Today’s 10 Entrepreneurship Must Reads
From Google Ventures Perfectionism to Andreessen Horowitz Mission
I am passionate about finding and analyzing the highest quality posts on entrepreneurship from around the web. These are the best articles I discovered today. Please read my brief descriptions and definitely familiarize yourself with the actionable insights — or Key Ideas — of each article.
1. Why You Should Move That Button 3PX to the Left
When a product is close to launch, Google Ventures design partner Braden Kowitz becomes a perfectionist. “Each misaligned element or awkward interaction is like a thorn in my side. There’ll be a dozen tiny implementation mistakes that taunt me each time I run into them. Everything seems so broken.”
You need to notice the gap between functional and delightful and obsess over the little details. But there’s a very real tradeoff between perfecting the design details and building more functionality: getting the details right often means moving slower. These details, however greatly affect usability, and as long as you can keep a clear head about how long these details might take to fix, they are certainly worth fixing for the sake of the user.
2. Unlocking the Power of Stable Teams with Twitter’s SVP of Engineering
“Training people so that they aren’t hyper-specialized is one of the best ways to prevent bottlenecking,” says Twitter Engineering SVP Chris Fry. “That way, you never have to wait on an answer from that one guy who knows how to do Android. You can do so much more on your own.” By building teams that were cross-functional and stayed together for at least six months, Twitter has been able to survive the “bottleneck” that occurs when fast staffing of projects doesn’t keep up with the scale of your company.
“The only way to survive this transition is to create stable teams,” says Fry. “In the U.S., we have this cult of the individual, but I encourage leaders to think about the value of strong units.” While you want the teams to be together for longer, keeping shorter development cycles is still a very good idea. “By dictating shorter cycles, we were able to get all of Twitter shipping mobile at a high rate and at high-quality,” says Fry. “It all comes back to thinking about teams as the primary unit of scale.”
3. Customer Support is the Ultimate Learning Experience
Customer support can be humbling and occasionally painful, but if everyone in your organization participates you’re going to be better for it. Everyone will learn a ton. Even if you did a lot of validation before launching (as you should!), the minute you put your product into people’s hands, they’ll do all kinds of interesting (read: crazy) things. You’ll probably be surprised and confused at how they’re using your product. Some features will get a ton of use, others will get very little; and I bet that you would have predicted the opposite.
Most often, you just don’t know what people are going to do when they get their hands on your product. And customer support is the learning engine that can drive the company forward in terms of resolving usability issues, fixing bugs, prioritizing features, increasing virality/word-of-mouth and more.
Make your employees feel your customers’ pain. “If you’re building an accounting application for healthcare — how many of your engineers will use it naturally on a daily basis? If you’re building say a HIPAA compliance app? I’m not sure it’s something your sales reps would ever use if they didn’t have to sell it. It’s not natural. So what do you do? The answer: everyone in a SaaS company has to do a 2+ hour stint on customer support (chat, phone, whatever) once a quarter, minimum. […] Everyone can still learn a ton about the real customers, the real customer experience — just by talking to them, even just over the ol’ internet. And solving their problems.”
5. Want To Know How The Double Viral Loop Works?
“1. Choose the simplest way to connect people. 2. Enable new users to nudge existing users. 3. Push existing users to invite and share upon returning.” Kenontek’s beautifully simple description of the “double-loop playbook” belies its power. LinkedIn was able to apply these steps to great success by optimizing its famous ‘people you may know’ functionality.
Differentiating between regular users and “visitors” is also critical, since the distinction helps a startup to begin to understand which users are staying with the platform. Figuring out and tracking who’s staying — and more importantly why they’re staying — is essential to facilitating the transition from visitors to users.
6. Dick Costolo on What It Takes To Be A Good CEO
Twitter CEO Dick Costolo emphasizes the necessity of camaraderie and communication when it comes to being a successful leader. “[A] sense of team building, and making sure that it feels like a team, that you’re all pulling for each other and working together, […that] is what makes something work. And I think that’s something I just really pay very careful attention to.”
