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What songs are in your personal soundtrack?

April 30, 2020 by Luke Szyrmer Leave a Comment

While fiddling around during the lockdown, I decided put together a Spotify playlist of songs I like, and that I found inspiring as a founder. Even though I have a reasonably eclectic taste in music, my roots will always be in rock. Rock and 80s hair metal were the audio backdrop to my mis-spent teenage years.

Just to call it out explicitly, I’m not really a fan of Gary Vaynerchuck “hustle” or Grant Cardone’s “massive action”. Being deliberate first matters (to me) a lot more, so you don’t fritter away lots of pointless energy. By nature, I’m more of a systematic strategist, which I think appeals to the deep tech founders I enjoy working with.

The theme song of my entrepreneurial style

In my own case…

If there was a theme song for my own style of new product development, it would probably be “Learning to Fly” by Pink Floyd.

Learning to Fly was released and massively popular right when I was still a pre-teen. You couldn’t not hear it on the radio for a period of a few months. It was the first time I was away from my parents for a few months, living abroad in Montreal with my family to pick up French. I had autonomy to explore and learn in a completely foreign environment. Safely.

Your riskiest assumptions are probably related to your prospects and customers. Establish empathy quickly with your target prospect, figure out what's valuable, and get your innovation into the market.

Learning to fall in a safe environment, before going skydving

And I had no idea what I was in for. I had the hormonal excesses of teenager-dom ahead of me. But this song nonetheless just kept playing over and over in my head. That song is ultimately full of hope and possibilities and everything I feel when starting a new business.

This song nails the feeling of entrepreneurship for me, at least my style of it. Initially difficult, but slowly through consistent effort and system building, everything eventually works. And I take off.

Also, it articulates one of the Launch Tomorrow core messages: test and validate before you expand. Especially when working from first principles. And when you do expand, keep testing in your growth until it really takes off.

You need to learn how to fly, before you can try achieving escape velocity. In fact, going for escape velocity before you know how to fly is the fastest path to a crash. There’s lot’s of advice on the details, but premature scaling is a real thing, especially among venture funded startups.

The Montgolfiers’ balloon

Flight was one of those seemingly impossible tasks for humanity, until about 100 years ago. The best of us, including:

  • Da Vinci’s sketches during the Renaissance
  • the Montgolfiers launching a duck, a rooster, and a sheep to impress King Louis in 1783
  • Sir George Cayley building a manned glider in 1849 to fly his coachman down a hill
  • the Wright Brothers finally achieving manned flight in 1903 on the sandy dunes of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina

We needed all of this to happen first, before Robert Goddard could starting thinking about how to conquer escape velocity, and come up with the idea of a rocket.

Why manned flight is a good analogy for the early stage

Source: Wikipedia

Arguably, it was the Wright Brothers figured out where it mattered most: getting humans in the air. Through systematic experimentation, they pulled it all together. There were a lot of instruments, a wind tunnel, and lots of prototypes until they figured out how to use the shape of a wing to lift a much heavier plane (that happened to be carrying a person too).

You don’t want to just jump off a cliff without knowing what you are doing, and the only way to truly know is through systematic experimentation.

At least until the coronavirus pandemic, we largely took flying for granted. But it’s one of the most amazing discoveries every achieved. And spawned an entire industry as a side effect.

What song do you find motivating?

Feel free to check out the full playlist on Spotify, and give it a whirl. And let me know in the comments or via email about any songs or playlists you find motivating, powerful and helpful, as I am curious. And I might want to nab and add it to my own playlist. 🙂

<< Help Yo' Friends

Filed Under: innovation, personal, release planning Tagged With: story, systemic

Why Covid-19 numerical models overlook the reality families face

March 19, 2020 by Luke Szyrmer Leave a Comment

It all started innocently enough.

As I’ve been working remotely for a few years, I felt I hadn’t been taking much advantage of it. So when my mom invited me to Cancun with my daughter who’s in preschool, I figured “why not?” As long as my team had everything they needed and were clear on priorities, I could go. Moreover, I could just work from abroad. The only real difference was my time-zone availability. Beyond that, nothing changed for them.

For me, it just meant getting up for 6 am meetings. But being much closer to the equator helped rationalize this. Particularly since I already had a team member in Columbia, even closer to the equator with 6 am sunrise, 6 pm sunset.

