In an industry built around investing large sums in uncertain ventures, the best companies seek out the best investors, and gains accumulate at the top. Part 3 in a series.
Investing in software companies is inherently an uncertain activity. It’s called high risk, but highly uncertain is a better label. Yes, you’re taking a risk with money, but the real problem is the widely variant potential outcomes. If you invest in a restaurant, you are taking a risk but you will pretty much end up with a profitable restaurant, or lose your money. If you invest in a software company, you can go bankrupt, have a small but profitable company, sell for five times the money in, or end up with a world-spanning multi-billion dollar behemoth that turns everyone it touches into a millionaire. That dramatic range is why you can get a bank loan to start a restaurant but not a software company. It’s exactly why people invest in software, but also why it’s so difficult to do well.
There’s no proven method for managing that uncertainty. The most successful investors frequently get it massively wrong, and a playbook that worked perfectly in one circumstance falls flat on its face in so many others. Yet, even when they frequently make monumentally bad investments, the best investors keep delivering the best outcomes. If no one knows what separates the best from the rest, how can some firms or individuals keep winning?
Of course, many would disagree with my claim, they would say the best keep winning because they can tell a great company from a bad one, but if you look at the trends in venture capital you can see the industry as a whole has given up on a clear system, even if individuals still cling to deserving their greatness. Fantastically successful investor Paul Graham once said that he can be tricked by anyone who looks like Mark Zuckerberg. He’s since claimed that was a joke, but he built his empire by making more bets than anyone else, which is a strategy explicitly designed around the fact that he doesn’t actually know why some things succeed and others don’t. Disgraced investor Dave McClure started 500 Startups with the similar goal of just making lots of bets, rather than making any attempt at making “good” bets.
Even those who invest in venture capital firms have given up on knowing who’s best. Given a pot of money allocated to VC, limited partners will distribute it across many firms, knowing that they have to play many hands to get a winner. After all, the industry average return for venture funds is, ah, absolutely nothing. The winners win big, and the rest balance that out, so LPs need to put money in enough places to be confident they end up with the winners.
If no one knows the difference between the best and the worst, why do the winners usually keep winning?
Access.
Venture capital is all about access: Founders having access to capital, and investors having access to the best deals. If you’re a founder today and you have a choice between taking money from a top-tier firm that keeps delivering hits, or another firm you don’t know and who hasn’t done well, which do you take? Of course you take the best firm with the biggest network and most well-known brand name.
Similarly, if you’re an investor who’s helped take lots of companies public, how does your deal flow compare to those who are just starting out and who don’t have a reputation for building big companies? Of course the best companies come to you.
In other words, there’s an implicit matching algorithm, where companies that are obviously doing really well are able to work with what look like the best firms, and as a result they are able to reinforce each other’s success. The best firms look better because the best companies seek them out, and the best companies do better because they’re getting the chance to work with the best brands. (For all that I am skeptical of repeatable investment skill, I am a deep believer in the value of brands.)
Venture capital is defined by the asymmetric stresses pressed on investors and founders by the need for access; every entrepreneur stresses over how they’ll get access to capital, and every investor’s business model is built around managing deal flow. Entrepreneurs who already had a great outcome magically have no trouble raising huge amounts of money, and yesterday’s great investors have no trouble convincing today’s great companies to work with them.
This focus on access also helps to explain some of the churn the system experiences. If no one knows what makes a great company, how can the best investors always get access? They can’t. There are plenty of great companies that fail to get first-tier support early on. If they do raise money, then those who backed them end up looking like tomorrow’s geniuses, and the cycle starts over with them closer to the top.
This access-based sorting also helps to explain how the VC industry is so discriminatory. Less than 5% of investments go to women-led companies, and just having a woman founder ruins a team’s chance of getting funding , and the numbers are as bad for firms led by African Americans, for example. If we believed investors actually knew what they were doing, then we could only conclude that they were correct to exclude women and minorities from investments, that these founders just couldn’t build great companies.
Of course, the data clearly says otherwise: Founding teams with women on them significantly outperform male-only teams. Because investors don’t know how to pick a good company from a bad one, they are relying on access and reputation, and because they’ve never let women or minorities in before, they can’t now. Their “pattern matching” doesn’t hit here.
This matching algorithm that runs our industry is reliant on privilege and luck. Venture firms and founders are almost exclusively white men from expensive schools (with a huge proportion from just Stanford and Harvard), and if you were lucky enough to be an early employee at Facebook or Google (who have historically used the same sourcing requirements), then that’s a big leg up, too.
To be clear, I think some investors are much better than others, and entrepreneurs haven’t built huge, successful businesses out of sheer coincidence. It’s not that there’s no skill involved, or that the people who get so rich instead deserve nothing. It’s that skill is an over appreciated (and often small) part of what determined their success.
You will rarely find communities admitting that privilege and luck are what determine outcomes. Human nature itself has a deep aversion to accepting this. Instead, we do what humans have done forever: We develop myths.
Humans deeply believe that people get what they deserve, and deserve what they get, despite the evidence to the contrary. So many of our cultural biases are a story created to justify a reality we would like to perpetuate. For millennia we’ve been told that royalty was special, and that’s why they were in charge, when it was patently obvious that their ancestors were just the best and most ruthless at organizing enough troops to control a chunk of land. Genghis Khan was history’s greatest murderer, which enabled him to spawn kings and kingdoms that lasted for seven centuries, but you can bet his descendants didn’t use his skills at genocide as justification for their lofty positions.
