Prime Movers Wanted…With Deep Technical Insights
Technical insights are fundamental to creating disproportionately massive outcomes in modern business. We see those insights all around us, as 5 of the 6 most valuable companies in the world today grew out of them.
One of my greatest lifetime memories is a conversation with Jeff Bezos when I was a student at Harvard Business School in 2003. These were the days when Amazon had just begun branching out of core e-commerce and powering the back-ends for companies like Toys ‘R’ Us, Target, Circuit City and others. Wall Street was not looking very favorably on that ‘distraction,’ so I asked Bezos how he viewed his technology investments in ‘non-dotcom’ areas. His response was striking. He suggested that, “People think we are a Retail company dabbling in technology. But the truth is, we are a technology company that services the customer, and we are currently in Retail.” I’m not surprised that his insights drove him and his team, led by Andy Jassy, to launch AWS and turn it into the fastest growing Enterprise Software business of all time.
A key reason I decided to join Floodgate was the deep-rooted belief that there is nothing more powerful than a technical insight whose time has come.
In order to help the great founders build a technical insight into a future ‘Thunder Lizard’, I believe there are a few areas where I need to be the absolute best partner:
1. Anticipating roadmaps from the platform juggernauts: We are living in a time where the powerful, deep-pocketed incumbents like Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple are jockeying for dominance of the platform of the future — the public cloud and associated services for an always-and-everything-connected, always-accessible, intelligence-driven world. As the old saying goes, “When elephants fight, it’s the grass that gets crushed”. Knowing and anticipating what the roadmaps of the incumbents might look like, and playing Judo in the space, is a skill that will be extraordinarily important. Ignore these roadmaps at your peril (just ask any of the startups who are now competing against one of the 1,000+ services AWS announced last year alone)!
2. Finding attractive customers: As Ash Maurya said, “Life’s too short to build something nobody wants.” Navigating the priorities of economic buyers at large organizations, especially for technical founders, is never easy. It is often not just the technical superiority of the offering that clinches the sale; Having a set of innovative, attractive prospects — someone who is irrational not to buy your offering based on the 10x advantages your insight provides — is critical.
3. Helping to build the entire Value Stack: This is Floodgate’s framework for how companies can rapidly get to ‘Product/Market’ fit, super-fast, while laying the foundation to scale at world-class speed.
Having been a CTO for a publicly traded company and launching and leading our cloud business, I know what it’s like on a visceral level to translate innovative technology into closed business.
If you are a founder with a profound technical insight, I have decided to devote the rest of my career to help you. If you are a Prime Mover…somewhat who has decided to make a permanent difference by turning a technical insight into a massively valuable company…. I hope you will give me a chance to prove that I can be the best partner for your startup at the first step of its journey.
