video and slides.

—————-

The next piece of the Secret History of Silicon Valley puzzle came together when Tom Byers, and Tina Seelig invited me to teach entrepreneurship in the Stanford Technology Ventures Program (STVP) in Stanford’s School of Engineering. My office was in the (now demolished) Terman Engineering Building.

Fred Terman – the Cover Story
I’d heard of Terman but I didn’t really know what he did – his biography said that he was one of the preeminent radio engineers in the 1930’s literally writing the textbooks. He was the professor who helped his students Bill Hewlett and David Packard start a company in 1939.  In World War II he headed up something called the Harvard Radio Research Lab. There was plenty in his biography about his post WWII activities: chair of electrical engineering in 1937, dean of engineering in 1946, provost in 1955. He started the Stanford Honors Co-op in 1954 which allowed companies in the valley to send their engineers to Stanford graduate engineering programs.

Since I was interested in the history of Silicon Valley, Entrepreneurship, and now Terman, I began to understand that Terman had a lot to do with the proliferation of microwave companies in Silicon Valley in the 1950’s and ’60’s. But how? And why? So I started to read all I could find on the development of microwaves. That led me back to the history of radar in World War II – and a story you may not know.

What Does WWII Have to Do with Silicon Valley?
Just a quick history refresher. In December 1941, the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor, and Germany declares war on the United States. And while the Soviets are fighting the Germans in massive land battles in eastern Europe, until the allies invade Western Europe in June 1944, the only way the U.S. and Britian can affect German war-fighting capability is by mounting a Strategic Bombing campaign, from England. Their goal was to destroy the German capability to wage war by aerial bombing the critical infrastructure of the German war machine. 

The allies bombed the German petroleum infrastructure, aircraft manufacturing infrastructure, chemical infrastructure, and transportation infrastructure. The Americans and British split up the air campaign: the British bombed at night, the Americans during the day.

lancaster

b-17The Odds Weren’t Good
These bombers flew for 7+ hours from England and over occupied Europe, through a gauntlet of intense antiaircraft fire and continuous attack by German fighter planes. And they got it coming and going to the target.

But what the bomber crews didn’t know was that the antiaircraft fire and German fighters they encountered were controlled via a sophisticated radar-guided electronic air defense system covering all of occupied Europe and Germany.

The German electronic air defense system was designed to detect the allied bomber raids, target and aim the German radar-guided weapons, and destroy the American and British bombers. The German air defense system had 100’s of early warning radars, and thousands of radar controlled anti-aircraft guns, and Ground Controlled Intercept radars to guide the fighters into the bombers.

wurzburg-reise-radar

And the German night fighters had their own on-board radar. In all the Germans had over 7,500 radars dedicated to tracking and killing the allied bombers.

german-nightfighter

Each allied bombing mission lost 2-20% of their planes. Bomber crews had to fly 25 missions to go home. 160,000 U.S. and British airmen were killed. The German objective was to make strategic bombing too costly for the Allies to continue.  

By 1942 the Allied Air Command recognized they needed to reduce allied losses to fighters and flak. They needed a way to shut down the German Air Defense system. (Bear with me as this history takes you from the skies of Europe to Fred Terman.)

The Electronic Shield
To shut it down we first needed to understand the German “Radar Order of Battle.” What radars did the Germans have and what were their technical characteristics? How effective they were? What weapons were they associated with? We needed to find out all this stuff and then we needed to figure out how to confuse it and make it ineffective. 

So the U.S. set up a top secret, 800-person lab to do just that, first, to gather electronic intelligence to understand the “Radar Order of Battle” and then, to wage “electronic warfare” by building mechanical and electronic devices to severely hamper the Germans’ ability to target and aim their weapons.

Ferrets and Crows – Electronic Intelligence
The first job of the secret lab was to find and understand the German air defense system. So we invented the U.S. Electronic Intelligence industry in about 12 months (with help from their British counterparts at the Telecommunications Research Establishment.) These mission of the planes called Ferrets, manned by crews called Crows, was to find and understand the German electronic air defense system.  We stripped out B-24 bombers, took out all the bomb racks, took out all the bombs and even took out all the guns.  And we filled it with racks of receivers and displays, wire and strip recorders and communications intercept equipment that could search the electromagnetic spectrum from 50 megahertz to 3 gigahertz, and this is 1943. 

We flew these unarmed planes in and out of Germany alongside our bombers and basically built up the “radar order of battle.” We now understood where the German radars were, their technical details and what weapons they controlled.

Tin Foil Rain – Chaff
We first decided to shut down the German radars that were directing the anti-aircraft guns and the fighter planes. And to do that we dropped tin foil on the Germans. No kidding. Radar engineers had observed if you cut a strip of aluminum foil to 1/2 the wavelength of a radar transmitter and throw it in front of the radars antenna, the radar signal would reflect perfectly. All the radar operator would see was noise, rather than airplanes. 

