Today marks the beginning of yet a new season; a new cohort of startups. So far it has been 3 seasons of learning and reviewing our structures and processes with the aim of running with the best in the herd of startup incubators out there.
From defining MVPs, working with Agile Scrum, developing the Lean Canvas, expert sessions and co-creation sessions with the startups. While the modus operandi of the startup ecosystem is quite similar, there are still unique lessons to be learned and interesting experiences to be had.
For me this has been quite the learning experience. Mentorship was never “my thing”. I was always your typical developer. Hates talking; prefers to just get the work done. But then this role fell on my lap and I could have either run away from it, or taken and it and run with it. I chose the latter. And boy hasn’t it been the experience.
Note: I wasn’t there for the first cohort so I’ll just skip Act 1 and move on to to Act 2
Act 2:
Mid 2013.
When I took up my current role running product development at the Nailab, I came in guns blazing and cracking the whip at every turn. I was the wicked drill sergeant from hell. No jokes, no laughing. When I said jump the startup asked how high. Getting the job done was all that mattered. I demanded quality and anything short of that was unacceptable. I was soon to learn that things didn’t always work out as planned.
You see, I joined the incubator at the middle the incubation programme. At that time, the incubation period was 12 months and the that startups I met had already been there for about 8 months.
Most had little to no traction, they had become complacent with what they were doing, and were already looking for consultancy gigs to pay the bills. Soon enough, in-fighting among startup founders broke out. The tech co-founders felt that they were doing all of the work and the business co-founders were just sitting waiting for the product to be ready for them to start selling. The business guys on the other hand were complaining that the product was not up to scratch and so the could not sell it to the potential customers. This went on for a while. By this time the startups were broke, hungry and unsure of what the future held for them. Am guessing that when they started out, they had come in with their starry-eyed idealism of what the startup world would be like. Free Pizzas, silicon-valley-type million dollar valuations and early retirement. HA!
Within a short period of time, I was to learn the business, the tech and the teams that I was working with, as well as help quell the internal fires that were cropping up all over the place among the co-founders. After 2 months of being the drill sergeant it quickly dawned on me that my approach had to change — and fast. Being hard on them all the time just wasn’t working. I had already started making enemies way back, about a week into the role. I believe some would have pushed me off the balcony if they’d have had the chance.
I like to think that I am a pretty level headed guy. After talking to each team individually enemies became non-enemies (not friends just yet) and a lot of underlying issues came to light. Even though some were not explicitly said, you could tell that they were there.
Eventually, two of the startups decided to call it a day and the third decided to stick it out.
Lessons learned:
- Listen, not just to what is said but especially to what is not said. We missed a lot of telltale signs that the startups were having problems from early on.
- Don’t be too hard on people all the time.
- When things are not working, sometimes it’s just better to crash and burn and then decide if you want to start over.
Act 3:
October 2013.
The next cohort of startups were to come in the following month and we needed to quickly pivot as an incubator. This 12 month thing just wasn’t working and neither was being tough the right approach. We needed to do an overhaul of the process!
With this in mind, we put aside the previous curriculum and started afresh. We started asking the important questions:
- What did we do wrong?
- What did the startups need? What were their expectations?
- What did we need? (From the program and from the startups)
- Was there anything that we could use from the previous curriculum instead of throwing the baby out with the bathwater?
- Could we do this in a shorter period?
- How many startups should we incubate?
The truth is, we had done quite a few things wrong. After deliberations within the team, we ended up with a new curriculum that answered all the above questions.
Lessons learned:
- It’s always important to be hands on and listen to (especially) what’s not being said. I cannot reiterate enough how important this is. Startups go through a lot of internal fighting and problems that they are not comfortable speaking up about. If you are not observant things will get out of hand really fast.
- The startups are there for mentorship and guidance. Don’t spoon feed them but don’t be a jerk to them either.
- Make sure that expectations are clearly defined on both ends and that they are continuously reiterated.
- Don’t throw an MBA kind of curriculum on the startups. While business plans are important in the long run, they are not particularly relevant until a clear business model has been defined. Also, if they wanted to go to business school they would have done that instead of joining your incubator.
- Whenever you can, adhere to Parkinson’s law. (The notion that work expands so as to fill the time available for it’s completion). The incubation period was way too long from the onset so we decided to shorten that to 6 months; 3 months focused on intense product development and the next 3, on business development with moderate product iterations. So far, that has worked out great. We work with early stage startups — some whom come in with no product at all, while others have some form of prototype that quickly gets thrown away as they iterate to find market fit.(In future however, we might just lower this even further).
- When choosing startups, look at quality over quantity. The signal to noise ratio is quite low when it comes to good ideas and great teams. Better to focus your time on 3 or 4 high potential teams than 15 teams that will just consume much needed resources but with little to no results.
All in all, the past one year has been quite the year. It’s amazing how much we have pivoted our incubation process during that time. Nothing as validating as practicing what you preach! Build. Measure. Learn. Iterate.
The best part is — the more we do this the better we become.