Additionally, Costolo tries “to be really present and there for the team, and to understand what everybody else understands. Because when you have that understanding of what everybody else understands, you can provide the proper context for the decisions that are being made, and help communicate those decisions. And then, it’s easier for everybody else in the company to feel like they have a sense of why decisions are being made.”
7. Where’s Your F Chord? What Guitar Teaches Us about the Quest for Mastery
There’s no two ways about it: achieving mastery in a given area is not fun. The example of the “F” chord on guitar, in which a player must contort her hands into an incredibly uncomfortable position, serves to highlight how consciously focusing on deliberate practice can improve a given skillset.
When surveying how you spend your time, it helps to ask “where’s my F chord?” In other words, one must ask “where in [my] schedule is the time dedicated to straining?”
“This type of deliberate effort is a pain, it’s why most people give up learning to play the guitar [and] why so many knowledge workers end up glorified e-mail sorters.” You’ve got to be willing to strain for the gain.
8. Inactivity and the Brain: Why Exercise is More Important Than Ever
Exercise keeps your brain healthy. Living a sedentary lifestyle not only greatly increases your risk of heart disease and other health issues, but research has shown that failing to exercise physically alters the construction of your brain. A Wayne University Study showed that rats who were sedentary had a much higher number of neuron branches, which could overstress the nervous system and lead to issues like hypertension. Moreover, exercise improves mental health, decreases chronic diseases, enhances sleep, and even reduces stress and improves your mood.
9. Why Fads Fade: The Inevitable Death of Flappy Bird
Looking at online games, Nir Eyal examines why certain media’s popularity wanes while others remain strong. Online games like FarmVille suffer from what he calls “finite variability” — an experience that becomes predictable with use. In contrast, “World of Warcraft — the world’s most popular massively multiplayer online role-playing game — still captured the attention of more than 10 million active users eight years after its first release. While FarmVille is played mostly in solitude, World of Warcraft is played with teams and it is the hard-to-predict behavior of other people that keeps the game interesting.”
While content consumption, like watching a TV show, is an example of finite variability, content creation is infinitely variable. Platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter all leverage user-generated content to provide visitors with a never-ending stream of newness. Products utilizing infinite variability stand a better chance of holding onto the user’s attention, while those with finite variability must constantly reinvent themselves just to keep pace.
10. Andreessen Horowitz — On A Mission
Mission-driven companies trump those with “mercenary instincts”, and will always be the “big winners”. Companies with a core vision that guides their decisions, even when these decisions might seem unwise with respect to conventional business wisdom, are increasingly successful in today’s startup scene. Companies like Facebook, Google and Apple have the additional leg up of being able to persuade the most talented employees to join them since, in addition to financial incentives, they can tell potential hires that working for them means “changing the world.”
Key Takeaways
1. The last touches to make a product perfect might be the secret ingredients that win loyal customers.
When a product is nearing launch, a few final items may need to be perfected. There are diminishing returns on the effort put into perfecting a product. After its main functionality is achieved, the additional finishing touches require a lot of work but may not have an immediate impact on the way the product looks and feels. So it may seem that the final 5% of work is not worth the amount of additional effort it requires, since the main 95% is ready. However, that last 5% of the product might be 80% of what will capture customers’ hearts!
2. Cross-functional teams that stay together for long periods produce the best results.
The traditional approach to projects by creating component teams—where a product is divided into components which then need to be integrated— is inefficient for a number of reasons. Agile programming advocates the use of stable feature teams, which stay together for a number of years, are cross-functional/cross-component and work on an end-to-end solution for a customer-centric feature.
3. Help Desk CEO — As an executive, maintain direct contact with customers even after your company has grown.
As a company grows, it is common practice for a specialized customer service department to field customer calls and complaints. While founders had the time to engage with customers directly in the early days of the startup, their executive roles take up more and more of their time as the company scales. However, customers remain the best source of learning, and engaging with them from time to time is the best way for executives to evaluate the impact of their own actions and decisions.
