Today we are opening our new Space for startups in San Francisco.
I can see that you are asking, what?
Well, it is a place to explore the latest technologies and learn how to build successful startups. It a great feeling to build new things and especially when you have the chance to dream about something and than move it forward so it become a reality. I am excited about this place, as it will give us a good option to help more and learn more.
Look below who open it 😉 Continue reading
That is the first thing you hear when someone is hearing about this for the first time. In my last two startups, I used it and it works quite good for us. Like in Agile / Scrum and all the other methodologies, you need to try and take what works for you. The magic in Kanban is the ability to keep most of the ‘things that works’ and gain productivity. If you like to do daily stand-ups meeting – keep them. If you push new version to production every week – keep it and the list goes on. The power of Kanban is in the ability to improve the communication and to put everyone on the same page, or a board in this case.
The Kanban technique emerged in the late 1940s in Toyota. It was their effort to invent a new approach to manufacturing and engineering. Line-workers displayed colored kanbans (=cards) to notify their downstream co-workers that demand existed for parts and assembly work. The system’s highly visual nature allowed teams to communicate more easily on what work needed to be done and when. It also standardized cues and refined processes, which helped to reduce waste and maximize value.
Very few companies got super bosses, but do we know who they are?
How can we find them?
Think on SNL and their amazing process to share talent and collaborate while each team member needs to push her parts so they will be aired.
I enjoyed this book by Sydney Finkelstein (Professor of Management at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College).
In this book, he analyzes the qualities that are shared by rockstar leaders who’ve transformed entire industries. They share a common approach to finding, nurturing, leading, and even letting go of great people. He used few interesting examples from different fields like football coach Bill Walsh, restaurateur Alice Waters, technology CEO Larry Ellison and fashion guru Ralph Lauren.
One of the strength points that startups got over big companies is the ability to run fast and try new things. That’s why it’s important to improve your prototyping abilities.
Rapid prototyping composed from quick iterations of these three steps:
The key to a successful rapid prototyping is revising quickly based on feedback. You should say ‘no’ to a lot of suggestions and let the data leads you. This approach helps teams experiment with multiple approaches and ideas on their way to a new product. It also reduces the risk by putting everyone on the same page (or in this case, the same image).
Use the 20/80 rule.
As a starting point, you can impress your colleagues when you suggesting it… You can start by saying something like: “Let’s work with Pareto distribution“. At this point of the meeting, everyone will look at you with admiration.
But more importantly, it’s helpful – For real.
Focus on the 20% of the key functionality that will be used 80% of the time. You wish to showcase how your product will work and later how it will look like. So ignore all the ‘little’ features that are not part of these core functions.
Coming to evaluate if a specific startup is a good option for you?
You should check it from several different angles as the risk/reward is very different from a mature company. The critical aspects that I will look for are:
What are the action items that will increase the odds in that battle to improve your monetization?
This is one of the most challenging aspect for every startups. After you build your application (or service) you need to measure all the actions that the users take. This is a learning mechanism that will let you iterate (hopefully quickly) and improve your product. Once you feel that you have a good product market fit and you are out of the alpha (or beta) modes it’s time to put efforts in the ‘Grow’ and ‘Earn’ parts.
Let’s see what are some of the tools that we can use.
It’s mostly depend on the angle you are coming to this good question. If you are the founder, valuation matters because it determines the share of the company you are going to give away (to investors) in exchange for money. If you are the investor, you want to make sure it’s the right deal in terms of risk/reward or give/get.
When you listen to experts in this domain, in most cases, the answer is something like: “It is a form of art rather than science”. But this is not very helpful, is it?
Let’s break the puzzle into few pieces and see how can we think on each one of them. Here are few questions to help us identify what we are doing in each piece. We start with ‘What we are going to solve’ (=problem) and with ‘How we are going to solve it’ (=solution). Later, we should see what is the potential (=market) and what are the risks (= direct/indirect competitors). We also need to show the team and why it’s capable to deliver. Continue reading
Last week, I had an interesting talk with a friend about the common set of skills you need in order to create a successful (big) project. In most cases, the planing phase is important but not the most challenging one. The execution is the real deal.
It’s the ability to push on when things are falling a part. As someone said: “Everybody has a plan until they get punched”. This is why grit is a critical aspect.
We later talked about another passion we shared: long distance running. It wasn’t too hard to see the similarity in characteristics of great entrepreneurs and runners.
From my experience, in both cases, it’s about the people that you meet in this clan and the willingness to help and support each other. In most cases, it’s not a direct competition, but rather a huge challenge to make it to the end. Where each individual define the ‘end’ differently.
Sure enough, someone already did a ted talk on this topic. Continue reading
In the past six years I had the pleasure to mentor hundreds of entrepreneurs and developers. For some, as an investor and for others as an external advisor or a domain expert. These days I’m doing it mostly as my day job which is really fun!
Here are some of the lessons learned over time.
If you are an entrepreneur who is asking:
“Why do I need someone to mentor me?”
Well, there are many good reasons, but check the graph below. Continue reading
These are the slides from my talk today at Google IL Office.
It covers:
1. Google’s past, present and a bit of the future.
2. Google’s 5 principles of innovation.
If you are an entrepreneur, there are some good principle to take to your venture (especially from slide 23).
Ido Green 