Death by detail: When data is dangerous

We live in a time when building a startup is increasingly becoming a science. The world is awash with ‘lean’ methodologies, ruthless A/B and multivariate testing and communities where ‘talking to customers’ is known as ‘customer discovery’. Is that signalling goodbye to the good ol’ ways of building a company? I’d argue not.

Data, of course, is a great leveler. Suddenly, every idea is an opinion that needs to be proved or disproved. It keeps the team on one page without hierarchical bias. Warm and fuzzy feelings of anecdotal growth are irrelevant.

In its most extreme, anal and obsessive avatars however, this culture can be fatal. 

  • You talk to 25 customers and ‘measure’ what they don’t like? That’s wrong - in all matters of science and arts.
  • You change the color of a signup button after 10 days of your website launch to see conversion rates? Nope, you can’t optimize before building.
  • You dive into five levels of detail before attacking obvious problems and die a death by detail?

A better way to understand data is that it helps you get comfortable with your counter intuition. To arrive at a mental state where the exact opposite of your expected result is equally obvious. Go beyond just objectivity and start telling your intuition that it’s ignored brother named counter-intuition is also important. It’s almost a deep, philosophical level where useful contrarians exist.

Let the science underpin your art. Not the other way round.

Vinod Khosla on Company Building

Have always enjoyed devouring his contrarian wisdom.

Is there a growing disenchantment with Social Entrepreneurship?

“Social entrepreneurship, which can be defined as doing well while doing good. The problem is that social entrepreneurs usually end up doing neither. This is not to say that companies should always maximize profits to the exclusion of everything else. But companies should have a specific mission. They should be solving some discrete, important problem. Social entrepreneurship fails that test. It has an incredible ambiguity to it. Is it actually good for society? Or is it simply approved of by society? Those are very different questions. If they are not—if what is good is simply what the masses approve of—progress is very doubtful, since everyone will end up doing more or less the same thing. Everyone will have a solar startup. Each will have some story about how theirs is slightly different. But query whether those are meaningful differences or just eccentric ones. In vast, competitive markets you often end up with mimetic competition.”

via Peter Thiel’s CS 183 at Stanford: Notes

The funny thing about risk

is it can be justified in retrospect. Say aye if you heard this before —

“When I look back three years, it was a risk that has made all the difference.”

With all elements for a great narrative present —a warrior in distress, a challenge, a war and a triumph— it’s rather easy to be swooned by a decision and then directly match that risk to this success. Which, of course, is not always a one-to-one co-relation.

Yet, it’s completely valid for people to paint this mythical picture. Consider it an emotional reward for the shots they take. No wonder the safe keepers have fewer stories to tell.

Update, 28 November 2012:  I wrote this back in April and few risky decisions later, this seems much truer. 

Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you’d like to like.

One becomes sharply aware, but without regret, of the limits of mutual understanding and consonance with other people. No doubt, such a person loses some of his innocence and unconcern; on the other hand, he is largely independent of the opinions, habits, and judgments of his fellows and avoids the temptation to build his inner equilibrium upon such insecure foundations.

— Paul Graham

Breadth vs Depth?

In many ways, that’s the audacious essence of Leveraged Dabbler: achieving breadth AND depth - in steady state. But what does that mean Monday morning?

There is a time for breadth:
- Building new learning. Collecting new enablers. Meeting new people. For novelty.
- But breadth-only serial starters earn a poor reputation. There are only so many Founder roles and fellowships you can hold before people wonder what you’ve actually accomplished! At least one BITS student, Nishith, saw through the B/S, as you see in his description: I am not a Founder/Director/CEO/CTO/CFO, neither have I worked with an NGO empowering women or feeding hungry children. I can eat, breathe, code and fart. I can do the last two particularly well.

There is a time for depth:
- Leveraging your learning. Leveraging your enablers. Leveraging your people. For scale.
- But depth-only focused actors are sometimes not noticed. There are only so many people who understand what you are excited about!

You need both breadth and depth. Don’t waste time figuring out which one at any moment. Pick and go!

P.S. I’m on depth right now :)

More Cars, Less Rocket Ships: The Lean Startup

My favorite excerpt from The Lean Startup book by Eric Ries.

An important feedback loop in an automobile is between the driver and the steering wheel. This feedback is so immediate and automatic that we often don’t think about it, but it is steering that differentiates driving from most other forms of transportation. If you have a daily commute, you probably know the route so well that your hands seem to steer you there on their own accord. We can practically drive the route in our sleep. Yet if I asked you to close your eyes and write down exactly how to get to your office—not every direction but every action you need to take, every push of hand on wheel and foot on pedals—you’d find it impossible. The choreography of driving is incredibly complex when one slows to think about it. 

By contrast, a rocket ship requires just this kind of in-advance calibration. It must be launched with the most precise instructions on what to do: every thrust, every firing of booster, and every change in direction. The tiniest error at the point of launch could yield catastrophic results thousands of miles later.

Unfortunately, too many startups business plans look more like a rocket ship than a car.

And what is it to work with love?
It is to weave the cloth with threads drawn from your own heart,
even as if your beloved were to wear that cloth.
It is to build a house with affection,
even as if your beloved were to dwell in that house.
It is to sow seeds with tenderness and reap the harvest with joy, even as if your beloved were to eat the fruit…
― Khalil Gibran
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