While there were a few news reports about Corona virus in Wuhan province in China, there didn’t seem to be much to be concerned about. My wife bought a box of face masks for our flight just in case. My daughter was excited about the face masks, at least initially. Kind of like Halloween.

You can probably guess where this is going.

Your riskiest assumptions are probably related to your prospects and customers. Establish empathy quickly with your target prospect, figure out what's valuable, and get your innovation into the market.

At the airport, when we were walking around with our face masks, people gave us somewhat awkward looks. Although we weren’t the only ones, we were one of a handful of people with masks. Both in Warsaw and later in Zurich.

When we got to Cancun, the world went #CovidCrazy. Suddenly, borders started closing, starting with the Polish one (for everyone except citizens) but we still had to get there in order to cross the border. We almost boarded our return flight but decided not to, as there would be two changeovers and a bus ride across the German-Polish border, with hours of backlog. Not ideal for travelling with a lot of luggage and a preschooler.

Then to get back to Poland, all of the connecting flights became impractical, because those countries shut down their borders. Even though we’d only be changing flights, we’d have to cross the border at the airport to pick up and drop off our luggage while changing airlines.

Finally, it looks like the Polish government looks like it may organize direct flights via the national carrier back to Warsaw. But still waiting on confirmation for this. Without it, we’ll be in Mexico until the international lock down resolves itself. Or more accurately, in self-quarantine so that we can travel at a moment’s notice.

We live in volatile times. It’s funny how I recently penned a few posts about proactivity, while remaining flexible and not locking into a rigid plan, as the optimal strategy. Clearly this is a mindset which helps now.

Like a number of friends with split up families with dependents around the globe, both kids and seniors, the realities of the advice that comes out of mathematical models are a bit more complicated than it would have been for me as a single or even childless young couple. Kids can spread the disease but not have much symptoms. Grandparents face the risk of death due to lack of absolute numbers of ventilators. All that said, I am happy that I am quarantined among family and able to take care of them and myself. I’m hopeful that this situation will play itself out eventually.

There must eventually be some kind of way to restart flights using some type of nearly automated pre-certification of health/lack of Covid-19. The Chinese have some kind of device that measure body temperature from a few meters away. We just need to start thinking through what we can change in order to continue containing the virus, while giving people some ability to remain mobile.

Also, there have been a number of efforts among makers to come up with technical solutions to the expected shortfall of ventilator masks, like that of my friend Sal: https://diyventilators.com/. If you are interesting in helping out, join the chat at that site and say hi.

<< Help Yo' Friends

Filed Under: personal Tagged With: covid, numbers, story

The Software Construction Metaphor is Broken

July 23, 2013 by LaunchTomorrow

Software Construction Metaphor Launch Tomorrow

Launch Tomorrow

Landing Pages for your Lean Startup

  • Free Tools
  • About
  • Members
  • Corporate Innovation
  • Blog

What songs are in your personal soundtrack?

April 30, 2020 by Luke Szyrmer Leave a Comment

While fiddling around during the lockdown, I decided put together a Spotify playlist of songs I like, and that I found inspiring as a founder. Even though I have a reasonably eclectic taste in music, my roots will always be in rock. Rock and 80s hair metal were the audio backdrop to my mis-spent teenage years.

Just to call it out explicitly, I’m not really a fan of Gary Vaynerchuck “hustle” or Grant Cardone’s “massive action”. Being deliberate first matters (to me) a lot more, so you don’t fritter away lots of pointless energy. By nature, I’m more of a systematic strategist, which I think appeals to the deep tech founders I enjoy working with.

The theme song of my entrepreneurial style

In my own case…

If there was a theme song for my own style of new product development, it would probably be “Learning to Fly” by Pink Floyd.

Learning to Fly was released and massively popular right when I was still a pre-teen. You couldn’t not hear it on the radio for a period of a few months. It was the first time I was away from my parents for a few months, living abroad in Montreal with my family to pick up French. I had autonomy to explore and learn in a completely foreign environment. Safely.

Your riskiest assumptions are probably related to your prospects and customers. Establish empathy quickly with your target prospect, figure out what's valuable, and get your innovation into the market.

Learning to fall in a safe environment, before going skydving

And I had no idea what I was in for. I had the hormonal excesses of teenager-dom ahead of me. But this song nonetheless just kept playing over and over in my head. That song is ultimately full of hope and possibilities and everything I feel when starting a new business.