Similarly, myths have grown around venture capital exist to explain the winners and losers. Somewhat like royalty, these myths help convince us that VC is more than privileged people using their positions to make lots of money. They must be winning because they deserve to win. Equivalently, people lose because they didn’t deserve to win. You could waste your life reading about how this founder got rich because they were smart and worked hard, or that investor succeeded because of their investment strategy, but you couldn’t consume a whole morning with the stories of equally smart founders who worked just as hard but went broke, or investors who applied that same strategy but somehow didn’t make it on the Midas list.
With these and related efforts, I’m optimistic that we can begin to peel back the myths about what makes a great investor, entrepreneur, or company, and instead begin building a more open market around investment and company creation. Only then can we hope to see venture capital include, enrich, and benefit all parts of the economy.
It’s time to develop new sources of capital for founders, to help them generate wealth through solving their customer problems without the massive failure rate. Part 7 in a series.
The venture capital world that funds the technology ecosystem appears to be specially designed to back the best founders working on the economy’s most important problems. This series has shown that it has instead evolved over time, with no higher purpose in mind than any other financial instrument.
This evolution is in many ways a strength, as by definition it is built on the successes of the past, but it leaves our ecosystem more blind than we realize. We can fear the fragility this engenders, but should instead see it as an opportunity to reach beyond its artificial limitations, to solve hidden or devalued problems. Technology funding’s demonstrated ability to change should give us confidence we can stretch it further, clearing new paths to success.
Wikipedia covers the history of venture capital better than I could, but it’s worth highlighting key epochs. The system as we know it was birthed by the windfalls from early funding wins, including DEC and Fairchild Semiconductor, so by definition there was no technology funding system in place at that point. Every deal involved people flying around the US collecting enough money to back a new venture.
These early big successes motivated a few people in the west to set up firms dedicated to funding technology companies — prior to this, the vast majority of American capital was in New York. Within a couple of decades, partially enabled by some regulatory changes in the US, there were enough firms around (including modern heavy hitters like Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins) that we had what felt like the first stable system, which of course led to over-investment and the first pull-back in the late 1980s.
What survived went on to fund the internet boom in the 90s, when a huge amount of wealth was created (and then destroyed) and this new ecosystem first made it into the public consciousness. Much of what we believe about venture capital comes from those days, but it was still changing quickly, with no seed funds, relatively small amounts of funding for software companies, and no obvious pattern of success.
Right now, the system looks dangerously stable. There are hundreds of seed and venture funds, all following the same playbook: Try to get their investments to the magic number of $1m in annual recurring revenue (ARR), raise an A round of funding, and keep on the funding train until you go public or go bust. There’s so much pattern matching going on that founders are contorting their companies to fit the funding schedule rather than discovering their destiny.
It’s important to recognize that this appearance of stability is a recent arrival. We might tell a story of how it’s a natural consequence of previous eras of success, but much of current best practice is cargo culting, copying the behaviors of the successful rather than understanding what made them work. If you step back even a little to gain perspective on the industry, you quickly see how much the system is still changing, and still needs to.
Don’t get me wrong: the system we have works. It is, essentially, functioning as intended, and any ideas or recommendations need to take into account not just what we dislike, but what makes it work. I hope this series has educated you somewhat both on how VC works, and why it works that way. As usual, when we dig deeper we find no villain at the heart of a web; we might not love venture capital, but it makes sense, and it works this way for good reason. And indeed, the system is working very well for a few people, and in the process is driving huge change in our economy and lives.
As much as the system of venture capital makes sense, we must ask: What sits outside? The industry generates money through positive feedback loops, but absence from the industry is merely an indication that something hasn’t worked, not that it can’t. What are we missing by doubling down on what we know, instead of exploring the unknown?
Investors are reliant on people near them, who resemble them, and who can absorb the weighty downsides of entrepreneurship. We’ve seen that investors don’t really know what separates great companies from bad in the early days, so they don’t strive to create the conditions necessary for gestation, and once a company is started, they do little for the winners and even less for those who fail. But don’t worry, all of this is hidden by the massive profits that the biggest winners generate for the top-performing investors, and the rest of the industry (while failing to meet its investment return goals) glides along in the afterglow.
(To think I was asked recently if I had become cynical about venture capital.)
It’s a funny thing. I grew up a communist (literally, on a commune) but have become a pretty big fan of well-regulated open markets (although they seem to exist only in theory; in practice we have lost the taste for effective regulation). A self-respecting capitalist can and should argue that this is a market, and it’s performing exactly as it should. I can hear it now: “Capitalism is inherently Darwinian, where evolution gives all prizes to the winners and the losers don’t live long enough to make it into the archeological records.”
It’s a fair point. Humanity can afford stretch goals like less collateral damage than the battle for life and death on the savannah, but we could ask for better even without that ideal. It took millions of years for nature to come up with the Dodo, only for it to promptly die off once it encountered outside species. How convinced are we that our apparently stable system is any more safe from an outside force?
The ultimate weakness in the Capitalist defense of venture capital is that for all the apparent competition we have a homogenous system. Shouldn’t we have multiple types of funding competing for the best companies and the best outcomes? That is, not competition between VCs who all work the same, but competition between different funding strategies?
Because there is no open market here. At best we have a dysfunctional oligopoly (is there any other kind?) with some churn at the top. For all the talk of disruption, everyone is trying to win by copying the winners, rather than seeking to disrupt them. The only people willing to step outside the current system are those who don’t have a choice because they aren’t allowed to succeed within it. Unsurprisingly, they find it challenging to compete not with another investor but with a whole system of funding.
