Winter Intensive: Part 1

Driving back to Melbourne was the standard fair from Canberra. Instead of the standard 8 hours we ended up taking a good 10 hours because we stopped over at a small town called Holbrook named after a submariner who got the first Victory Cross for bravery.

Firstly we dropped by the local bakery which we were recommended to go to. The bakery itself was pretty good — the walls adorned with certificates of achievement for local, state and national competitions. From there we went to check out the submarine HMAS Otway that was embedded into the ground there as a sculpture and the submarine museum.

It seems that VC bravery award is awarded to those who risk the lives for 200 odd men going through enemy lives staying well beyond recommended dive times underneath the surface and dodging landmines and almost running aground. Whether that was intentional or accidental or not I have no idea but I couldn’t help but think it was crazy. I wasn’t expecting to stay much longer in Holbrook but one short trip into an antique store turned into a 1 hour extravagazana of buying things for Bindi and a few trinkets later we were on our way back to Melbs.

Back in Melbourne it was great to be back to a nice clean apartment, saying Hi to my lovely housemate, dumping all my clothes in the washing machine and just getting acquainted with my own bed again. Glorious. No more running around, just a bed to sleep in!

The next day was pretty much standard — life admin, cleaning the home and spending a motza food shopping to get all the comfort foods and produce that I’d been depriving myself of being in and out of different accommodations in Sydney. Having dinner with the folks was a welcome distraction and being fed with home-cooked meal never goes astray. I re-arranged a few meetings I had with a couple of people in the course as well as outside of it just because I didn’t want to be running around again. I had 2 days break before I had to go back to Uni for a Winter Intensive and I wanted to breathe a little bit before getting stuck into that.

I did manage to catch up with one of my colleagues from the course on the Wednesday morning and our impromptu chat turned into a 3 hour marathon talking about different ideas etc. Then I got my brain together to do some catchup compulsory reading prior to the start of Uni the next morning.

So far my impression of the intensive has been largely underwhelming. Granted I’ve just come off 4 weeks of intensive learning by working with experienced entrepreneurs who make a daily living of explaining and working through complex problems with corporates and startups alike however it further demonstrated to me how the course isn’t living up to its potential.

The purpose of the intensive is to partially re-cap on the last semester of learning and then also to set us up (ideally) in groups (or individually) for the second semester to working on a startup that we’ll get to pitch to investors for a $10K prize.

However as was expected — we walked into class and with the exception of a group of 2 and a few others who wanted to work alone, none of us had organised into groups and pretty much had only vague ideas of what we’d like to work on. Furthermore it was the first time that we had caught up with each other for 4 weeks and we hadn’t even had the chance to say “Hi” to one another before lunchtime when we were expected to form groups and have an idea of ‘what problem we wanted to solve’ and ‘what solution we’d have’ by the end of the day.

It was ridiculous. It was shades of the same mistakes being made from the first semester when we were organised into teams when we hadn’t yet even spent a few days with each other or knew what each other could bring.

More and more you could see that things were being organised not from the point of view of student learning and engagement but what fit best in terms of the academic marking structure and easy for the lecturers. Or in other words they have all their priorities wrong.

For an entire semester we were (poorly) taught to do design thinking, and I’d spend the last 4 weeks learning how to do it properly at Vivant where you take the time, talk to customers and respect the process and allow the problem you identify to reveal itself and the many different solutions to be ideated — rather than falling in love with a solution without talking to customers and then force fit it into a problem area.

You can guess what we were told to do instead.

It’s amazing how easy it is for consultants (both our teachers are consultants by background, and teach the MBA course, and not startup people) revert to type. We spent the last hour ‘learning’ to orientate your thinking around product creation/customer segmentation towards ‘jobs being done by the customer’ but instead of asking questions ‘What value are you bringing’ we were being asked ‘what is your monetisation strategy’ or ‘how big is your market’ or ‘what is your solution — a product/service or consulting’.

When it comes down to it, it seems like it is back to ‘doing as I say not as I do’ — which seems to be a recurring theme throughout the course so far. Now those are not unimportant questions but they are for another time and place once you firstly find a customer that you can help solve a problem for!

Instead of learning how to ‘startup’, we’re being given existing case studies of huge corporates who were started 22 (Amazon), 18 (Google) and 12 (Facebook) years ago and asked if their acquisition or vertical integration strategy makes them a ‘lean startup’. Ridiculous. That’s what you do in MBA’s not in freaking entrepreneurship courses. What we need to know is how these companies MVP’ed, what was their first 6 months like, how did they fund it, how did they solve a customer problem, what was the customer problem, how were they different to the other 15 companies doing the same thing, how did they get their first customers, who was on their team etc etc. These are all Startup problems.

Not ‘now that they’re a multi-gazillion dollar company is it smart for them to acqui-hire the Android team (Mobile), the DoubleClick team (Adwords), KeyHole team(Google Maps), Urchin Team (Analytics), Youtube etc etc — ‘Is it on strategy’.’

Well who the fuck cares? Firstly I just want to get a business to start. I’ll deal with those higher order questions of what plane to buy a Boeing or a Airbus later down the track when I have more money than God. For the time being these discussions are a complete waste of time.

I wanted to ignore the lecturers and work with my team to go through the process but we were effectively discouraged to do so because they wanted a business model that they could grade for efficacy by the end of the week. So instead I workshopped an idea (which I knew was easy to prototype and get customer feedback from) I had with with my group based on some ideas I had from Rozibaby on what I found worked well. I drove a lot of this as a ‘domain expert’ and my team helped me flesh it out and generate ideas around it.

I’m in a better position than most because I’ve done something prior and I’ve learned things (non-obvious things) about customer behaviour and problems in a specific sector so I can just riff off an idea and see where it goes. So far I’ve asked 4 different people to go through my MVP concept (which by the way was some drawings on a wall) and they all validated exactly what I thought they would do as well as used exactly (i.e. confirmed) the same words that we generated in our customer driver hypothesises.

This gives me more confidence to expand on this idea and prototype.

But this is the wrong way of going about it even if it is successful. We’ve effectively already chosen a solution (with a bias towards what is easy for me to test, not necessarily anything else) and are building out a business model before doing enough work around the customer problems, and before we’ve talked to ‘unbiased actual customers’ beyond our own networks.

Rewarding all the wrong behaviour — and reinforcing all the wrong ways of starting up a start up.

I am more willing to bet that the ideas from this method of doing things is going to lead to repeating the same mistakes from first semester and creating ‘solutions’ that have no customers, and doing the opposite of lean and building something before getting customer feedback.