Hungry Yet Humble

As an example, when Manning was a rookie, a reporter asked him what he was going to do with all the money he was just awarded in his contract, to which Manning said, "Earn it".  <-- bad ass

As for his perspective on playing football: Manning said that he tried to remember that we are not promised tomorrow, that it can all be taken away at any time.  He said that he tried never to take anything for granted and to appreciate each day.

To me, this situation with Manning offers a lot for entrepreneurs to learn from:

1) How to handle yourself in a tough situation with grace and class (see Peyton Manning's goodbye speech where he thanks Colts owner Jim Irsay despite all the awkwardness of the final months of his Colts career)

2) How to appreciate all the positive in a situation: recognize the incredible opportunities you've had to follow your dreams, even if things don't necessarily all work exactly as you had planned

3) Recognize that you are not guaranteed anything as a startup founder, early employee, or CEO.  You have to earn it every day, and guard your integrity and reputation fiercely even after you are gone. Manning didn't want to burn any bridges on the way out. He went out with his head held up high and he thanked everyone in such a gracious fashion

4) Appreciate and celebrate past accomplishments, but realize that the reality of the business world is that the models of the future do not necessariy fit in the containers of the past (via @rishad)

Reaction to Manning getting released was swift and wide ranging: One comment that I found interesting was from the Detroit Lions' Chris Harris on Twitter: “Peyton’s release puts things in perspective…….if Peyton can get released, WE ALL CAN GET RELEASED!!!!!” 

I try to constantly remind myself that I as CEO can be fired at any time by a company's board. Anyone can be fired - that's what we sign up for.  I try to keep this in mind because really, it's about not letting yourself get complacent about your place in the world.  If we are not moving forward, then we're not really moving. Manning is moving on - I wish him well as he moves forward.

I read a post today from Bijan (Spark Capital) that talks about how the progression of a startup is "hardly ever goes straight up and to the right".  There are also statistics out there that the business models of approximately 80% of very successful startup companies have had some sort of pivot in their lifecycle. 

Couldn't agree more. Why a pivot? And how can companies leverage a pivot in their model to accelerate growth?  

Why so many pivots?

Startups exist to solve problems in a new way. The "new" part of this means that more often than not, you are trying something that hasn't been done before, with the goal of building something from nothing. You are often attempting to solve a problem that either is a new one (eg. a changing media landscape creates new challenges) or one that can be address in an innovative manner because of a changing environment (eg. new technol

ogies enable advances where they were not possible before - such as broadband internet penetration and or smartphone adoption enables an array of new solutions to existing problems).

Because of the "newness" of creating a startup, there are many questions for which you will not have answers. You have to be able to make assumptions based on as much data, advice, and instinct as you can muster from your team, advisors, investors etc. And you do your best to execute like hell from there.

But along the way, as you are in the guts of building your solution to the problem that you are trying to solve, you learn a TON about the market in which you are now deeply and personally involved in.  Even if you have prior experience in that market, you will learn more and from a different perspective than you have had before.  You may recognize new opportunities or issues with assumptions that you had going into your venture.

An example: Fab.com

One example of a company that went through a pivot is Fab.com. Fab started out as Fabulis, a social network built on top of Facebook geared toward the homosexual community.  Founder Jason Goldberg is a serial entrepreneur and a very product-oriented person.  He led the company to build, iterate, and innovate quickly.  But at some point along the way, he and his team recognized an opportunity to build something different that might address an even larger market opportunity: a design-oriented commerce company.

Once Jason and his team made the strategic decision to pivot, they worked like mad to build an entirely new property quickly.  They relaunched as Fab.com - and grew extremely quickly.  They recently raised a large round of funding at a high valuation, a testament to the traction they are building.

Key need: Self-awareness

One of the biggest lessons to take from the Fab story is that they had the guts and self-awareness to identify issues, recognize a larger opportunity, and deploy resources aggressively to pursue the new opportunity. Having the self-awareness to make change is, in my opinion, the most difficult part of this process. Not everyone and not every company is self-aware enough to recognize ones strengths AND weakness, successes AND failings.  When you are in the trenches, it is extremely hard to be able to pull your head up long enough to look around and see what is really happening out there.  You can get so internally focused that you can often miss what the market is telling you.  The fact that some 9 out of 10 startups fail to achieve success is an indicator of a lack of self-awareness sometimes in startups.