4. Develop good onboarding processes to convert visitors into regular users.
Attracting new users to your product is a big achievement, but turning a visitor into an active user is a greater mark of success for startups. User experience should be researched and optimized in order to avoid scenarios where a large number of first-time visitors do not convert into regular users.
5. User Turned Salesman — Make it easier for your users to promote your product.
Existing users should be incentivized to encourage others to use the product, thus increasing the customer base exponentially. For example, Facebook users with default settings receive an email notification when they are tagged in a post or photo, and the text is such that it entices users to visit and see where they were tagged. LinkedIn allowed users to endorse other users on specific skills, leading to a doubly positive effect — first, users understand that their own connections can contribute to their profile, so they are interested in growing their networks. Second, they feel a sense of obligation to endorse friends and colleagues in return, leading to exponential growth of the usage of this feature.
6. Understand how your team perceives something, in order to better communicate your vision and decisions.
Managers often have more information than their teams and communicate about actions and decisions from a higher-level viewpoint of the general situation. Team members might have much more limited information and therefore have a different view of the same situation. In order to communicate optimally, team leaders need to understand what their team members understand, and communicate on that level.
7. Deliberately and painstakingly focus on improving a specific skill.
After a study focusing on chess players, William Chase and Herbert Simon were the first to postulate that an average of 10,000 hours of practice was needed before someone became great at something. Recent research suggests that this does not give the full picture. It is not just a question of how many hours you spend practicing, but how you spend those hours.
For most of our activities, we focus on reaching a certain level of automation, so that we no longer have to think when we perform. “From this point on, additional time [practicing] will not substantially improve your performance, which may remain at the same level for decades.” In contrast, expert performers counteract automaticity by “actively seeking out demanding tasks — often provided by their teachers and coaches — that force the performers to engage in problem solving and to stretch their performance”.
8. Manage and replenish physical energy for better results at work.
While the general importance of physical energy is no secret, its contribution to daily tasks, even non-physical ones, is often underestimated. Physical energy is key to maintaining concentration and managing one’s emotions, both being necessary for a productive day at work. Tony Schwartz and Catherine McCarthy from the The Energy Project say that “inadequate nutrition, exercise, sleep, and rest diminish people’s basic energy levels, as well as their ability to manage their emotions and focus their attention.”
The Energy Project put a team of 106 employees at Wachovia Bank through a program where they were taught to manage their energy more effectively. Employees who were involved in the program “produced 13 percentage points greater year-over-year in revenues from loans than a control group did. They [also] exceeded the control group’s gains in revenues from deposits by 20 percentage points.”
9. Offering variable rewards increases the addictive power of a product.
Variable rewards lead to a dramatic increase in interest and addictive power. Psychologist B. F. Skinner first discovered the effect, when his experiments showed that mice would press a lever compulsively when the size of the reward (a small or larger piece of food) was random, compared to mice who would get the same predictable reward every time. Neurobiologists subsequently showed that dopamine receptors in our midbrain were responsible for this reaction on a biochemical level.
Nir Eyal provides another example, “While content consumption, like watching a TV show, is an example of finite variability, content creation is infinitely variable. Platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter all leverage user-generated content to provide visitors with a never-ending stream of newness […] Products utilizing infinite variability stand a better chance of holding onto the user’s attention, while those with finite variability must constantly reinvent themselves just to keep pace.”
10. Focus on contributing to a larger cause, one that is greater than the success of just your company.
Tesla Motors founder and CEO Elon Musk mentions how his company’s mission has not changed in around a decade — to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport by bringing mass market electric cars. The greater goal of sustainable transport (where Tesla may only be one part of the solution) is compelling and has provided Musk and his company with a lot of airtime.
Y Combinator partner Sam Altman says that this type of greater mission is also important for the hiring process, especially since the best candidates will likely already have jobs and you need to provide a compelling reason for them to move to your company.
