10 Words that Grew a Global Company in 3 Years
Hello Medium Community! First, thanks to all followers that stayed here while my column has been entirely empty since I registered! I do love writing and sharing via reflective essays. However, being an entrepreneur of a fast growing company indeed is 7/24 and I just started Year 4 of this journey. My Columbia PhD years’ research-thought-driven blogs can still be found from my Columbia link. Time flies and our world changes so fast. I signed up with Medium with an intention to share things that can bring useful information to readers and also to participate in meaningful dialogues of my “woman-entrepreneur” life, especially on subjects of Startups, Robotics & AI, Education, Innovation & Creativity, Human Conditions, Space and so on. Jan 26th 2017 marks the 3rd birthday of RoboTerra, Inc and I have been sending annual letters to the company’s team, clients and community, shareholders and advisors. Haven’t finished my End-of-2016 team letter yet, here I wanted to share the very first annual letter I wrote to the RoboTerra founding team on last day of 2014. We were 7 full time, 4 interns at that time and now we have 70 awesome RoboTerrians in four offices serving clients in more than 30 countries in the world, proudly being the world’s first and best virtual robotics learning cloud.
The “10 words” summarized from year one’s experience of forming the company and winning the market, has been proving its core importance to every aspect of the operations and growth of RoboTerra. I will reveal in several updates later about how it is now.
My dear gang,
While the world is departing Year of 2014 and taxing into 2015 and many people getting ready to celebrate, I woke up at 5:40am, starting just another work day to continuing going through my 325 emails that I have left piling up since my schedule got overwhelmed in Sept. But there is one thing I must respond to timely, on this new year’s eve, which is to share with you all something I wanted to say to farewell the awesome beginning year for RoboTerra.
First I have to confess that whether to write this letter in English or Chinese bothered the hell out of me — indeed currently our entire team speak and read Chinese, however, RoboTerra started by working with engineers from different cultural background and will continue hiring the best talents globally, so with the belief and pursuit that “if I do something, I’d better keep it as accessible and sustainable as possible”, here is the letter I am writing to share with you all, with the world’s language for doing business and technological collaboration.
The above pendulum of “go Chinese vs. global” is also one of the most important business decisions I sort of have to spend a lot of time in being firm about, because there are both legit concerns: on the one hand a start-up needs to focus on its strategy and market specialty and China market is so essential for us; on the other hand, the nature of our business and future success will be dependent on an open world allowing students’ true international learning experiences without borders through our smart hardware and contents so on this dimension we feed on the same foundation of many tech companies’ success, “openness”. Thus at the beginning of the new year, I wanted to be firm on our key identity: we are a silicon valley company aiming at the global market; our design, R&D and talent strategy should always keep this in our mind.
Besides the language I should use for this “annual letter”, the second decision that I am having a hard time to make is the format of this letter. Those good CEOs that we all are familiar with write good letters and good letters should be inspiring, sincere, educational, and pro-company. Writing is a practice that I cherish as precious as all other human activities of “being creative” and the best form of creativity, as the widely-applauded contemporary author Elizabeth Gilbert wonderfully stated in one of her TED talks, is “let muse flow through you”. So I am simply choosing the format that I know is effective in summarizing, which I use in my “effective” diary book, a format that basically writes reflections on 10 things that worth being thankful for. So in this letter, I will share with you the 10 things that I am most grateful for about how we walked through RoboTerra’s first calendar year:
1. I want to thank everything that pushed us to have the SPEED we have had till this day. 天下武功，唯快不破。 I want to thank Yuan and Shaolong’s “I am in!” attitude and trust and vision they shared about the direction of the baby start-up and all of yours whenever you joined. There were times when we made decisions with lots of doubts such as “whether we should go to the Beijing Science Fair?”, “whether we should make Bo out and bring it to students?”. Now looking back of what those decisions brought to us, I have to say: making decisions for businesses will never be like proving a mathematical equation, it is about risking-taking. Making the best intelligent decisions with risks needs a strong vision about the future that can lead us through darkness, the unknowns.