This song nails the feeling of entrepreneurship for me, at least my style of it. Initially difficult, but slowly through consistent effort and system building, everything eventually works. And I take off.

Also, it articulates one of the Launch Tomorrow core messages: test and validate before you expand. Especially when working from first principles. And when you do expand, keep testing in your growth until it really takes off.

You need to learn how to fly, before you can try achieving escape velocity. In fact, going for escape velocity before you know how to fly is the fastest path to a crash. There’s lot’s of advice on the details, but premature scaling is a real thing, especially among venture funded startups.

The Montgolfiers’ balloon

Flight was one of those seemingly impossible tasks for humanity, until about 100 years ago. The best of us, including:

  • Da Vinci’s sketches during the Renaissance
  • the Montgolfiers launching a duck, a rooster, and a sheep to impress King Louis in 1783
  • Sir George Cayley building a manned glider in 1849 to fly his coachman down a hill
  • the Wright Brothers finally achieving manned flight in 1903 on the sandy dunes of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina

We needed all of this to happen first, before Robert Goddard could starting thinking about how to conquer escape velocity, and come up with the idea of a rocket.

Why manned flight is a good analogy for the early stage

Source: Wikipedia

Arguably, it was the Wright Brothers figured out where it mattered most: getting humans in the air. Through systematic experimentation, they pulled it all together. There were a lot of instruments, a wind tunnel, and lots of prototypes until they figured out how to use the shape of a wing to lift a much heavier plane (that happened to be carrying a person too).

You don’t want to just jump off a cliff without knowing what you are doing, and the only way to truly know is through systematic experimentation.

At least until the coronavirus pandemic, we largely took flying for granted. But it’s one of the most amazing discoveries every achieved. And spawned an entire industry as a side effect.

What song do you find motivating?

Feel free to check out the full playlist on Spotify, and give it a whirl. And let me know in the comments or via email about any songs or playlists you find motivating, powerful and helpful, as I am curious. And I might want to nab and add it to my own playlist. 🙂

<< Help Yo' Friends

Filed Under: innovation, personal, release planning Tagged With: story, systemic

Why Covid-19 numerical models overlook the reality families face

March 19, 2020 by Luke Szyrmer Leave a Comment

It all started innocently enough.

As I’ve been working remotely for a few years, I felt I hadn’t been taking much advantage of it. So when my mom invited me to Cancun with my daughter who’s in preschool, I figured “why not?” As long as my team had everything they needed and were clear on priorities, I could go. Moreover, I could just work from abroad. The only real difference was my time-zone availability. Beyond that, nothing changed for them.

For me, it just meant getting up for 6 am meetings. But being much closer to the equator helped rationalize this. Particularly since I already had a team member in Columbia, even closer to the equator with 6 am sunrise, 6 pm sunset.

While there were a few news reports about Corona virus in Wuhan province in China, there didn’t seem to be much to be concerned about. My wife bought a box of face masks for our flight just in case. My daughter was excited about the face masks, at least initially. Kind of like Halloween.

You can probably guess where this is going.

Your riskiest assumptions are probably related to your prospects and customers. Establish empathy quickly with your target prospect, figure out what's valuable, and get your innovation into the market.

At the airport, when we were walking around with our face masks, people gave us somewhat awkward looks. Although we weren’t the only ones, we were one of a handful of people with masks. Both in Warsaw and later in Zurich.

When we got to Cancun, the world went #CovidCrazy. Suddenly, borders started closing, starting with the Polish one (for everyone except citizens) but we still had to get there in order to cross the border. We almost boarded our return flight but decided not to, as there would be two changeovers and a bus ride across the German-Polish border, with hours of backlog. Not ideal for travelling with a lot of luggage and a preschooler.

Then to get back to Poland, all of the connecting flights became impractical, because those countries shut down their borders. Even though we’d only be changing flights, we’d have to cross the border at the airport to pick up and drop off our luggage while changing airlines.

Finally, it looks like the Polish government looks like it may organize direct flights via the national carrier back to Warsaw. But still waiting on confirmation for this. Without it, we’ll be in Mexico until the international lock down resolves itself. Or more accurately, in self-quarantine so that we can travel at a moment’s notice.

We live in volatile times. It’s funny how I recently penned a few posts about proactivity, while remaining flexible and not locking into a rigid plan, as the optimal strategy. Clearly this is a mindset which helps now.