Well, you couldn’t stand in front of the German radars and throw out tin foil, but you could if you had a fleet of airplanes. Each plane threw out packets of aluminum foil (called “chaff”.) The raid on Hamburg in July, 1943 was the first use of chaff in World War II.  It completely shut down the German air defense system in and around Hamburg.  The British and then the Americans firebombed the city with minimal air losses.

Chaff used 3/4’s of all the aluminum foil in the U.S. in World War II, because by the end of the war, every bomber stream was dumping chaff on every mission.

Jam It and Shut it Down – Electronic Warfare
But this secret lab was focused on electronic warfare. So they systematically designed electronic devices called “jammers” to shut down each part of the German air defense system.  Think of a “jammer” as a radio transmitter broadcasting noise on the same frequency of the enemy radar set. The goal is to overwhelm the enemy radar with noise so they couldn’t see the bombers. We built electronic jammers to target each part of the German air defense system: their early warning radars, the short range radars, the antiaircraft gun radars, the Ground Control Intercept Radars, the air to ground radio links and even the radars onboard the German night fighters. By the end of the war we had put multiple jammers on every one of our bombers, and while their power output was ridiculously low, these jammers were flying in formation with 100’s or even 1,000 other planes with their jammers on, and the combined power was enough to confuse the radar operators.

Just to give you a sense of scale of how big this electronic warfare effort was, we built over 30,000 jammers, with entire factories running 24/7 in the U.S. making nothing but jammers to put on our bombers.

By the end of World War II, over Europe, a bomber stream no longer consisted of just planes with bombs.  Now the bombers were accompanied by electronics intelligence planes looking for new radar signals, escort bombers just full of jammers and others full of chaff, as well as P-51 fighter planes patrolling alongside our bomber stream.

radarj1

Every WWII Movie and Book with a Bomber was Wrong
While there were lots of stories about how the British early warning radar system, called “Chain Home” saved England during the Battle of Britain by giving the Spitfire pilots time to scramble to intercept German bombers, there wasn’t a coherent story about American and British bombers encountering the German radar-guided air defense system. (The best book on the subject is the Nuremberg Raid.)

This lack of information meant that every World War II movie or book that had airplanes on bombing missions in it was wrong.  Every one of them. (To someone who had grown up with reruns of WWII war movies on TV, this was a shock.) Every movie I had seen – 12 O’clock High, Memphis Belle, etc. –  assumed that there were no electronics other than radios on these bombers. Wrong. Not only didn’t the movie makers know, but the pilots and crews didn’t know about the German radar guided system trying to kill them. Nor did they know about the electronic shield being assembled to try to protect them.

But while this may be a great story what the does this have to do with the history of Silicon Valley?

The answer lies with who ran this lab and became the father of electronic warfare and Electronic Intelligence in the Cold War for the next 20 years.

Who Ran the Most Secret Lab You Never Heard of?
It was Fred Terman of Stanford.  The Harvard Radio Research Lab was his creation. A Stanford professor was at Harvard in World War II because the head of the Office of Scientific Research and Development thought Terman was the best radio engineer in the country. (Why couldn’t he have set up a lab at Stanford?  Apparently, the Office of Scientific Research and Development thought that the rest of Stanford’s engineering department was second rate.)

Finally, I had an answer to the question I had asked 35 years earlier when I was in Thailand: “How did electronic warfare get started?” Now I knew that it began in the early days of World War II as a crash program to reduce the losses of bombers to the German air defense network.  Electronic warfare and electronic intelligence in the U.S. started with Fred Terman and the Harvard Radio Research Lab.

Spooky Music
Reading about Terman was like finding the missing link in my career.  Here was the guy who invented the field I had spent the first five years of my adult life working on. And 30 years later I was teaching at Stanford in a building named after him and never knew a thing about him.  Play spooky music here.

I began to realize a few things: First, everything we had done in electronic warfare in the Vietnam War was just a slightly more modern version of what we had done over occupied Europe in World War II.  (And in hindsight, we seemed a bit more agile and innovative in WWII.)

Unbelievably, in less than two years, Terman’s Radio Research lab invented an industry and had turned out a flurry of new electronic devices the likes of which had never been seen.  Yet decades later the military lacked the agility to write a requirements in two years, let alone get 10’s of thousands of new systems deployed on aircraft as Terman had done.  How was this possible?  In 21st century terminology we’d say that Terman built the Radio Research lab into a customer-centric organization doing agile development. And Vannevar Bush with OSRD had turned the U.S. military into an ambidextrous organization.