Guidepost: Core Values

One thing that can help guide a company through a pivot is your set of Core Values. A company is often founded on a core belief or core philosophy. A belief that something is really needed, that a certain trend will emerge and prevail. In Fab's case, a focus on design and on creating a great consumer product experience applied both pre-pivot and post-pivot. Despite the upheaval of a changing your model or business, core values can hopefully act as a guidepost through to the other side.

Leveraging a Pivot

So let's say you are a startup, you've built something, you've identified a larger opportunity, and now you are pivoting. How can you leverage a pivot and turn it into accelerated growth?

First, you hopefully used market feedback and data to tell you that there was "gold in them thar hills" when you identified the potential pivot. As an example, in the case of Justin.tv, they found that one of the most popular categories of live web cam video content being broadcasted and consumed by their community was video gameplay content.  They decided to leverage this finding to create an entirely new property called Twitch.TV - a gaming discovery and gameplay community. 

Why create a whole new site? In order to fully go after the new opportunity (eg. gameplay) Justin and the rest of the Justin.tv folks recognized that they had to build a new browsing, viewing, and community building experience focused on the audience that was going to be using it.  Rather than having more general purpose video recording, playing, and browing features, Twitch.TV is squarely focused on gamers and their needs. This level of focus also makes it easier to feature advertisers who want to reach this audience.

Making the Turn

Something that isn't often discussed in terms of companies making a pivot is that it is often a gut-wrenching, soul-searching, painful experience in which many people inside the company can lose faith.  Some people are just not able to "make the turn" either mentally or in terms of the skills that may be needed for the new direction of the company versus the older direction. People resist change. People may feel burned out and exhausted, or they may feel disgruntled and disenfranchised. These are natural feelings. As they say, feelings are not right or wrong, they just are. 

But how someone responds to these feelings can be positive or negative. If a person bucks up and decides that they have the energy, drive, and passion to push forward (hopefully with as clear a mental slate as possible) then people can make the turn.

A company though, in order to survive if it has gone down this path, has little choice other than to Make the Turn, fizzle out, or plateau. In my opinion, in the life of a truly entrepreneurial technology startup, to grow is to survive. To plateau is to fizzle.  At Visible Measures, we made a pivot at the end of 2010, and it was a seriously long and arduous process to get to the other side (and by the way, we are still at the beginning of what we hope is a massively long journey). But we closed 2011 with almost 500% revenue growth over 2010 and about 3X the staff.  It has been amazing to see how the company now is so aligned around our new strategy. 

Making the Turn is hard, and few companies can pull it off. History is littered with the names of companies who could not do it.  Why is it so difficult?  Making the Turn requires a company to 1) rally as much of itself and its team together toward the new direction as it can 2) inject new talent, blood, energy, and skills where needed, and 3) go for it with total conviction.  Failing at any of these steps most likely means trouble.

Yes, it is extermely difficult to leverage a pivot into growth, but that is what Making the Turn is all about.

 

 

In this blog post, Fred Wilson is dead-on about your family being the co-founder of an entrepreneur's business.

Startup life can be brutal.  The people busting their butts to create something from nothing sacrifice a lot.  But the families of the people at a startup also suffer and sacrifice.

An entrepreneur's spouse (or significant other) being understanding, supportive, and often times directly helpful to said entrepreneur can often be the difference in a startup's success and (perhaps more importantly) a family's happiness.

Valentine's day = startup co-founder (Spouse+family) appreciation day 

"As a company, one of our greatest cultural strengths is accepting the fact that if you’re going to invent, you’re going to disrupt. A lot of entrenched interests are not going to like it. Some of them will be genuinely concerned about the new way, and some of them will have a vested self-interest in preserving the old way. But in both cases, they’re going to create a lot of noise, and it’s very easy for employees to be distracted by that. It could be criticism of something that we actually believe in. It could also be too much praise about something that we’re not doing as well as the outside world says we’re doing it. We’re going to stay heads-down and work on the business."