Like a number of friends with split up families with dependents around the globe, both kids and seniors, the realities of the advice that comes out of mathematical models are a bit more complicated than it would have been for me as a single or even childless young couple. Kids can spread the disease but not have much symptoms. Grandparents face the risk of death due to lack of absolute numbers of ventilators. All that said, I am happy that I am quarantined among family and able to take care of them and myself. I’m hopeful that this situation will play itself out eventually.

There must eventually be some kind of way to restart flights using some type of nearly automated pre-certification of health/lack of Covid-19. The Chinese have some kind of device that measure body temperature from a few meters away. We just need to start thinking through what we can change in order to continue containing the virus, while giving people some ability to remain mobile.

Also, there have been a number of efforts among makers to come up with technical solutions to the expected shortfall of ventilator masks, like that of my friend Sal: https://diyventilators.com/. If you are interesting in helping out, join the chat at that site and say hi.

<< Help Yo' Friends

Filed Under: personal Tagged With: covid, numbers, story

The Software Construction Metaphor is Broken

July 23, 2013 by LaunchTomorrow

Software Construction Metaphor Launch Tomorrow

DIY strategy in setting up an apartment.

I dragged my feet up the cracked cement staircase. Next to the stairs, wild, thorny shrubs grew out of control. No one had bothered with them for years. A metallic pipe with black paint peeling off served as a fence. It was a snappy cold February day.

As we got to the top of the staircase, two massive guys got out of a parked sedan with an engine humming to keep them warm. In black, furry sport jackets, they tumbled up the stairs, with stubby legs sticking out from underneath rather big beer bellies. We were meeting with a builder named Slawek. Slawek was the last entry in our “beauty contest” of building contractors.

My wife and I had just bought our first apartment. We’d never made such a big purchase in our lives- ever. We had serious “skin in the game”. The housing market already started spectacularly nose-diving. We wrangled down the purchase price by quite a bit, relative to the area. The owner was desperate to sell an apartment he had rented out for over twenty years. It showed.

Unfortunately, neither of us had any experience with DIY, other than hanging up a picture frame, much less construction work. At least, I knew “Project Management”. Moving in from remote parts, we had to have the renovations done well, and finished on time. Otherwise, we’d be paying a both a mortgage and rent. We also knew that we’d be living with any mistakes for a long, long time.

Your riskiest assumptions are probably related to your prospects and customers. Establish empathy quickly with your target prospect, figure out what's valuable, and get your innovation into the market.

Everything had to be redone (electricity, plumbing, floors, walls, ceilings-basically everything), in one month at most. The scope was staggering, at least for a small apartment. It was probably cheaper just to build a new one.

We also wanted everything to be certified, and in accordance with the local regulations, since we know how important that would be when we’d be selling the place, based on recent experience as house-hunters.

Most of Slawek’s peers had a sheer look of terror when we laid out the scope and timeline-they started losing nose hairs. In contrast, Slawek and his buddy just smiled.

Slawek said, “Yes, sure, no problem. Three weeks should be enough, actually.”
“Even with the regulatory certifications?”
“Yes, sure”
“Ok,” I said, “in that case, you won’t mind a penalty for lateness, if you run over one month,” I suggested.
He flinched a bit.

I thought giving Slawek a buffer was benevolent move. At minimum, I wouldn’t feel guilty about imposing a penalty. He had some space for risk-for the unexpected. At the same time, he had to know we were serious about not missing our deadline.

“Yeah, one month. No problem,” he repeated.

This is one cool cat, I thought. Deal!

As the work progressed we visited every few days. Rather than actually being a builder, Slawek himself turned out to be a sales guy and an extremely talented project manager. While anything PC-related clearly overwhelmed him, as I had to help explain what an RTF file was, it didn’t stop him at all. He wouldn’t even install MS Project even if I paid him a few thousand extra.

At the same time, he had an intuitive grasp on timing, i.e. when to curse out one of his hired hands to “motivate” him. In his next breath, he was back to dishing out highly technical advice to us, packaged as stellar customer service.

I had severely underestimated how street smart the guy was. He was a real rainmaker. There was clear progress every single time we visited. This guy ate milestones for breakfast.

After a few slips of the original schedule, the builders gave back the keys exactly one month after starting; taking full advantage of the buffer I had given them. The work was well done. Visually, the apartment was everything we had imagined it would be. We could move in. We were happy. All our boxes were ticked.