Just the Beginning
The public history of Terman’s involvement with the military ends when he returns back to Stanford at the end of the war. Nothing in his biography or any Stanford history mentions anything as exciting as his work in World War II. The public story of his last 20 years at Stanford, in the 1950’s and ’60’s, seems to have him settle into the role of the kindly dean and innovative provost.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

The Secret Life of Fred Terman in a War you never heard of in Part VII of the Secret History of Silicon Valley.

Filed under: Air Force, Secret History of Silicon Valley, Technology | Tagged: , , , , | 19 Comments »

Killing Innovation with Corner Cases and Consensus

Posted on April 22, 2009 by steve blank

I was visiting a friend whose company teaches executives how to communicate effectively. He had just filmed the second of a series of videos called, Speaking to the Big Dogs: How mid-level managers can communicate effectively with C-level executives  (CEO, VP’s, General Managers, etc.)  As we were plotting marketing strategy, I mentioned that the phrase “Speaking to the Big Dogs” might end up as his corporate brand.  And that he might want to think about aligning all his video and Internet products under that name. 74HGZA3MZ6SV

We were happily brainstorming when one of his managers spoke up and said, “Well, the phrase ‘Big Dogs’ might not work because it might not translate well in our Mexican and Spanish markets.”  Hmm, that’s a fair comment, I thought, surprised they even had international locations. “How big are your Mexican and Spanish markets,” I asked? “Well, we’re not in those markets today… but we might be some day.”  I took a deep breath and asked, “Ok, if you were, what percentage of your sales do you think these markets would be in 5 years?”   “I guess less than 5%,” was the answer.

Now I mention this conversation not because the objection was dumb, but because objections like these happen all the time when you’re brainstorming.  And when you are brainstorming you really do want to hear all ideas and all possible pitfalls.  But entrepreneurial leaders sometimes forget that in startups, you can’t allow a “corner case” to derail fearless decision making.

Corner Cases
A corner case is an objection that may be:

  1. technically reasonable
  2. may have a probability of occurring
  3. its probability of occurring is lower than your probability of running out of money.

I’ve noticed that corner case comments are directly proportional to the intelligence of the people in the room.  The smarter the team the more objections you’ll have – and they’ll all be technically and theoretically possible.

Corner Cases and Consensus are For Large Companies
Carefully considering each and every possible outcome before you proceed with a decision is something large companies with large revenues, shareholders and employees need to do.  

Achieving consensus about every corner case from each stakeholder in the room  is something large companies with large revenues, shareholders and employees need to do.  

Unlike large corporations, startup meetings are not about achieving consensus for every objection raised.  They are about forward motion, momentum and feedback loops (i.e. Customer Development.)

Calculate the Odds
The heuristic I suggest is: hear the corner case objections, make the objector calculate the odds, if the potential damage estimate is low (probability of the event occurring multiplied by its ability to put you out of business) keep the meeting focussed and move on.  If you do this consistently your team will catch on.

You’ll be spending your time on what matters, rather what’s theoretically possible. For a startup “No Corner Cases” needs to be an integral part of your corporate DNA.

Any startup that’s striving for consensus on corner cases instead of speed and tempo will be out of business.

Focus on Speed and Tempo

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The Secret History of Silicon Valley Part V: The Second 100 years

Posted on April 20, 2009 by steve blank

When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.
– The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

I always had been curious about how Silicon Valley, a place I had lived and worked in, came to be.  And throughout my career as an entrepreneur I kept asking questions of my VC investors and friends; Where did the valleys entrepreneurship culture come from?  How did Silicon Valley start? Why here?  Why now? How did this culture of “make it happen” emerge, etc.  And the answer came back much as it did in my past jobs; Who cares, get back to work.

After I retired, and before I started teaching at Stanford, Jerry Engel, director of the Lester Center on Entrepreneurship, at U.C. Berkeley Haas Business School was courageous enough to give me a forum teach the Customer Development Methodology. As I was researching my class text, I thought it would be simple enough to read up on a few histories of the valley and finally get my questions about the genesis of entrepreneurship answered.

The Legend: HP, Intel and Apple
I read all the popular books about the valley and they all told a variant of the same story; “entrepreneurs as heroes” building the Semiconductor and Personal Computer companies: Bill Hewlett and David Packard at HP, Bob Taylor and the team at Xerox PARC, Steve Jobs and Wozniak at Apple, Gordon Moore and Bob Noyce at Intel, etc.  These were inspiring stories, but I realized that, no surprise, the popular press were writing books that had mass appeal. They were all fun reads about plucky entrepreneurs who start from nothing and against all odds, build a successful company.

popular-view-of-silicon-valley-history1

But no one was writing about where the entrepreneurial culture had come from.  Where were the books explaining why were all these chip and computer companies started here?  Why not elsewhere in the country or the world?  With the exception of one great book, no one was writing about our regional advantage. Was it because entrepreneurs keep moving forward and rarely look back? I needed to dig deeper.