As just one example, the most common barrier I hear to starting a new kind of venture capital is that the limited partners — that is, those who invest in the venture capital funds — would not be willing to support a new kind of capital. This is a perfect example of an ecosystem limitation, rather than a problem with individual players. I hear no argument that founders, employees, and customers don’t want competitive models; only that the source of capital would need to be educated, and that’s just too hard. Except… this whole industry is only a few decades old, and its creation required that same kind of education. Why should we expect a new kind of financing to be any easier to start, require any less systemic change, than the one we’re fighting against? And isn’t it ironic that an industry built on stories of disruption finds the idea just too hard for its own work?
That competition will show up eventually, though. We need it. There are too many software markets lying fallow, unfundable in the current model and thus deemed to be of no value. Someone will figure out how to finance those companies. And just as the first winners in venture were big winners indeed, the first few investors to step out of this world into a new one should make out like the oligarchs who laid the groundwork for our current world.
I’ve said before I don’t have the solution, but there are some market truths give me confidence there are better answers available:
The best way to make money is to hold high quality assets for a long time. If nothing else, Warren Buffett has demonstrated this is both the best way to make money and indefinitely scalable.
The majority of employment and wealth generation is provided by companies too small or too closely held to be public.
The steady state of good companies is cash-flow generation managed by long-term teams who take pride in their work. This is literally the entire history of for-profit enterprises. Any other solution must either fail or revert to this at some point.
None of these realities show up in modern venture capital. Companies can’t run on venture capital forever (although try telling that to Uber), and do usually need to show a profit to be sustainable (I expect Amazon begs to differ), but the companies that do either of these are explicitly leaving the world of venture capital.
It’s unquestionable that the financing structure of venture capital is tied in to this separation from market principles. The risky software companies we build today are funded via a structure invented to support the risky ventures of the 19th century: whaling. Suddenly the term ‘venture’ in venture capital makes more sense, doesn’t it? (Tragically, even though it was the days of slavery, those whaling fleets had better representation in some ways than current tech companies, with up to 20% of their employees being African American. Wow.)
We’re using an incentive structure that works perfectly to support individual voyages that might last a couple of years. Is it any surprise it is not great at building companies that last for decades, or have a high survival rate? In fact, whaling had a better survival rate than current venture capital, with more than 80% of the fleet surviving, and delivered better returns (14% IRR on average, and 60% IRR for the best). The funding perfectly matched the ventures.
I should not need to say this, but whaling is unlike company building. It’s unrelated to developing a product, it has nothing to do with creating a new market. It’s inanity to expect a funding mechanism built for one would work as well for the others. The fact that it’s making some people rich, and it hits a jackpot once in a while, should not confuse us.
Venture capital’s apparent stability convinces me it’s at its most vulnerable. Instead of continuing to fund disruptors, I think it will itself be disrupted.
If you’re a founder given a choice between a firm that kills most of its customers and one with demonstrated success at creating long-running companies that generate wealth for everyone involved, why would you pick venture capital? The only reason you do today is because it’s your only option.
Founders want this competition right now. Some want to build Facebook, but most want to build a great company, help their customers by solving a critical problem, and hope to get rich along the way. They don’t want a lottery ticket; they want upward mobility, entrepreneurial fulfillment, and to feel like they made a difference. Unfortunately, low-probability gambling is all the venture world sells.
The new models will start at companies run by women and people of color, because they’re the ones shut out of the current system, but as they start to succeed, they will start to pressure to rest of venture capital, and we will see just how stable the system really is.
I have tried in this series to help you understand not just what venture capital is, but that what you love and hate about it are intrinsic to how it works. I hope this deeper knowledge will help you make higher quality decisions about how to involve yourself in this world. Even more so, I hope it convinces you to seek out, or even create, other ways of funding companies, other ways of building them.
It’s time for founders to have truly competitive options for funding. Let’s go make it happen.
Software has the potential to increase productivity as much as electrification or steam power did, but its impact is stunted by its reliance on random interactions. Part 6 of a series.
The venture capital ecosystem bills itself as a meritocratic miasma of genius, with smart founders getting smart money from smart investors. In reality, there is an overwhelming reliance on privileged people bumping into each other at just the right time. This serendipity has spawned some great companies:
Warby Parker was started because someone in an elite graduate program lost an expensive pair of glasses.
Apple was started by a couple of guys who met at a hobbyist group in the computer heartland.
Google’s founders met when one of them gave a tour to the other when he arrived at Stanford for a CS graduate program.
But how many great problems are being ignored because we didn’t get that lucky alignment of particles?
The remodeling industry is a perfect example. It’s an 83 billion dollar market, yet it’s only now starting to see software solutions. The industry itself bemoans neglect by the software industry. The article linked above has some impressive stats about how much waste they experience:
“…studies suggest 30 percent of the construction process is re-work, 60 percent of labor is wasted, and only ten percent of losses are due to wasted materials”
Shouldn’t there be companies fighting tooth and nail over that market? Shouldn’t there be tons of solutions out there, spending money like Uber and Blue Apron are to acquire new customers and take a cut of the productivity gains?
Yet I’m in the late-stages of having a garage built at my house, and as far as I can tell software was only used during design, not actual production. One of the contractors we considered seemed to be an Excel wiz, but wasn’t using off-the-shelf software. How many months of productivity could have been added back into these teams’ lives if they had better tools? How much less disruption could I have experienced, and even, how much less could I have paid if my contractor could get three jobs done in this time because she was so much more productive?
