Going All In On Content

Several weeks ago I spoke to a partner at Andreessen Horowitz (also known as a16z), the prominent, Silicon Valley venture capital firm.

He explained to me that his firm takes more of a "marketing" as opposed to a "sales" approach in attracting entrepreneurs to their funds. For people that know the firm, this may seem obvious.

When I started working in tech, the best venture capital firms did not take this approach. Their investments were driven by rooms full of young associates cold calling entrepreneurs to find the best companies. a16z has taken a different approach and has focused on getting entrepreneurs to come to them.

The way that they’ve accomplished this is through the production of great content — blogs, social media, podcasts, videos, etc.

The quality of their content is phenomenal. The a16z podcast has been a favorite of mine for years. One of their founders, Ben Horowitz, has written a best selling book, The Hard Thing About Hard Things, that has become an indispensable guide for people starting a company. They’ve also recruited partners that were great at producing content long before they joined the firm. Chris Dixon, now a partner at the firm, was a major inspiration for me to start writing this blog. He no longer blogs independently but you can find his archives here. I also followed Benedict Evans closely long before he joined the firm back when he was a mobile analyst in Europe and writing great stuff about tech. Now he's a partner at a16z. He’s arguably become the new Mary Meeker of tech with his annual State Of Innovation Talk.

a16z made a brilliant move by recruiting these two guys. I'm sure they're great investors in their own right, but I know for a fact that they're incredible content producers.

Case in point: when my company started talking to a16z about taking an investment from them I was very excited; not because I knew the firm well, but because I had an extremely high opinion of them that was driven by their content before ever actually meeting or speaking with anyone from the firm. That is the definition of great content marketing. High quality content that doesn’t ask the consumer for anything, but passively improves the perception of the company or product.

I just started reading Seth Godin’s new book, This is Marketing, and in it he reminds us of the right way to do marketing:

“The other kind of marketing, the effective kind, is about understanding our customers’ worldview and desires so we can connect with them. It’s focused on being missed when you’re gone, on bringing more than people expect to those who trust us. It seeks volunteers, not victims.”

Seth has been saying this in one way or another for almost 20 years (at least since writing the Purple Cow) and it’s a great way to think about content production. If a16z’s content went away, a lot of people would miss it. That’s a great standard.

Most marketers are producing some form of content these days. But very few are going all in. At last check, a16z sees about 2,000 qualified inbound pitches per year, only to make 20-40 investments. So going all in is clearly working for them.

Marketers don’t necessarily need to hire the top thought leaders in their space to create content. But it’s worth thinking about what going all in would mean for your brand and asking yourself if anyone would miss you if you were gone.

The B2B Growth Podcast

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to be interviewed on the B2B Growth Podcast with Logan Lyles. I really enjoyed the discussion. We touched on a few things I’ve been thinking a lot about lately; including how to structure a marketing team with sales objectives in mind, the different profiles of marketing leaders and some thoughts on hiring great leaders.

The Apps > Infrastructure > Apps > Infrastructure Cycle In Health Tech

Union Square Ventures had a great blog post the other day on The Myth of the infrastructure Phase. 

They argue that the narrative in tech that says there’s an orderly infrastructure phase followed by an application phase is a bit of a myth. Instead of orderly and distinct phases, they argue, it looks more like an ebb and flow. Apps, in many cases, drive infrastructure then that infrastructure enables new apps, and vice-versa. From the post:

“Planes (the app) were invented before there were airports (the infrastructure). You don’t need airports to have planes. But to have the broad consumer adoption of planes, you do need airports, so the breakout app that is an airplane came first in 1903, and inspired a phase where people built airlines in 1919, airports in 1928 and air traffic control in 1930 only after there were planes.

