Addressing the Platform Pandemic
Let’s ask better questions of future startup founders
Alongside the global COVID outbreak, there is another not-so-deadly but easily contagious disease lurking around town, particularly rampant in innovation circles in the heart of Bangkok. You might have experienced its symptoms at its peak if you have ever been to a startup competition (a hackathon) or an entrepreneurship class. Affected individuals, mostly young entrepreneurs looking to change the world for the better or to get rich (or both) have a tendency to ideate with a singular mindset.
That mindset, for better or worse, is the unshakable belief that an app connecting users and stakeholders will solve all of life’s problems.
Welcome to the Platform Pandemic. Please allow me to elaborate.
Just last month, during the week before the New Year’s Songkran holidays, and sandwiched between corporate innovation workshops, my team of junior design researchers and I spent a little over 3 hours mentoring 11 student teams in a program for young tech entrepreneurs based at Chulalongkorn University (where I also teach). We had moved the meeting online due to an impending third wave of COVID outbreak in Bangkok (note: at the time of publication, we are essentially on lockdown). I was quite happy to be in the comfort of my home office, surrounded by house plants, as I doled out product, work, and — sometimes — life advice to eager ears.
Admittedly, it felt good to be sharing my experiences and failures with the changemakers of tomorrow. I’m sure my team would agree too that, overall, the session was positive, energy-giving, and time well-spent. While some questions fell within our user-centered design expertise (e.g. pain points, user experiences, and cultural narratives), others could be addressed from years of exposure to the startup scene (e.g. business models, first target users, scaling up — more on this later).
We focused our help on how the students should frame their ventures through the lens of user empathy. And generally, the students knew what and whose problems they were trying to solve so all we had to do was to help them clarify the specifics before big pitches.
How will their users feel about letting strangers charge their EV cars inside their homes? What value do recent retirees see in the re-skilling classes you are offering to them? Does custom tailoring men’s pants to reduce waste really require a technical solution?
This last question is reflective of a warped startup culture, here in Thailand, where scale is the be all and end all, right at the beginning. All 11 teams have, after 2 months of workshops and mentoring sessions, proposed a platform for coffee explorers, environmental fashionistas, mom-and-pops pharmacies, underprivileged high-schoolers, rush-hour parents, and insert your target user here. A platform, in this context, is essentially a digital marketplace that connects the demand and supply of a certain good or service.
So beyond buzzwords like empathy, design thinking, agile, pre-totyping, we have also apparently imported the “I’m making an Uber for X” punch-line from Silicon Valley.
Before elaborating on my frustration, I would like to state the obvious: I don’t have a grudge against digital platforms. Without social media and marketplaces that I use today, I wouldn’t have been able to keep up with the people I love (Facebook, Instagram) or nourish my soul with good books (Goodreads), good food (Grab), good music (Spotify), or visual inspiration (Behance). What I do question is the prevalence of digital platforms as the default solution thrown at whatever problem we see in “modern society”, as if providing a virtual space for merchants with the supply and users with the demand to meet is in and of itself value creation.
While not all teams proposed a platform that simply enable connections, the fact remains that every single team we spoke to in that program came up with some kind of digital-first solution.
How did we end up here?
Picking the wrong criteria for a startup context
Perhaps it was the “tech” in the name of the program that led students to think first and foremost of digital platforms. Or perhaps it was the success criteria of scalability set by the program organizers in the first place. The latter condition, to be fair, is likely by design: the funding probably came with stipulation around measuring the size of impact.
About halfway through that mentoring session, I messaged one of the organizers for the criteria that students must meet with their final pitches. I noticed that two (of the five) might have skewed our young entrepreneurs’ ideation because…
- 20% of their score is dedicated to “innovativeness and use of technology”
- 20% of their score is dedicated to “market potential”
The rest of the criteria are: sustainable business model (30%), organizational structure (20%), and presentation (10%). Though I did not further clarify these criteria in detail, I think there is a not unreasonable possibility that participants will extrapolate the combination of “innovativeness”, “technology”, and “market potential” to an Uber for My Problem Space solution.
In other words, they’re probably thinking: let’s propose a platform so we can check all the right boxes! These are the boxes that the “adults” — the organizers, funders, and mentors (me! oh, the hypocrisy of writing this article!) — have deemed to contain the formula for creating successful startups right out of the gate.
These boxes are, of course, created in hindsight, by looking at successful case studies of Tech Companies that have already Made It Big. There seems to be a disconnect here between starting small and doing well before scaling up and making meaningful change.