(Did you notice that even I’m relying on the serendipity of my building a garage to illustrate my point that VC relies too much on it?)
In a rational world, every reasonably sized market would have a well-funded ecosystem of software companies vying to take it into the information age. When I got my home equity loan for the garage, I should have been inundated with offers from software companies to help improve the project. Heck, someone should have offered me the loan interest-free if only I required my contractor use their software. Instead, my project is late, costs me more, and makes less money for all the workers because it’s left out of the information technology revolution.
And that’s just one industry, chosen at coughrandomcough. What about all of the other industries the software kings have not yet anointed as worthy, filled with deeply skilled and energetic experts who aren’t lucky enough to run in the right circles, or live in the right zip codes?
Venture investors famously want passion for the problem they’re investing in solving, so much so that the companies also then demand that any employees also be passionate in turn. And we want our software companies started by developers, by product people, not by business analysts. Or carpenters.
So now to start a company you’ve got to have a software developer thrilled about and experienced in a problem, able to accept the risks that come with starting a company (e.g., health insurance and wage loss), who is living in or can move to San Francisco, and hopefully is a white dude who went to Harvard or Stanford. One way to look at that is how discriminatory it is, but another way is just how much you’re relying on everything lining up just right. It might be that you’ll find a Stanford-educated software developer who deeply cares about building houses and can take the leap into entrepreneurship. But what are the odds that that person has the right insight at the right time, and then can find the right people to partner with?
Twenty years in I’m still awed by the opportunity for software to connect, educate, and empower people, but I’m incredibly disappointed by how little of that opportunity we’re progressing against. I think our inappropriately slow revolution is in large part thanks to this reliance on randomness. We have got to get past this if we truly want to get the most out of software before the heat death of the universe (coming more quickly now with all the power being consumed to mine bitcoin). If we can build an environment that does not use serendipity as a crutch, I am convinced we can generate more great companies, and importantly these companies can cover a broader swathe of the economy, and be run by a more representative sample of the market.
Let’s look to biology to see how much of a difference shifting to a constructed environment can make. Living creatures are full of enzymes, which are basically proteins that speed up the rate of a reaction. These reactions are critical to the function of the organism, and without the enzymes speeding them up, life as we know it could not exist. (Conveniently, I did my senior thesis at Reed College on protein structure, so I’ve got some knowledge here.)
In most cases, the reaction that they catalyze (that is, cause to happen) would happen without the enzyme, but it would do so at a far slower rate. For instance, mammalian milk contains the sugar lactose. This sugar will break down in water into glucose and galactose of its own accord, but not quickly enough to digest all the lactose in milk you drink. Mammals have evolved the enzyme lactase, which causes this splitting of lactose into simpler sugars to happen much faster.
Enzymes are incredibly complex — lactase has 1927 amino acids in five separate groups, arranged in an amazing 3D structure:
A rendering of the structure of lactase
This huge structure is all necessary to enable the protein to place a lactose molecule near a water molecule in exactly the right arrangement to ensure the reaction happens immediately, every time, instead of eventually, sometimes. For all this structure, the site where the reaction takes place is quite small, just big enough for the two target molecules. Those 1927 amino acids mean the protein is about 37,000 atoms. Lactose is 35 atoms, and water is, ah, 3.
That’s a lot like designing a building the size of a sports stadium just to catalyze a meeting of two people.
How much quicker does the enzyme work? About 75% the world’s human population is lactose intolerant, meaning that if they drink milk as an adult, the lactose will cause adverse reactions instead of safely being broken down in the intestines. The rest express enough lactase that they are able to comfortably metabolize lactose, and thus can drink as much milk as they want. Again, remember that lactose breaks down in water on its own, just too slowly to be useful.
So here we have a situation where one of the major sources of calories around the world — cow’s milk — is enabled by this enzyme dramatically speeding up reaction rate.
What does this have to do with venture capital?
Again, venture today is heavily reliant on serendipity; that is, the right people bumping into each other at the right time in the right context. This is exactly how chemical reactions happen normally: Two molecules (e.g., lactose and water) live near each other, and every so often they bump into each other in a way that enables the reaction to happen. Most of the time, however, they fail to hit exactly the right setup, and nothing happens.
When the enzyme is present, though, its unbelievably complex structure ensures that the water and lactose molecules are placed into exactly the right orientation every time, and bam, magic happens.
The probability of a great company getting founded today is a lot like the probability of lactose degrading naturally: It happens, but slowly and infrequently.
I smile at the idea of complexes the size of sports stadiums built for speed-dating founding teams, but that’s not necessarily what I’m recommending here (although if that’s your plan, I’d love to consult on the project).
Even if we wanted to, I don’t think we could build a structure (physical or otherwise) like this, because we don’t yet understand yet what it takes to build a great software company, which means we can’t construct or evolve a perfect environment in which to make it happen.
All I really know is that what we’re doing now isn’t working. We’re not attacking the right markets, we’re not including enough people, and we’re not having a big enough impact on the economy.
For our ecosystem to be healthy, for it to be effective at transforming the industries that need it most, it has to do something differently. We can really only increase the rate of great company creation by increasing the rate of experimentation, or increasing the rate of success. Incubators and early stage investors are doing what they can to run more attempts in parallel, somewhat like a generative algorithm, but this is bound to have little impact because the goals — “be worth a billion dollars” — are so separate from the founding event. Investors are starting to figure this out and pull efforts back accordingly.