A few months later, we were eating dinner at our dinky IKEA table, chatting away and…the room lights in the entire flat go out-all of the lights in every room, and many of the other lamps, including outdoor lighting.

Dropping my fork mid-bite, I ran to the circuit breaker. One circuit had popped. I realized most of our lights were on one circuit, which I had missed during the handover from the builders. Not only that, the circuit breaker kept popping back when we tried to set it. There was a serious underlying design flaw in our electricity.

I quickly realized the only way to fix it was to redo the wiring in the whole flat, but now-we actually lived in the apartment. It was painful thinking about it.

I flipped out, and started looking for Slawek’s phone number. I couldn’t get through. At the time of the renovation, he had said he was planning on leaving the country soon. We only wanted to get the electrician’s phone number, but no luck.

After scratching our heads, we realized we had received a certificate from the electrician. I desperately paged through old paperwork, and thrilled, I pulled out the flimsy-looking thing. All hope was not lost.

To add insult to injury, I realized, only now, that the certificate looked photocopied-many times. There were some scribbles on the paper, and I could make out a phone number. A bit suspicious, I jumped online to find out more about the exact nature of the certificate. It looked like a forgery. Not only that, it definitely wasn’t the gold standard certificate we thought we had bought. He had given us a no-name certificate, and we hadn’t even noticed it.

Of course, the electrician didn’t pick up the phone either, only responding to our queries with nasty text messages. To be honest, he had his cash, and he had no interest in providing us service “under warranty”, even if we paid for it. He knew exactly what the problem was, so he didn’t even want to try fixing it.

While we could temporarily introduce a few floor lamps, we had expected the lights to work after a fresh rewiring of the entire flat. That was unacceptable. By my standards, the ultimate result was not functional.

At the same time, I could only really blame myself, or to be more precise, the approach that I took. I had slyly slipped in a late penalty for delays. As a result, Slawek couldn’t let the electrician mess around any longer than the first week, if he wanted any chance of avoiding the penalty. I wanted to minimize my own risk, forcing them to take shortcuts.

Those shortcuts ultimately “broke” the deliverable in the long term. I had no idea about the interdependencies among their tasks. I wanted them to manage it, and I just pressured them to do work faster.

If the above was a software project, it would have been a massive success:
• Everything in scope was delivered
• Everything was delivered on time
• To be honest, we actually got a pretty good price given the initially perceived quality
• Didn’t need to use metrics
• Didn’t need to use specialized project tracking and handoffs, as popularized by MS Project

At the same time, the builders introduced a big, undetectable, architectural problem, which became a big, unpredictable, and nearly unfixable problem for the “users”.

The main cause?

The rush, the hurry-which I introduced as the moneybags.

Of course I could be angry at this electrician, but I had insisted on finishing fast. As a result, when they had to cut corners, they did…because I had clearly defined the criteria they need to satisfy.

When launching a new product, you are typically faced with the same problem. You want to deliver something quickly, in order to be first, in order to make a splash. You want first mover advantage. It has very concrete financial implications for you. In highly competitive markets, especially online markets, there are typically only a few large players.

In the late nineties during the dot-com boom, as new business models were being introduced, many of the segments had three players, and a handful of also-rans which typically didn’t have more than 10% market share. Nowadays, it’s not much different.

Whether you realize it or not, delay is usually the biggest cost you bear when launching a new product. It can mean the difference between a majority market share, and a minority market share for your product.

You risk making fewer sales if your competition beats you to a market. Even if they have more bugs, they will already be earning cash.

This is particularly true for startups. When there is big disruption, and you create a new segment, customers will only remember 3 three players in a segment at most.

In most markets, according to Ries & Trout’s booklet the 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, there is space for three players in your users’ mind. How many brands of toothpaste can you come up with, without checking a store?

More poignantly, do you know who the second person to cross the Atlantic was, without checking Google or Wikipedia? (Hint, it wasn’t Charles Lindberg or Amelia Earhart).

You are up against the limits of perception and memory, at least within your niche, and the clock’s started ticking.

<< Help Yo' Friends

Filed Under: delay, marketing, software Tagged With: story

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    Luke Szyrmer is an innovation and remote work expert. He’s the bestselling author of #1 bestseller Launch Tomorrow. He mentors early stage tech founders and innovators in established companies. Read More…

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