The same pattern follows with the internet. We start with the first apps: messaging (1970) and email (1972), which then inspire infrastructure that makes it easier to have broad consumer adoption of messaging and email: Ethernet (1973), TCP/IP (1973), and Internet Service Providers (1974). Then there is the next wave of apps, which are web portals (Prodigy in 1990, AOL in 1991), and web portals inspire us to build infrastructure (search engines and web browsers in the early 1990’s). Then there is the next wave of apps, which are early sites like Amazon.com in 1994, which leads to a phase where we build infrastructure like programming languages (PHP in 1994, Javascript and Java in 1995) that make it easier to build websites. Then there is the next wave of more complicated apps like Napster (1999), Pandora (2000), Gmail (2004) and Facebook (2004) which leads to infrastructure that makes it easier to build more complex apps (NGINX and Ruby on Rails in 2004, AWS in 2006). And the cycle continues.”

We’ve seen this trend in healthcare technology as well.

The first electronic medical record dates back to the 1960s when Dr. Larry Weed created the problem-oriented medical record that allowed his fellow providers to see notes, medical history, etc. in an electronic format (application). The first EMR as we know it that included additional functionality such as billing and scheduling was launched in 1972 by the Regestrief Institute, though adoption was extremely slow. In the 1980s, the need to transfer clinical information between providers led to the creation of Health Level 7 (HL7), a set of international standards for transfer of clinical data between different applications (infrastructure). By the late 1980s, low-cost personal computers (more infrastructure) allowed providers to do what Dr. Weed was doing at scale. The emergence of the internet in the 1990s (more infrastructure) allowed providers to use electronic medical records remotely, increasing adoption and leading to more use cases (more applications).

Today, thanks to meaningful use incentives enacted under President Obama, the vast majority of healthcare providers use electronic medical records and Dr. Weed’s initial application has become an infrastructure of its own. EMRs, originally just a collection of apps that sat on top of an infrastructure, have now become the infrastructure for a new wave of applications that can plug-in to the data stored within the EMR.

Now we’re seeing a new layer of infrastructure being built that will connect all of these EMRs to one another across the full continuum of care — acute to subacute to post acute to home care to ambulatory, etc. There are lots of organizations working on this (including my own) and there’s no doubt that success is on the horizon.

Once this “connective” infrastructure is built we’ll see a new wave of health tech applications that will be built on top and will bring enormous value to our healthcare system.

We don’t need airports to have planes, and we don’t need connectivity to have medical records. But pilots, patients, and providers are a lot better off when we do.

Uncomfortable Conversations

“A person’s success in life can usually be measured by the number of uncomfortable conversations he or she is willing to have.”

— Tim Ferris, The 4 Hour Work Week

I'm beginning to think this is the best piece of leadership advice I've ever read.

As a leader, when your company grows and the demands of your job become greater the need for crisp, direct and candid communication becomes increasingly important. At some level of scale, avoiding or delaying hard conversations with customers, prospects, peers, a boss, the board or direct reports can literally become disastrous. Decisions get delayed, expectations aren't set, people lack clarity, bad habits persist, and individuals and teams row in the wrong direction.

I've found that uncomfortable conversations, like most things, get much easier with practice. As you have more of these conversations you start to build an "uncomfortable conversation muscle" and these conversations seem much less daunting. When you start getting comfortable with the uncomfortable you really start to see the value. 

I'm not saying that one needs to walk around looking to have difficult conversations but a willingness to jump into a sensitive and thorny dialogue is crucial for success in leadership. Uunfortunately, the easy and natural thing to do for most people is to avoid or put off the hard conversations. The leader that doesn’t hesitate to go there quickly and is willing to address the elephant in the room will have a much higher likelihood of success than the leader that does what’s natural and easy. 

The SalesQualia Podcast

I recently had the chance to sit down with Scott Sambucci from SalesQualia on his Startup Selling Podcast to discuss: The Selling Process vs. The Buying Process in the Enterprise Sale. We covered a wide range of topics, including the most common mistakes entrepreneurs make when selling into large companies, selling innovation and building and managing teams. Check it out below on Soundcloud or on iTunes. 

Quick Decisions

Whenever I interview someone that recently worked at a startup that went out of business I ask them why it failed. How analytically someone answers this question says a lot about them. But the truth is that I'm mostly asking because I'm curious. I want to know what to look out for.