The “Adults in the Room” are asking the wrong questions
Looking back at my own experiences around the startup / innovation ecosystem, I noticed a similar theme of going big, too soon. I was reminded of the Bangkok Climate Change Hackathon that I participated in last year, where a series of seminars led to a 24-hour “hack” session. The theme, obviously, was to find solutions to tackle the impacts of climate change. Many of the teams joining were startups-in-the-making; groups of friends with an idea they want to validate or co-founders with a running operations (my friends and I were, in comparison, basically just hanging out with our pitch deck).
During the grand pitch event, I noticed a judge that regularly probes with the questions: How will you scale? How will you make your idea affordable / accessible to more people?
Oh, but what type of solution could *possibly* be scalable and accessible to a lot of people (assuming they have internet access and/or a smartphone)…?
I agree that these are perfectly valid and extremely important questions to ask of startups that want to self-sustain. Even more than that, I agree that climate change is a humongous problem that the time for small, individual changes is long over. But these these questions, however little air time they took up, also send a signal with two problematic implications.
First, that participants should think of a scalable business model immediately after (if not before) fine-tuning your solution to a user’s needs. Second, that future entrepreneurs making change through a “startup” model must always prioritize scaling efforts.
The first accomplishes a mild offense, in that young entrepreneurs will immediately default to an idea that is “mass-market”, and neglect the truth that needs vary within the same market, whether it’s for energy efficiency or coffee products. By asking about scale early on, we may inadvertently encourage people to jump to the numbers, the “average” pain, rather than consider the extreme needs that might produce the coolest, most effective innovations.
The second is more egregious in that there embeds an assumption that a startup is the vehicle to solve all problems. Having been a clean energy enthusiast through school and first few jobs, I do not believe that relying purely on market mechanisms and venture funding will get us to the GHG emissions reduction that we need.
We have a tool better suited to affect large-scale changes and that is called “policy”. If only we have a group of people who knows how to work with that tool.
Taking the judging criteria in both stories to their logical conclusions, questions about scale set up a vicious cycle — a positive feedback loop, in systems thinking terms — that tells young entrepreneurs to innovate through platforms in order to achieve impact.
And so, the Platform Pandemic spreads — one hackathon, one mentoring session, one well-meaning judging panel at a time.
Can we be kinder to our budding entrepreneurs?
Starting a startup is no easy undertaking, even if you’re not aiming for a unicorn exit. Not to mention that it’s all the rage right now to throw hackathons at BIG problems (like this one on air pollution by a telecom company, or this one on like everything energy, or this one for high schoolers) to surface BIG ideas that will save us. All hail the mighty startup!
Aside from the fact that our ecosystem could use a bit of scoping down in terms of product fit (i.e. let’s start a startup for the startup-type problems), I wish that not all hackathons here are created with the mindset of scaling up at any cost. Some problems like climate change, air pollution, healthcare, or basic social inequality during the pandemic will need the assist of policymakers. It is absolutely unfair to ask entrepreneurs to shoulder the weight of all the world’s problems, some of which we inherited from previous generations.
I find this whole situation particularly odd, considering that virtually none of the big tech companies that startups look forward to metamorphosing into started out at scale.
Let’s take FANG: Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and Google — each had their own small niche and unique value proposition, and then they looked ahead to what the big market could be. Facebook was an Ivy school exclusive while Amazon started by music and books. Netflix started with DVD rentals and Google, well, they had one brilliant algorithm. The founders might have all dreamed of changing the Internet but what is really on their Day 1 to-do list?
For the budding entrepreneurs, I propose we separate out the phases of empathy and scaling in our innovation-creation processes such a hackathon or a class.
What this means is that we should clearly allocate time and space for people to articulate the problem(s) first, and discuss with the teams what subsets of that problem might be good to solve through a startup.
After that, we can move on to checking for scalability, knowing full well that some problems — those in social justice, like gender-based violence and income inequality for instance — might be just as impactful sans scale in the styles of Silicon Valley. We need to help define startups as aiming for scaled impact, not just scale in terms of capital or user base (something I learned from the ChangemakerXChange community).
Eventually, this shift in approach for startup creation will also de-glorify the heroism attached to finding that solution that exit big. Which should, in theory, ease off the pressure a bit and help refocus startups on solving the right problems.
Wouldn’t this be a kinder way to support budding entrepreneurs in our nascent Bangkok startup ecosystem?
