Blitzscaling with Reid Hoffman: The Family Stage

Assignment 1. Write about the Family Stage principles that: a) resonated the most with you and b) surprised you

What resonated with me the most?

“As long as your mission is set you can change the rules.” — @Sam Altman

I have to admit, I didn’t always see the value of a mission statement. In fact, I don’t think I even knew what a Mission Statement really was until my 2nd year of University as a commerce student.

Back then, this definition meant very little to me. “Duh, of course a company needed to know its purpose. Next.”

And yet now, some 10 years later — having had some real work experience and being in the midst of launching my first start-up — I feel more like this when I re-read the definition back to myself.

It seems so simple and in a way it is. However, in another and more practical sense it isn’t quite as straightforward as one would think.

How I see it, coming up with your company’s mission statement is basically the equivalent to coming up with your company’s internal and external compass. Or in today’s world your company’s <Insert favourite map app here>. Aka, an all mighty “device” that has the power to continuously guide you to where you want to go.

Not exactly the easiest thing to nail your first time around. That said, once you are able to lock it down you will, as Sam Altman suggested, have the power to “change the rules”.

The more I looped Sam Altman’s comment -“As long as your mission is set you can change the rules”- through my mind, the more it seemed to resonate with me.

Let’s say for analogy sake you want to make your way to Stanford for the first time to attend a CS183C lecture in person. And lets say that you have your mission locked down (aka you have a device in your pocket that can reliably guide you there). You now have the power to adjust your route depending on real-time conditions. For instance, lets say you originally intended on biking there but on the day of it starts raining heavily. No problem, your mission statement/device can help you re-route your journey to the next best alternative that suits the current situation (product market fit). Perhaps you opt for public transit instead. Just like that, you adjusted the rules on how to get to Standford without adjusting the destination. Magic.

So even though we may “glorify failure too much” — according to Sam Altman — I have a feeling that we vastly under glorify the importance and power a mission statement is capable of granting us. Especially if what Sam says is true — “As long as your mission is set you can change the rules.”

What surprised me?

I heard a lot around the importance of speed during the Family stage of a start-up (Family Stage= less than 10-team members, 10,000 users and revenue less than $100,000.) And although it didn’t surprise me- we are in fact learning how to blitzscale — the comment that did surprise me was this one:

“If you are not embarrassed about your product you are releasing it too late.” — Reid Hoffman

The reason it surprised me is it seemed to both compliment and contrast the other lessons I managed to pick up from the assigned readings and the presentations in the first two weeks of class.

In terms of complimenting the other lessons, speed gave you:

1. The opportunity to experiment more which by extension gave you more data and case studies to work from — always a good thing.
2. The opportunity to collect more feedback from early users — which we were told was some of the best feedback you are likely to receive
3. A chance of maintaining a growth rate of 10% every week — which is what seems to be the going rate for most accelerators programs.

In terms of contrasting the other lessons, the idea of speed taking precednece seemed like it could contradict:

1. Providing an “insanely great” product.
2. “Delighting” your users.
3. “Winning the 10 year game”

Now, I am well aware there is often a trade-off between speed and quality, however, my question is to what extent? It never really became clear to me by the end where on the spectrum we should be aiming.

Accuracy vs speed?

Therefore my follow-up question to Mr. Hoffman would be: Does speed trump quality in the family stage, and if so to what extent? Could you provide some personal examples that have exemplified the speed vs. quality decision making process?

For instance, right now I have an MVP for my start-up. By definition it is in its infancy stage but it does give the outside world an indication of how we plan to structure our idea. For instance, how users will input information, what users profiles will look like, how users will interact with other users, how we plan to differentiate users, etc. However, what it doesn’t quite have is social media integration or a financial payment system set up — components we feel are essential for users to use the MVP. So my question is, do we spend another few months integrating these components so that users are able to use our platform for what it is intended to do, or do we invite a small subset of users right now, let them set up their profiles and integrate the other components as they become available? Said differently, is it more effecient to set it up from the get go, or is it more beneificial to launch, invite, reiterate, invite, reiterate?

Tribal Stage up next.