More often than not, the answer comes down to one thing: dysfunctional leadership. More specifically, for some reason, leadership didn't communicate well and couldn't make quick decisions. 

Tomas Tunguz had a great blog post on this topic recently, titled the Challenge of Uncertainty. From the post:

“The management team of a company is a decision-making and productivity chokepoint. Critical decisions flow through them. If the management team ruminates on most decisions, the company’s progress stalls. In a 100 person startup, five slow-to-decide executives limit the productivity of 95 employees. In a 1000 person startup, the ratio might be 10:990. There’s enormous leverage in a hierarchical organization if the leadership moves quickly. The converse is equally true. Sluggish decision-making halts all progress.

The cost of deciding slowly seems small. Just a day or a week of more research; one more experiment. But a day’s delay in a 1000 person organization costs the company more than $400k in lost productivity.”

Slow decision-making can be paralyzing for a company.

Management teams should check themselves occasionally on the speed and quality of their decision-making. It will almost always deteriorate over time. There are dozens of little things that can weigh down management and cause them to slow the pace -- too many direct reports, too many meetings, not enough meetings, new personalities, fear of telling the truth, personal issues, different communication styles, poor prioritization and on and on. All of these things will come up at some point. How well a leadership team weeds through this stuff and finds a way to continue to make good, speedy decisions might make the difference.

Some Advice For People Joining A Tech Startup For The First Time

Joining a tech startup for the first time is extremely difficult. If you’ve come from a big public company or a non-profit or the public sector it can feel really unnatural and even uncomfortable. The way you’ve operated in the past likely won’t work. Things will feel weird.

I’ve had the luxury of working in five different tech startups and have been in a position to see trends around the things successful people do and the things the not so successful people do. Here's some advice based on what I've seen over the years. I hope it’s helpful for people that are joining a tech startup for the first time. 

Be incredibly good at dealing with change. Depending on the number of employees in the startup, headcount can literally double in a month or even a couple of weeks. The number of customers serviced can double. Cash in the bank can grow by 1000x. A crucial employee can quit. A major customer can cancel. Because startups are small, change and its impact can feel radical. The company can become a different company in an instant. This is a strange thing. This doesn't happen in a normal company. In addition, in the early days, a startup is really just a hypothesis about solving a problem. And the way that the company is solving the problem will change constantly. For the employee, this means they are likely to have different bosses and jobs and roles and projects in a short amount of time. Learn to enjoy and thrive in this change. 

In your first 90 days do something awesome. When you join a startup, because of its small size, you’re going to have a lot of eyes on you — particularly from people that can make decisions about your future. Find a way to impress them. Take ownership of a project or a sale or a product or a process improvement and dive in deep and make it great. Be transparent about what worked and what didn’t. You’ll find that failure is generally not frowned upon and learning is highly valued. Doing something awesome is not necessarily easy. It’s not going to come to you. Have zero expectation that someone is going to set you up for success. Go get it and make it happen. 

Avoid playing politics. In larger companies, to get ahead you have to play the political game. This is much less true in startups. In a large successful company an employee can do nothing and play politics and the damage to the company is non-existent. The great employees aren’t playing this game and if you are you’ll stand out. People will pick up on it and you’ll get a reputation as someone that is political and it’ll be hard to shake. Get stuff done and be transparent about your success and learning. The downside of a startup is sometimes if one person doesn’t like you it can hold you back because there isn’t a defined system to move you forward. This is why you should avoid playing politics because it’s a quick way to get people that matter to not like you. The way to be liked is to produce results and share what you're learning.

Think short term and long term. This is one of the hardest things to do. It's not natural but it's necessary. The main thing that is going to get you ahead is your ability to produce short-term results and to be transparent about those results (and your learnings). You have to think short-term and show weekly if not daily progress. But you also want to have a longer-term point of view on your industry and where things are going. Your leadership team is getting paid to predict the future and that's hard to do. They will love the employee that can deliver short-term results but can also act as a thought partner in how the company should be thinking about longer-term strategy.

