Talent Wins
All I know is that the best talent doing the best work will always win. What I don’t know is, what they’ll win or when they’ll win it.
Today, we celebrate a huge win from one of the most talented teams I know, Tom Giannattasio and the crew behind MACAW. I’m excited that I can now share the news that Invision has acquired MACAW! What started as an ambitious dream quickly became a product with industry evolving potential. And now, it’s ridiculous talent and technology will make one of the strongest upcoming leaders in the design industry, much stronger.
If you do it right, they say you never lose; you either win or you learn. We have certainly learned much and won more than our fair share over the past decade. It’s not always about winning, we just try to be slightly better than a coin toss. What I know to be right is that the best talent doing the best work will always win. It’s the only model I know, the only model I trust and the only model I invest with.
The best experience you can ever have is being a part of a great team. When great talent is given the opportunity to do great work, great things happen! Talent wins. MACAW was one of the first companies we had ever invested in, but, we didn’t invest in MACAW, we invested in Tom; we invested in the model!
The Model
We had a crazy idea once when we started our very first company; what if we built a company the way we wrote code. We had no idea how to build companies, but we certainly knew how to write code! Start with finding someone else who had already done something similar, peek under-the-hood, reverse-engineer it and then make it our own while learning the process along the way. Instead of starting a company, we deconstructed someone else’s.
We needed to survive and the consistent model seemed to be that we simply had to make more money than we spent; we needed profit. To get profit, it appeared to us that most had to have revenue and the driver of revenue came from customers who needed a product that serviced a need. Product seemed to be based on technology and it was people that developed that technology. It became clear to us immediately that the greater the people, the greater the tech, the greater the product, the greater the customer the greater the revenue the greater the profit … so, what we needed was great people, great talent.
At Twitter, they told me their focus was building a world-class product, their mobile app. At The White House, they told me their focus was serving their users, the American people. I don’t disagree that we should be building world-class products for our users. But, I have to wonder … what user is there to serve without a product to serve them and what product is there without someone to build it? It’s easy to get lost in a classic cart and horse debate; however, what I want us to focus on is the carpenter that makes the cart and the rancher that raises the horse … the talent. Because talent wins.
Our ambitions for success are often out of focus. There is an inherent desire to be blinded by everything but the finish line and what it takes to get there; in that, the who it takes to get there is most often overshadowed. There is a finite amount of energy available; and, every moment spent focused on something as grandiose as building a world-class product is not being spent on building a world-class team. If you focus on bringing together world-class talent and creating an environment where world-class talent can do world-class work, the natural and inherent result of that will be a world-class product. And, when you’re successful at that … you no longer have to find world-class talent, it’ll find you — it’s how Tom found us. Because talent wins.
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