That leaves us the challenge of finding ways to increase the rate of success.
Of course, I have my own ideas for doing so, but I was always told as a leader my job was to present the challenge to the team and leave the problem of solving it to them.
Venture capital’s reliance on unicorns provides cover for the huge failure rate of startups, and investors make no effort to reduce it. Part 5 of a series
Venture investing is fundamentally uncertain. You’re making big bets on people, ideas, and markets that might never work out, and there are more ways to fail than succeed. As a result, investing has to take into account the likely failure of many efforts. If your financial model assumes each of your investments will be a success, you will have a short career indeed.
Manyinvestors have written about how they need some companies to win big in order to cover for other companies failing completely. As a simple example, Fred Wilson at Union Square Ventures tells his investors to expect 1/3 of his investments to fail, 1/3 to return their capital (which is also failure; they sell for a small enough amount that investors just get their money back, and in most cases the founders and employees get nothing), and 1/3 to “succeed”, where his definition of success is that they return 5-10x the original investment.
He says his actual record is a bit better than that, but like Warren Buffet, he’d apparently rather set achievable expectations.
Let’s use some concrete examples. Remembering that most companies raise more than three rounds of funding, and keeping in mind that investors usually get about 20% of your company through each of those first few rounds, here’s what needs to happen to deliver that 10x return:
Your seed round is $500k at a $2.5m pre-money valuation, so you have to sell for $25m dollars. The investor gets $5m, and founders split $20m.
Your A round is $5m at a $25m pre-money valuation. Now your company has to sell for $250m. Each investor gets $50m, and the founders split $150m.
Your B round is $15m at a $75m valuation. Your target exit price is now almost $750m. By this time the founders own less than 50% of the company, but hey, if you can exit at that price everyone is pretty happy. Notice also that while this is a solid 10x win for the last investor here, it’s delivering close to a 300x return for the first investors (not counting pro rata costs). It’s nice work if you can get it.
Beyond three rounds, investors usually have smaller return expectations (e.g., 3-5x) but also have a shorter time horizon. That growth round investment of $50m is only expected to turn into $150m or so, but it needs to do it in 3-5 years instead of 7-10. Tripling a $750m valuation ends up being pretty hard in any time horizon.
It’s worth noting that if the company sells for $20m after that B round, then the founders get nothing. According to the preference stack (where the later investors all have priority over earlier ones), even with the cleanest term sheet the B and A investors get all their money back, but the seed investor, founders, and employees get nothing. In practice, the buyer will usually negotiate something for the employees and founders — you rarely buy a company without wanting some kind of golden handcuffs on the people who work there — but it’s basically a pittance. You’ve always got to manage your downside, even while you build toward the upside.
Note how quickly the exit price for the company escalates as you raise money. Realistically, it’s only once you’re around a billion dollars in valuation that you can consider going public, so if you’re smaller than that your only choice is to sell the company.
This model helps to explain the industry fetish for unicorns. The returns you get from a billion dollar exit swamp all the failures. And if those unicorns hide a lot of ills, the really big ones overwhelm even the successes. WhatsApp returned $3b to Sequoia on around $60m invested for a 50x return, which means every other investment in the portfolio could have failed and they’d have still made a ton of money.
You can see how the unicorns make or break a firm. How does this affect how they treat the rest of their portfolio?
When you know that a small percent of your bets end up mattering, you don’t worry much about any individual one, and that plays out in the world of venture capital.
Obviously investors don’t actually ignore the other firms; after all, they don’t really know which ones will win big. Equally, though, there’s no evidence they care whether any given startup succeeds.
Of course, investors would say otherwise: They’d say they work incredibly hard to help their companies, they work massive hours, answer the phone late at night, etc. Sure. I mean, they don’t put in nearly as many hours as the founders they’re helping, or even as much as a typical financier does (just thinking of the hours bankers put in these days makes me shudder) but I do believe they work hard. I do have a couple of anecdotes that show it’s not as hard as they’d imply, though.
I had one investor tell me that he loved the transition from operator to investor because the lifestyle is so much better. Again, this is from an investor class that publicly derides “lifestyle” businesses that generate cash for its founders but don’t scale massively. When I asked him about the hypocrisy of him working 9-5 but demanding his founders put in crazy hours, he defended it as their needing to lead from the front. Guess that tells you where the investors aren’t.
I also know a great investor who left a top-tier firm because he said he could not spend any more time working three days a week and being paid for five. Pretty honorable, if you ask me.
But mostly, yes, I do think many investors work hard.I just don’t think the work they’re doing helps their companies much.
Let’s walk through a couple of obvious examples.
Given the high probability of failure of a given investment, you’d think that the industry would be great at reducing the risks for their companies and thus increasing the survival rate. Not so much. For example, many investors have told me that the most likely reason for a company to fail is the team. Ok. So what do they do to reduce the probability that a founding team will fall apart?
Ah… nothing. No coach for each founder, no coaching plan, not even a packet providing best practices. Nada.
Their explanation for this is pretty simple: Coaches are expensive, and the investor can’t afford to have them on staff because the measly 2% on their $300m fund just can’t support bringing on staff to help founders. They could have the company fund it, but then that’s less money going to build the company.
This is the highest risk to your investment, and you’re literally not willing to spend any money mitigating it? Further, you’re tacitly recommending that your founders also avoid this easy bit of risk mitigation? Huh. Ok.
Investors will also tell you that the most valuable resource at a company is the founder’s time, and he or she needs to be laser-focused on building the business. It’s obvious they don’t actually believe that.