Make work a very big part of your life. There are times in our lives where we want to focus lots of attention on things outside of work. If you’re going through that time in your life then I’d encourage you not to join a startup. A startup’s cost of capital is generally extremely high. It costs the startup a lot of equity value to raise the capital needed to pay your salary. Because of that, there will be high expectations around your commitment and production. This is a crucial point. It’s simple math. It costs much more for a startup to employ you than it does a big company. And your impact is also greater. If you’re in a 30 person team your contribution, on average, is 1,000 times greater than the same person in a 30,000 person company. The startup is going to rely on you greatly. If you’re uncomfortable with that pressure you’re in the wrong company. 

Be humble. It is enormously difficult to effectively operate in startup if you’re not humble. It almost can’t be done. The way you are doing things today is going to change dramatically because it’s not right. Your product isn’t right. Your pricing isn’t right. Your process isn’t right. Your go-to-market isn't right. You have to have a perpetual curiosity about what can be done better, the humility to recognize it can be done better and the willingness to go out and do it better. If you can’t check your ego and do this well you will fail. 

Hire people that are better than you. When you’re hiring people there’s a temptation to make sure that you’re not hiring someone that can take your job. Do the opposite. Hire people that can take your job. This may not feel natural but I’ve found over and over again that people that are willing to take this approach win because they build A+ teams and that’s much better than the safety that comes from hiring a B team. A+ teams create exponential value. B teams create linear value and in some cases negative value. 

Be insanely commercial. Most startups are not sustainable. If they weren’t taking in outside capital they’d go out of business. Be very aware of this reality. This is not a comfortable situation for the executive team. By definition it’s uncomfortable. Embrace this reality and get onboard with leadership in understanding that it all could come crumbling down. Commercial success is the only thing that matters in the early days.

Challenge yourself to understand context. Because things move so fast and there often isn’t clear ownership and process, decisions made by leadership or other teams may seem dumb. People may seem incompetent. This generally isn’t the case. At one startup I worked in I had the luxury of working closely with the leadership team but I wasn’t on the leadership team. I’d be in the room and see how leadership made decisions and then I’d be out for drinks with my peers and they’d complain about how leadership was clueless and didn't make good decisions. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. The problem wasn’t that leadership was incompetent, the problem was that my peers lacked the context and lens that leadership was operating under. Challenge yourself to not dismiss seemingly bad decisions as people being uninformed and try to see the decision through the other person’s eyes.

Consider doing the impossible. If you dive into the history of most extremely successful startups they probably did something at some point that seemed impossible. This is true of most major success stories. For some reason, I always think about poker on television. Today, millions of people watch poker on television but there was a time when this was a crazy idea. The reason was that the great players would never agree to have the cameras see their cards during a game. And if the viewer couldn’t see the cards all the drama would be lost. But it was a non-starter with the players. No way. Never going to happen. But some ambitious TV producer saw the opportunity and didn’t accept that reality. He forced it and found a way to get the players to agree and now television poker is a multi-million dollar product. Consider the things that you think are non-starters or are impossible and try to see if you can find a way to break through. Don't be the naysayer. Be the one searching for the solution to the impossible problem. Find a way.

The Issue Of The Day

I’ve found that one of the most important things an executive can do is to regularly identify the “issue of the day” for their company or their team or their group and to address it with urgency.

Peter Drucker refers to this as identifying “what needs to be done?” Ideally, it's one thing, but definitely not more than two.

The discipline to continuously have this in mind and to have the emotional intelligence to be able to accurately identify the issue of the day is difficult and something that separates great leaders from the rest.

The issue of the day could be a number of things: some are opportunities, some are problems, some are strategic, some are tactical, some are elated to business problems, some are related to people problems. An example could be launching a product that will create a large growth opportunity or retain a specific set of customers; onboarding new managers and making them into productive leaders or something as small as fixing a commission policy or plan that is frustrating for top salespeople. The key is the ability to recognize the issue and measure its importance and urgency in comparison to the hundreds of other burning issues that could be addressed.

