GV, A VC That Enables Their Start-ups to Seize and Unleash Their Potential
If you’re unfamiliar with our project, Diving Into the Bay Area Work Culture,read our intro here
Company Snapshot
GV (Formerly Google Ventures)
Founded in 2009
Headquarter in Mountain View, CA, with offices in San Francisco, Boston, New York, and London.
Portfolio: 300+ companies (Slack, Medium, UBER, Nest, 23andMe and many more)
Who did we talk to at GV?
We met up with John Zeratsky & Jake Knapp at the GV office in San Francisco. We wanted to interview John and Jake because they are Design Partners at GV, meaning a big part of their work is running sprints with startups and help them develop.
Innovation Challenges
The Innovation challenges John sees startups struggling with and is getting their customers to care.
Collaboration & Creative Processes
With all the experience from working with startups and facilitating sprints, Jake, John and a 3rd colleague Braden Kowitz have written a book about the design of a sprint process for solving business problems by prototyping and testing ideas in 5 days. It’s the process they use in-house with their startups. The GV design team offers to facilitate this process with startups who asks for their help.
It’s a collaborative process that focuses on making problem solving a team effort in a way that allows all team members to share. Referring back to the title, this process seeks to leverage unused skills and knowledge in the team and bring it forward.
In terms of decision making in the collaborative process, the decision maker in the GV Sprint process has a Supervote and the final say.
John explained that in the Bay Area there is a respect for vision (maybe because of Steve Jobs). And that you can see the decision maker, with the Supervote as the owner of that vision, who will keep the much needed focus on it. That’s why in the sprint process, it becomes natural that there is a Supervote.
Work Culture
The beginning work culture of GV was in a way shaped by Google since many of the employees came from there. But now, as GV is developing, their culture is mostly shaped by working with the startups in their portfolio, and not by Google and Alphabet Inc.
In terms of team culture John and Jake told us that GV has an optimistic view on teams. Sometimes the startups teams that join GV, come with a clear vision, skills and knowledge needed, but might have not reached their full potential because of a lack of structure, habits or thinking “there is a certain way of doing things”, GV helps them to get there.
By introducing the teams to the sprint process, John believes the team and the culture naturally develops. When the teams try new processes and learn by doing and from experiential learning the team culture is affected.
Our Takeaways
What makes GV culture special, and maybe more the culture of the GV design team is the impact they have on their startups and the focus on bringing the power of design to startups. We see it as a way to foster the awareness of a balance between business intelligence and being aware of how you work as a company, which is important for succeeding.
John & Jake, thank you so much for your time, thoughts and inspiration :)
Meet John
Design Partner at GV.
Background: Youtube, Google & much more
Me in 3 words :
Pragmatic, Focused & Curious
Sign up for John’s Newsletter TimeDorks with Here
What is your best advise ? (John asked for who? and we said people like Helene and I)
Maybe it’s not my best advice, but it’s the advice that I believe in the most. There are two parts to it. The first is not to accept things the way that they are. Because things are not always the way there are for a good reason. Sometimes things just happen. They are accidental defaults about the way things are done. The people who make a difference tend to not care about the way things are. They change things and I think that is really important.
The other thing is people really need to prioritise environments where they can get in a lot of repetition, do a lot of projects and have a lot of opportunities to learn because I think most schools and companies are not set up that way. Often things take a long time. Even when I worked at a start-up our projects would take months and you just don’t get that many opportunities. You mess something up and you have to wait until the next project to fix it, try again or do something better. Particularly when people are early in their career, if they can put themselves in environments with opportunities to learn from your mistakes, then they will learn quicker than people in more conventional environments.
You can follow the GV design team on twitter, read Sprint stories and check out the hashtag #sprintweek if you’re curious about teams using the process.
I hope you enjoyed the read!
Co-written with Helene Schalck
Curious about why we’re doing this project? Read about it here