We’ve already established that founders will spend about a quarter of their time fundraising, rather than building the company. You could argue that this is the most valuable use of their time, but that’s only true in the sense that it has to be done and there’s no one else to do it. Most founders suck at fundraising and are tortured by their need to focus on that rather than building their business. Investors do help a little with this, but not so much that it implies the founder’s time actually is a precious resource. There’s a pretty clear sink-or-swim attitude around fundraising, even though success at it has little to do with the ability to build and run a company.
You see this same disregard for the founder’s time when you look at what they end up spending it on.
There’s a vanishingly small part of any business that’s truly innovative — maybe some part of your market definition or your solution itself — and everything else you do is disappointingly similar to what every other founder ends up doing. Great, so investors have figured that out and as part of their investment they deliver a playbook that uses the collective intelligence of their portfolio to help founders avoid having to make all the rookie mistakes, right? Hah! Nope!
The best firms do enable founders to talk and work together, but it’s all ad-hoc, and let’s be honest, that’s pretty minimal help. Every founder is basically doing a random walk around the possible solution space for “how to build a great company”, taking on huge technical risk with untried platforms and experimenting with idiocy like holacracy rather than focusing on the most important parts of their business, the one or two bets that will make or break the whole thing.
It shows how little investors are willing to do to help founders mitigate the biggest risks in their business, thus improving its probability of survival. If they cared about their portfolio companies making it, they’d specialize in helping them navigate the different phases of the company, minimizing probability of failure at each phase and especially when transitioning.
So now we see that it’s not just that investors are focused on unicorns, but also that the failure rate that those unicorns cover for is just irrelevant to investors. They know most of you will fail (again, they expect 2/3 to at best return their capital, which is failure in their model and even then only accomplished by a fire sale of the company). Heck, if you don’t fail and instead just continue on being neither a big sale nor a failure, they’ll have to push you into one or the other category in order to close their fund.
As I found running a growth company, success hides many ills. One of the biggest problems in venture capital is how much they let the success of their unicorns hide their indifference to the rest of their companies. This fails their founders, their employees, and the whole market, for no reason other than that it’s easier this way.
I’m convinced that a firm that directly invested in reducing its failure rate would have as many unicorns, but would also have more positive returns throughout their portfolio, and in the midst of building more companies and making more money, they just might do a little good at the same time. That would be a nice change.
The success of companies and founders in modern venture-backed startups is highly reliant on peer validation of investor decisions. Part 4 in a series.
Say you’re an entrepreneur building something new and different, and you know you need capital. After pitching up and down Sand Hill Road (and all over South Park), you’ve finally found a believer, someone who sees what you’re trying to do and thinks you and your team are the ones to do it. Great! Now you can focus on building your business, right?
Nope. Get used to more of the same. You probably raised just enough to get to your next milestone, not enough to get to self-sustaining profitability, which means you’ll be raising again soon. After all, on average startups raise more than three rounds of funding. I know what you’re thinking: But this investor is a true believer, and given how hard it was to convince others, they’ll sign up for the next round instead.
Nope. It does happen, but it’s rare. In general, every round you raise has to be led by a new investor. Part of this is about dollars: Your seed-stage investor writes $500k checks out of a $50m fund, but your A-round investor writes $5-10m checks out of a $300m fund. That seed investor will participate in the larger round (doing what’s called their pro rata, to keep their ownership share the same), but if they led the round they’d burn through their fund too quickly and would not be able to lead enough investments to make their model work.
Even if dollars aren’t the restriction on your first investor leading later rounds, you’ll still likely find yourself pounding the pavement again. Imagine you’re an investor, and you see a peer investor leads follow-on rounds for most of their portfolio companies. One of those companies comes knocking on your door asking you to invest, and of course your natural question is: Why isn’t your existing investor leading? There’s no good answer to that question.
You can’t say, “Well, they’re a bad investor, and I really need new blood”, for pretty obvious reasons. Even if it’s true, badmouthing existing investors will never get you new ones. You can’t say, “Well, they like us, but even though they lead follow-on rounds in 90% of their companies, they don’t like us enough to lead one for us.” You’ve just told this new investor that you’re in the bottom 10% of your investor’s portfolio. Now there’s no chance they’re going to invest. If the investor that knows you really really well doesn’t want to write a check, no one else will.
To prevent this problem, the industry has the habit of not leading follow-on rounds. Again, not that it never happens, but it can’t be the common pattern, because the company that breaks it gets a black mark. I’ve had many investors (including those invested in Puppet, the company I founded) tell me they follow this habit religiously, for exactly this reason. “Nope, as much as I like you, you’re going to have to get the money from someone else.”
Out you go.
Thankfully, venture investors recognize the downsides of this and build deep networks of firms and individuals who frequently work together. There are even later-stage firms who specialize in following specific investors whose track record they trust. But while this pattern was developed for good reasons, it also has downsides that no amount of networking or help can compensate for.
First, of course, it means most CEOs spend a huge percentage of their time either directly raising money or doing the work necessary to do so later. You might not have wanted to become best friends with tens of investors, but if you’re taking venture capital, that’s your job now. Given that investors are professional meeting-takers, they’ve got time to meet for coffee any time, so this can be hugely time consuming. Then when it comes time to actually raise a round, you should expect it to consume your life for at least three months. And that’s the success case.