One of the most difficult things about determining the issue of the day is that different people will often have different perspectives on what the issue of the day actually is. The board, the CEO, the executive team, the line managers will often have different opinions. Getting alignment here is crucial. And, just as important, if alignment can’t be gained across all relevant stakeholders, the executive must make the call on what's most important now and focus on that thing more than any other.

Silo And Un-Silo

Back when I was working at Next Jump, an e-commerce company that enabled big brands to offer their products and services at a discount to large employers and customers of large consumer marketers, our primary objective was to drive spend through our website.

My specific job was to drive user acquisition. I was focused on acquiring more companies to buy the product for their employees and then to get employees (users) to register an account and keep coming back. My colleague, I'll call her Jane, was in charge of site merchandising and had the job of converting those users into buyers once they came to our site. So my job was to get people to our site, and her job was to get people to buy once they arrived.

Every week our teams would meet to review results. We’d start by focusing on the total spend on our site during the previous week. Some weeks the numbers would be up and some weeks they'd be down. In the weekly meeting, our leadership would look at Jane and ask what happened during the previous week. Frequently, Jane would look at me and say, “we didn’t have a lot of spend on the site because we didn’t have a lot of traffic.” Other weeks I would look at Jane and say, "we had plenty of traffic but that traffic didn’t convert into spend."

This was obviously unproductive. We were pointing fingers at one another and defending our impact on the overall number which meant that nobody was responsible for the overall number.  

Our solution to this problem might seem counterintuitive: we created silos.

We came up with something we called “the box.” My team had the job of getting people into the box (get people to the site) and Jane's team had the job of making good things happen once they were in the box (get people to buy things once they were on the site). My primary metric was weekly unique users and Jane’s primary metric was conversion of those users (spend per unique user).

This changed everything. We set up specific metrics for each team where neither one of us could ever blame the other. My team wasn’t measured on overall spend (something we couldn’t control alone) and Jane’s team wasn’t measured on overall spend (something her team couldn’t control alone). We were measured on our slice of the spend metric (users and conversions) and if we both did our job we had a great week. This change created crystal clear ownership and accountability which led to lots of creativity and powerful initiatives to drive each teams' numbers. Our overall spend numbers started heading up and to the right.

Over time, though, things started to break down. Because we were so silo’ed my team wasn’t focused on the overall company goal, we were focused on our team goal. So my team would do whatever we could to drive users to the site regardless of the impact on spend. We would repeatedly promote offers from Target and Best Buy (brands that had 'mass appeal’ and would drive traffic but had relatively low value discounts with low conversion rates). This would drive a ton of traffic to the site, but the traffic didn't convert. Similarly, Jane was focused on conversion so she would promote the best offers on the site (30% off Juicy Couture, as an example). Users would come to the site expecting to see an offer from Best Buy and would see a great offer from a brand they had no interest in and a not so great offer from Best Buy. This led to a low-quality experience, lower spend, and user churn. Overall growth in spend began to slow down.

In response, we quickly setup processes to begin working more closely together. We had to fix the disconnect. We had to collaborate.

We built a monthly merchandising calendar that every team member could access in real-time. We set up several 10-minute check-ins so that the acquisition team knew exactly what the site merchandising team was promoting each day and which offers were converting at the highest rates. The acquisition team would send all marketing emails to the merchandising team prior to sending to users to get their sign off. We used data from the acquisition team to convince the mass appeal brands to offer deeper discounts. 

At first, these efforts forced collaboration. But over time the collaboration became much more organic. The teams became inclined to be collaborative. After a few weeks, the numbers started to head back up. That said, we definitely didn’t abandon the silo’ed metrics for each team. Hitting those metrics was still the primary job of each team. What changed was the approach we took to hitting each of our metrics. It was about transparency and collaboration and a broader focus on what was best for the company as a whole.

The point here is simple: not having silo’ed metrics is a bad thing and being too silo'ed is a bad thing.

As an example, sales teams need to have silo’ed sales metrics that they’re accountable for to force ownership and creativity and high performance. But if the sales team is only focused on one top line metric and nothing else, over time they’ll be motivated to close deals that may be bad for the company and will lead to high churn rates. They have to have a silo’ed metric but also be forced to consider what’s best for the company as a whole.