At startups, you are constantly having to reinvent yourself as you grow...even if your business doesn't change much, if you are successful, your company will expand rapidly and the type of company you are has to evolve with it.  To see such a large company rapidly innovate and create entirely new categories of services (eg. Amazon Web Services) is very inspiring.

It's been a tough week in terms of losing visionary leaders.  First, the once-in-5-generations Steve Jobs passed away. His example as a leader, game-changer, and absolute militant for design and creation has impacted billions of human lives.

But today, Ben Horowitz from Andreessen Horowitz has a great post about running a startup in the face of truly unpredictable adversities.  He recounts a story about Bill Parcells seeking council from his mentor Al Davis. Parcells had called Al Davis to get advice during a season in which so many of the players on his NY Giants squad were out with injuries. Davis told Parcells, "“Bill, nobody cares, just coach your team.”  Al Davis passed away today, and his impact and advice lives on.  

In a guest post on Techcrunch, Mark Suster reviews a new book by Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson called Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist.  This book exists to minimize the imbalance of information / experience between venture capitalists (who invest for a living and look at hundreds or thousands of deals per year) and entrepreneurs (who have perhaps been through a handfull of financings at best).  Truly the best vc's are the ones who earn the trust of entrepreneurs as partners, and having an even playing field in terms of information going into a deal is a great way to start a relationship off the right way.  I applaud this book, and this article is an excellent summary of "why it matters".

Dave Balter is one of the nice & cool CEOs on the startup scene in Boston.  I have known him for a while because our firms are both backed by General Catalyst Partners.

I respect Dave a lot for how he thinks and how he treats people.  In this awesome article he wrote for INC, Dave talks about how he got cocky as a CEO enjoying high growth and success. He discusses how his company may have failed if he did not correct his attitude and become more humble.

I think this advice is incredibly applicable to CEOs and to high performing people across the experience spectrum.  The willingness to learn, be coachable, optimistic, and work with a team toward a bigger goal are key characteristics of anyone who wants to grow, progress, and innovate. 

And big ups to Dave for the sale of his company! 

Rob Go is one of the founders of NextView Ventures - a new seed stage "micro-vc" fund in Boston/Cambridge.  His partners are Lee Hower and David Beisel.  Talk about a small world: Dave and I actually went to the same high school outside of Pittsburgh PA.  Anyway, I'm honored to be an advisor to NextView and I think these guys are absolutely fantastic for the startup community around here.

Here is a talk that Rob gave recently about identifying great founders of startups:

Had fun in my first national tv appearance, albeit brief.  Julia was awesome and so well versed!!!  

They first showed many stats (all from Visible Measures!) about viral video (essentially marketers creating video content to be viewed and passed along online).  Then we talked a little about how brands are utilizing this emerging ad medium (viral video / social video is THE fastest growing ad segment period).

The Shift to Consumer Control:

In case you are not familar with Visible Measures, we are a video analytics and advertising technology company.  We measure the entire world of video and try to help publishers and advertisers maximize their impact in it. The big shift that is happening across all media is that consumers are in control - they can choose to watch whatever they want, whenever, and on whatever device.

This shift in power to the consumer can be unsettling to brands.  The traditional model with broadcast media enables a brand to get more "airtime" if they spend more.  But with consumers in control to choose, they will naturally gravitate to the highest quality or most "viewable" content.  With Viewable Media, our newly announced video ad network, we utilize our world of video data to help brands get chosen more often.  When consumers choose to watch branded content, EVERYONE wins.  Consumers get more engaging experiences, brands get 100's of % points higher brand recall, and publishers end up making more money - which can hopefully enable internet video to remain mostly free.  

CNBC is running a weeklong series talking about the "future of advertising" - this week happens to also be the height of the advertising upfront season.I had a chance today to be interviewed by Julia Boorstin on CNBC's Street Signs to talk about "viral video" and what it takes for brands to get onto the Ad Age / Visible Measures Viral Ad Chart each week.  Here is a photo of the folks at our Boston HQ watching me on the tube.  So great to feel their support!  These guys are the driving force of the company and I am so humbled to work with them!

The segment was cut short because Jim Cramer showed up (he has so much energy!) but it was an honor to be asked to represent Visible Measures and the broader video sector.