This time sink is pretty bad if you live near all the investors you need to meet, but what if it’s a flight to the bay area instead of just a drive? Oh, if you’re one of the top companies they’ll come to you, but if you’re not, it’s one more way you have to work harder than the ones they love. It was only in our late-stage rounds we had luck getting investors to come to us, and we were only in Portland, an hour and a half flight away. I can’t imagine trying to raise money in a place that shudder needs a connecting flight to get to. I nearly killed myself in a rented PT Cruiser (the first available car at SFO) trying not to be late to an investor meeting, and of course, he passed on us anyway because I could not convince/did not want his buddy to join us as COO.
This all adds up to a massive tax on the companies that do succeed, where CEOs become experts in fundraising rather than experts in building great companies, which is, of course, stupid. But it has a much worse impact on who and what can get funding in the first place.
Again, put yourself in the head of an investor. You look at tens of potential investments a day, and you have far more opportunities than time or money, so you have your pick of what to invest in. On the one hand you’ve got a woman or a person of color pitching a company that sells to markets they deeply understand, maybe something more focused on customers who look like them. On the other hand, you’ve got a Harvard-educated CS grad who’s found another great use for AI in the cloud.
What we want is for the decision to be made based on what’s the best investment, who’s the best founder, but it’s not. It’s obviously not. If it were, you wouldn’t see such rank discrimination in the world of VC, where women and people of color are almost entirely excluded.
Instead, a key factor is whether the investor believes this person can raise another round. Note: It’s not whether the person actually can, because you don’t know that until you try it. It’s whether the investor thinks they can. And, of course, investors know that women and people of color don’t fit into the pattern of other investors, so they pre-discriminate in expectation that later investors would have anyway. I mean, why give someone $500k if the company won’t be able to raise another round anyway? You’ll lose all your money.
Like with all patterns, it’s as much about the company as it is about the founder. It’s not just about who gets money, it’s about what kinds of problems are worth solving, and what kinds of customers make good markets.
Silicon Valley has a well-known fondness for investing in products that solve the needs of white boys who just got out of college and are having to learn to live on their own, but less obvious is that this means they often consider other customers to be worthless. It is fantastically hard to convince an investor to back a product built for women, or people of color, or international buyers, when the investor is none of those things.
That is, it’s not just about investing in people who are different — it’s that their ideas are different, the problems they care about are different, and the markets they want to attack are different.
In a world where you’re taking risks, where you’re actually focused on brilliant founders in big markets, those differences would be positives, they’d be signs you can do something ground-breaking. But when that world requires multiple rounds of belief, where failure at any round destroys your company, suddenly those differences become reasons for people to say no, for companies not to get funding, for founders not to get support.
There are some firms out there, like K9 Ventures, who make these bets anyway and recognize that it turns their job into finding follow-on rounds for existing investments rather than just finding new companies. Too many investors either don’t see the consequences of this pattern, or preemptively admit defeat and just don’t even consider investing in a company that they are concerned couldn’t get another round.
Once again we see how a key aspect of venture, one that exists for good reasons, has pernicious consequences that help to explain how the world of venture works today, in all its glory and misery.
There’s no obvious fix to the problem, as either an investor or an entrepreneur, if you truly do need capital to grow but you don’t fit the pattern. One of your best defenses is to focus on profitability first, so you don’t need those follow on rounds and the levels of approval required to make them happen, but that’s not possible for every firm, and even when it is it can result in heavy compromises on growth.
Thankfully, there are now firms out there focusing on founders who are women and people of color. These firms will help in multiple ways. First, of course, they’ll provide the direct funding that is not currently available to so many great founders and companies, but second, they’ll begin to build out those networks of social proof that will enable these companies to get as many rounds as they need, rather than just the ones they can provide.
We’re going to need a lot more firms like that to truly unlock the potential of venture capital, to bring world-changing solutions to those who can get the most benefit, wherever they are and whoever they are. I’m hopeful that the competition these new firms bring will change the behavior, and the opportunity, of the existing ones enough to make the difference, but what’s really going to shift behavior is when the companies invested in by these companies start to deliver outsized returns specifically because they don’t fit the pattern.
Giving something away for free can be a fantastic way to achieve adoption, but it raises a permanent conflict. The conflict is even greater when the free products are open source.
Driving adoption is a key requirement for any product business, and a popular tactic for doing so is hooking people with something free in order to sell them products once they’re invested. The most famous example is Gilette “giving away” razors, but this model is now widely adopted by software companies striving to grow quickly but cheaply. Splunk and New Relic are examples of fantastic businesses who allow their products to be used for free in some circumstances in order to drive long-term adoption and revenue.
Success with this tactic requires mastering the tension that it introduces: The thing you give away must be valuable enough that it drives adoption, but not so valuable that people don’t eventually need to upgrade.
If it is insufficiently valuable on its own, no one will use it, but if it is so valuable that people can succeed without ever paying, then you have users but not customers.
The goal of a freemium business is to separate the commitment from the buying decision. I want you to become so successful with my product that you become committed to it, which means when I finally ask you to pay the sale is both easier and more valuable.
For you to become committed, you must be successful. You must achieve whatever goal caused you to download my software in the first place. However, in your success, you must also hit some wall that requires you to upgrade.
Managing that balance is crucial to success with freemium. Give too little away and you don’t get any adoption, but give too much away and you have a passionate community but no money to pay for building the software.
This balance is complicated by the fact that the best communities are built around authentic identities, so changing what you give away involves changing who identifies with your company and why, which is much more fraught than tuning your business model. It’s a sufficiently complex operation that it’s one of the key dials that a freemium business will manage throughout its existence.