Companies get in trouble when they lean too far towards one side. Telling groups to just work together to drive an overall number leads to a lack of accountability and creativity. And too much separation leads to a lack of collaboration and focus on the broader goal.

Well run companies find a balance and learn to silo and un-silo.

Writing To Learn

Tim Ferris had a great podcast with Daniel Pink a couple weeks ago. I'm a big Daniel Pink fan. I highly recommend reading his book To Sell Is Human. 

In the podcast, Daniel talks about the fact that one of the main reasons he writes is not to teach people something but rather for him to learn something. And often, when he sits down to write about an idea part of the way into it he realizes that the idea stinks. Or that the theory he set out to write about is just wrong.

This really resonated with me. The reason I've kept writing on this blog for more than ten years isn't to tell people things I know that they don't (though if that happens that's great). The primary reason is that I learn through writing more than other medium. If I have an idea or a theory I find it enormously valuable to get it down on paper. I'm no different than Daniel in that I have literally dozens of draft blog posts in my Squarespace account that I haven't published because halfway through writing them I realized the idea wasn't good or was wrong or wasn't fully baked. 

I highly recommend that people write down their ideas on a blog or an Evernote or a personal journal. Writing forces you to focus and think clearly and consider alternatives and ensure that an idea isn't just a whim but a well thought out, actionable concept that matters. The clarity that comes from writing is invaluable.

For me, that clarity has been the best thing about writing on this blog.

How To Know You're Hiring Great People

Recently someone asked me how I get comfortable that I'm hiring great people. Obviously there’s a ton of work that goes into making a hire so I won’t go into all of the detail. But just before I’m ready to pull the trigger there are four checkpoints I use to make sure I’m making the right call.

1. I can clearly point to something about them (beyond functional expertise) that they can do (or I believe they will be able to do) at a world-class level.
2. Credible, smart, successful people say amazing things about them.
3. If I strip away their credentials, I'm still really fired up about making the hire
4. The reason they bounced from one job to the next doesn’t concern me, it inspires me.

There are obviously lots of other things I could add to this list but I’ve found that I'm generally making a great hire when these four things are in place.

Four Productivity Apps

Here are four apps that I've been using recently that have increased my productivity.

Accompany. This app will scour your calendars and see who you're meeting with in the coming days and weeks and will build out a profile for each person that includes news mentions, bios listed on the web and updates from their presence on Twitter, AngelList, Crunchbase, LinkedIn and other social networks. It pulls everything into a one-page profile. Just prior to your meeting it will send you an email with all of these details. Last week I was at the HIMSS conference in Las Vegas and found it invaluable. As I walking between meetings I could read through the manifest for my next meeting and get a refresh on who I was about to talk to. Following the meeting it adds the people you've met to your network and it will continue to push out updates. You can set preferences so you only get updates on people you want to hear about. 

MobileDay. I’ve been using this one for a while but just started using it more often. MobileDay scours your calendars for upcoming conference calls and pulls the conference call dial-in details into the app and pushes you a notification just prior to the meeting so that you can dial into the call with just one click. You just literally just click on the notification and it will dial you in. This is so much better than switching between my calendar app and phone app trying to remember a ten digit number to get dialed in.

Brain.fm is an app that has ambient sounds on a timer that helps with intense focus. I often listen to music when I'm writing but I've found that if I really need to focus on something for a sustained period of time the sounds on Brain.fm work a lot better than Spotify. Note that the app requires you to be online so when I’m on a plane or somewhere without access to the internet I'll use the Noisli app. Not as good but gets the job done.

Astro is an AI-powered email application. It's pretty amazing and I'm not sure I'm getting everything out of it that I could. The more you use it the smarter it gets. It does a great job of building a priority inbox based on the emails you open and the people you email often. And it has a bot that pushes questions to you about your contacts and makes recommendations and reminders to follow up on important emails. It also can track email opens and has a send later feature. I understand that there's a lot more coming as Astro is building a big AI company around the app. The sooner you download this one the better.