2. I finally am able to catch up with sleep when back to the east coast on Dec 18th. I think I slept for two days then. It was not just the jet-lag, or the red-eye effect. It is what I want to remind all of us about: BALANCE of life and HEALTH first. I was completely exhausted after probably 6 consecutive months of “run, run faster!” mode starting from June when I started to go out and talking to investors, then the marketing testers, then building our team. When we moved to our new P&P office, I was falling asleep non-controllably when driving, and was not feeling as imaginative as in the summer- all strong signs that the physical body and brain calling for rests. As I mentioned at the beginning of this letter, I still have not finished all the working emails, or provided feedback to our entire teams’ wonderful work and business intelligence reports as I wished to. But I did not push myself in working through nights in recent month and I try to restore the healthy rhythm I used to have that actually built the foundation for me to run non-stop with many 18-hour-work-days for the past half year. We have had gym memberships for our Silicon Valley crew, which we will also get for our Beijing staff. Stories about no-sleep nights can be interesting when start-ups being pictures in reports or movies after IPO success, however we don’t live to entertain others, we live to sustain and thrive. Work out regularly, sleep well and eat well. Let us build awesome health to the body of ourselves and to our company.
3. Like how we build good health, it is the HABIT and what you do every day that matters to long-term success, not one-day-frenzies. Thus, here are some principles I would like to ask you all about shaping the habit we keep together in our company:
- Because of the nature of our business, there will be days that I or the regional head won’t be in our US Headquarter office or China office. Come to work in the office, every day. Even all other colleagues are out for business trips and only you at the location, come to work from the office. As a doctoral student who once always had the freedom of choosing whether to work from home (comfy and food and save time on transportation) vs. tiny office or library, I read a lot about how to make decision on this matter and personally benefited a lot of letting work happen at a work place, focused, non-distracted. Of course there can be times you have to work from home, like taking care of family members, house work, etc. Make a request and we will support it.
- “Swallow the frogs first” habit: always leave big block of time to yourself in the morning without being interrupted, work on the most challenging and important project, such as drawing the design cad file, drafting a contract, or finishing an analytical report.
- Keep a work journal, log your daily activities with to-dos and hours you spend on it, plan your to-dos for the next day. Share with me, S and Y and your project manager during that period of time. We are a 柔性组织，J and L have already been my PM on things. Y and I will share the template with all of us in Zoho Docs. We will use this daily/weekly work-report together with other project management tools. This is meant to help you better manage your own time on projects, but also to help the company to provide all our members better feedbacks and for objective performance evaluations etc.
- Do the logistics of your part so that we are running efficiently as an organization: this includes adding and closing your tasks on our Project management system, logging all client information in CRM , filling out your Zoho People detailed profile, submitting your monthly expenses on the last day of the month, logging your off days for vacation, sickness, or personal. We have a system in place and we run on it. Work tracked in the system will be counted officially, like the work report above-mentioned.
4. Together with habits, it is the DETAILS that matters too in making the best products and services. I verbosed a lot above about how to use our collaboration system in details. When producing client-facing contents, whether products, packages, services, contracts, emails, phone calls, anything, our expected standard is: It has to be PERFECT. If there are typos, mis-represented information, wrong versions out, design defects due to inefficient research and due diligence, it is considered negligence and disaster. I won’t yell at you as how Jobs did at Apple because we all make mistakes. But someone who does not care about details and does not pursue perfectness in the product s/he makes, this person just not a good fit for our company.
How to make perfectness happen? Trial and error — conducting thorough due diligence, testing sufficiently, proof-reading sufficiently, repeating sufficiently till it is perfect and then it is ready to be out for clients. One small example here to start your new year with a habit that forms perfectness: follow the file naming rule internally and with clients! E.g. XXX Training Competitor Analysis — Henry v 2.1 — YZ Comments -20141216
5. Why do we care so much about above mentioned details? It is about SCALABILITY. How to turn different individuals to work together like an army and produce great synergy for success? System. It is the system that we will customize together through using it and knowing it, that will help us grow our company, speedily adopt in new employees in our way of doing things and making new members productive. In your product design, or work on a contract write-up, always ask yourself: am I working on something scalable? Can this expand and serve more clients at a low or zero marginal cost? If you found such scalable inventions, design thoughts, management suggestions, share with us! Look at our new curriculum engine! From zero to billion dollars, only if we have scalability in our business model, product design, management system, that the company can scale up to billions in value.