The Facts: Vacuum Tube Valley – Our 100th Anniversary
To my surprise, I discovered that yes, Silicon Valley did start in a garage in Palo Alto, but it didn’t start in the Hewlett Packard garage. The first electronics company in Silicon Valley was Federal Telegraph, a vaccum tube company started in 1909 in Palo Alto as Poulsen Wireless.  (The 100th anniversary of Silicon Valley in 2009 went unnoticed and unmentioned by anyone.)  By 1912, Lee Deforest working at Federal Telegraph would invent the Triode, (a tube amplifier) and would go on to become the Steve Jobs of his day – visionary, charismatic and controversial.

* Federal Telegraph and Lee Deforest in Palo Alto are the first major events in what would become Silicon Valley. We need to reset our Silicon Valley birthday calendars to here.

By 1937, when Bill Hewlett and David Packard left Stanford to start HP, the agricultural fields outside of Stanford had already become “Vacuum Tube Valley.” HP was a supplier of electronic test equipment and joined a small but  thriving valley electronics industry with companies like Litton and Eitel and McCollough.

* By the late 1930’s when HP started, a small group (measured in hundreds) of engineers who made radio tubes were building the valleys’ ecosystem for electronics manufacturing, product engineering and technology management.

Who would have known?

Microwave Valley – the 1950’s and ’60’s
There isn’t much written about Silicon Valley during and after World War II.  The story of the valley post war, through the 1950’s, is mostly about the growth of the tube companies and the rise of Hewlett Packard and the birth of Fairchild.  The popular literature has the valley springing to life in the 1960’s with the semiconductor revolution started by Shockley, Fairchild, Signetics, National and Intel, followed by the emergence of the personal computer in the mid 1970’s.

But the more I read, the more I realized that the public history’s of the valley in the 1950’s and ’60’s were incomplete and just plain wrong. The truth was that huge dollars were spent on a large number of companies that never made the press or into the history books. Companies specializing in components and systems that operated in the microwave portion of the electromagnetic spectrum sprouted faster than fruit trees in the valley orchards. In ten years, from the early 1950’s to the early 1960’s, the valley went through a hiring frenzy as jobs in microwave companies went from 700 to 7,000.

This wave of 1950’s/’60’s startups (Watkins-Johnson, Varian, Huggins Labs, MEC, Stewart Engineering, etc.) were making  dizzying array of new microwave components; power grid tubes, klystrons, magnetrons,  backward wave oscillators, traveling wave tubes (TWT’s), cross-field amplifiers, gyrotrons, and on, on…  And literally across the valley, these microwave devices were being built into complete systems for the U.S. military by other new startups;  Sylvania Electronics Defense Laboratory, Granger Associates, Philco, Dalmo Victor, ESL (my first startup in the valley) and Argosystems. In the 1950’s and ’60’s more money was pouring into these companies than on the fledgling chip and computer companies.

* The 10x expansion in the number of engineers in the valley in the 1950’s came from the military and microwaves – before the semiconductor boom. And these microwave engineers were working at startups – not large companies. You never heard of them because their customers were the department of defense, the intelligence community and most often their devices were embedded in classified systems.

When I read the funny names of these microwaves devices… Backward wave oscillators, TWT’s, Magnetrons…long silent memories came back. These components were the heart of the electronic warfare equipment I had worked on; including Wild Weasels and fighter planes in Thailand and on B-52 bombers.  After decades, the story started coming home for me.

The Revolution Wasn’t Televised
What the heck happened here to create this burst of innovation?  What created this microwave startup culture in the 1950’s? And since there was no Venture Capital in the 1950’s/’60’s where was the money coming from?  This startup boom seemed to come out of nowhere.  Why was it occurring here?  And why on earth the sudden military interest in microwaves?

the-real-story-of-silicon-valley1

Part of the answer was that these companies and the military had forged some type of relationship.  And it appeared that Stanford University’s engineering department was in middle of all this. The formation of the military/industrial/university relationships during the Cold War and the relationship between Stanford and the intelligence community in particular, went on untold and out of sight.

While nothing I read described the specific products being worked on, or what specifically was Stanford’s contribution, there were some really tantalizing pointers to who the real customers were (hint, it wasn’t just the “military,”) or why was this work was being done at Stanford.

Few knew that the answers to all these questions pointed to just one guy at the center of it all –  Fred Terman of Stanford University.

* Stanford, the military and our intelligence agencies started the wave of entrepreneurial culture that today’s Silicon Valley takes for granted.

“U.S. Science and National Industrial Policy” on the Part VIa of the “Secret History” posts here.

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