6. I also want to thank all other great companies being great role models in making this world a better place through their products, who reminded us the importance of seeing from clients’ perspectives. On this note, I have to admit that my biggest regret for this year, is that I did badly in serving our clients due to over-stretched schedules. But this is not excused. I suffer strong blames and will make it first thing in all our work and efforts. In your work, always VISION THE BRAND IMAGE from clients’ perspective, see what will make them happy and do it. Basics should include timely response of emails, follow-up phone calls, caring conversations about their product experiences, etc., it should be in this company’s blood that we care the people who use our products and services.
7. Today we are empowered with great technology that can help us collecting information, lots of data for our decision making, studying market needs and so forth. Use DATA and ANYLYTICS. We will provide training of tools, share insights, provide templates, etc. for us as a data-drive company. Here I like to bring up one thing that I explained in great length in my meetings with some of our team members — data is not only valuable for us to use in evaluating our products results, users’ experiences, but it will be essentially the most valuable thing we will cultivate our long-term growth. So, again, in your design, be it hardware or online platform, or questionnaire, give valuable data high values.
8. Above, I have listed all the important elements that will make success happen, but a very mechanical term here is also very important: DELIVERABLES. Whether it is building the system we can scale on, or forming a good work habit, or thinking from clients’ perspective, what is THE measurement for all actions? It is the deliverables that finally will matter and we can count on. For a team, it is the execution we have together, for every member, it is the deliverables : tangible stuff that can be quantified, passed around internally for collaborations /comments /further production, or to market and transacted for clients’ usage. Here are two examples to help you understand this if it is not yet clear to you:
- If you work on design and want to call for a meeting: it should not just be a story in your mind, draw it out, print it out before your meeting, so that other people can see it and provide constructive feedbacks.
- If you write a market or competitor analysis: gather data from all aspects, base your conclusions on data, and your conclusions should include suggestions to things our team can do, e.g. not just “we need to change our website’s color”, but, “here are three colors I suggest our website to change to”. Or, not just “we need an updated version of our course description” but “here are the two versions I have developed for us to consider, please comment and revise”.
If you do not have a tangible, quantifiable, further-customizable deliverable, you did not finish whatever project you are working on and do not call it a “done”. As each of you will be leading different projects, make sure you always ask for “deliverables” from your members.
9. I am very grateful that till this day, our team is blessed with a sincere, respectful, honest and OPEN communication style. Keep it up. Talk about things: issues, problems, concerns, good or bad. Let us talk, one on one, in group, at lunch, at gym, a long walk. Ask for one, suggest one. If you feel communication is lacking on something, make it happen. The founders made a very hard effort in finding top talents, YOU, to form our founding team. And the founding team should be people who work for their own belief and mission and we are just a group of people having the same mission and vision that fortunately found each other. The only way we can keep this luck to grow a truly great company is not to break up over stupid mistakes like lack of communications. We are located at two offices, but distance should never be an issue as long as we make efforts for it.
10. Lastly, I want to remind all of us again, why RoboTerra is here, who we are and where are we going. RoboTerra is born because of the great human spirit that distinguished us as the unique creature on earth — our ability of being creative in making things — I regard this the highest human spirit and want to contribute to it. It might be seeded from my personal experiences and background but it is being shaped by all of our team members in our collaborative work. We want children all over the world to enjoy fun learning experiences that protect and develop their creativity, which will ultimately lead human society to the next stage of development with explorations and technological changes beyond our imagination. Yes, beyond our imagination. However, we still need to imagine. Imagine wildly, boldly, find the dots, connect them in the most imaginative ways, and try it in reality, that is how we progress.
I am thankful that RoboTerra was born because of pursuit for perfectness, for finding the fun learning solutions, for imagination in education technology. I thank you all for joining me in giving our company, each of us, a great beginning calendar year. And I hope the year of 2015, will be a truly amazing one, with lots of challenges’ ass-kicked by us together, because we are client-caring, detail-oriented, system-scalable, data-emphasized and imagination-driven, because we are RoboTerrians.
平庸的产品不值得做。 不好玩的事情不值得做。
Best of Never.
Let us have great fun together in 2015.
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