As difficult as this balance is in a proprietary software business, it’s much harder when dealing with open source. After all, when you decide to open source something, you’re not just choosing to make something free, you’re giving your community permanent rights to something you own. While you technically have the right to keep private any further updates, in practice once you open something up you have to either keep that project free forever or let it die.
Your community considers the opening of your code a permanent commitment to maintain this software for free forever, and anything less than that will generally be considered betrayal. They didn’t adopt you, or your revenue streams; they adopted this free thing that you promised would work well for them, and they’re going to raise hell when it doesn’t. They don’t care that your business model requires that you charge for analytics, or for clustering. They need those features to be successful, you implicitly promised them success, and now you’ve got blood coming out of your ears.
In some sense, successful open source software companies require lightning to strike twice: They need to free something that it is so great you’ll adopt it without paying, then they need something else that’s also so great you’ll pay them. Most OSS companies try to provide this extra value at the margins, because getting that second lightning strike is so hard. Proprietary software companies can provide hard limits on how you take advantage of their most useful features, but if those features are open source, then of course you can’t limit them in any way. You’ve got to develop additional features instead.
It’s not a coincidence that we’ve seen so few open source software companies build large revenue streams. Most end up shifting their focus from the open source that started everything to proprietary software that drives their business. The best companies remain community-oriented, but that is by no means a given.
If you’re considering building a freemium business, you must treat the success of this balance as a key business metric. It underpins the unit economics of your business, determining how big the funnel is based on adoption and how many convert based on the willingness to pay.
Getting it right is worth it because it enables a fantastic company with low marketing and sales costs, an engaged community, and easy upgrade paths for your best users.
Don’t get stuck on a solution until you know what problem you’re trying to solve.
I often get called in to help companies make decisions about their open source strategy. They want to release key parts of their software as open source, but they need some help figuring out the best way to make it happen. I always ask them the same question:
Why? Why are you planning to open any of your code?
They rarely have a good answer. They’ve already decided that this is the right decision, because a board member, founder, or customer has said it’s necessary, and they are just trying to figure out how to do it. But it’s impossible to build a strategy to accomplish your goals if you’re unsure what they are.
Are you trying to build a community? To get public review of core functionality? To grow adoption? Something else entirely? By now most people have realized that open sourcing software isn’t a route to magically get free contributions so you don’t have to write your own software, but there are plenty of other myths around it.
I’m a huge fan of open source. I’m an even bigger fan of the companies behind it building a sustainable business so they can stick around for the long term. Open source is a tactic, taken to accomplish (hopefully) a key goal for the business. It has upsides and downsides, like most tactics, and it has to fit your goals.
There are damn good reasons to open source software, either as a business or as an individual. Most motivations I’ve heard from founders don’t stand up, though. Companies have built healthy communities (Github, Atlassian, VMware, Microsoft) and scalable freemium models (Github, Splunk, Slack, Trello), all with no notable reliance in publishing open source software.
The fact that these businesses have been built with proprietary software doesn’t mean yours should be. But it at least shows that your goals have multiple routes to accomplish them, and you can’t just say you need to open source your product because you want the same adoption path as MongoDB.
Many open source software companies don’t have the luxury of starting with goals and working backwards. If your project started first, and you only built a company once your community made it clear you should, then many hard questions are already decided, and you have to work around the reality of your situation. Docker is a great example of a company being built in response to community demand, because an existing project got adopted broadly enough that the opportunity arose to build a business (or in their case, shift the focus of an existing business), and some of their struggles can be attributed to the path they took.
I open sourced Puppet through a combination of ignorance and confidence. It honestly never occurred to me that I could build a company around commercial software, since I really only knew the OSS world well, and when I started Puppet, around 2005, there seemed to be plenty of great examples of successful business models around open source so I assumed I’d figure out which of those made the most sense when it came time. In the mean time, I did exactly what needed doing: I focused on building software that people loved, and then convincing people to use it. By the time I realized how hard it really was, we were too far down the path to dramatically change our strategy.
If, however, you are early enough that all options lie before you, you need to take the time to ensure you have the highest probability of success. It’s hard enough to build a company from scratch; don’t make it harder. Your team should actually view open source as a liability, in the financial sense: You’ve made a commitment (usually implicit) to your community that you’re going to spend money indefinitely to make sure this software gets better and better. Just like other financial liabilities, like office leases, employee contracts, and partnership commitments, these can be fantastic successes. But like any liability, they can just as easily be a painful drag on your work if done poorly.
I think open source can be a huge help in building community, widening your marketing funnel, increasing the quality of your code, and building software people love. But you have to do it with clear ideas of what you’re trying to accomplish and what you’re willing to do to make it happen.
Two decades into a software career, I’m still moved by its potential to improve people’s lives through connection, automation, and access to information, yet I’m less convinced than ever that our financial systems are built to get the most out of it.
This is the first post in a series I’ll be writing on the structural problems in venture capital. These problems aren’t a condemnation of the industry, they’re an attempt to outline where the industry fails the market. This failure helps to explain people’s experiences, but I think also helps to outline the opportunity and need for other ways of funding companies. These ways will also have flaws - they’ll likely not be great at building unicorns - but they’ll be finding people and markets ignored by the current environment.
Like the general financial industry, the world of venture capital has become adept at using money to create more money, but it does not consider of the wisdom of its actions. It chooses easy answers, thus leaving harder but better questions unexplored, and accepts high collateral damage to the employees, customers, and industry that at best is painful and at worst is pure exploitation.
I am pulled to build more software that, like Puppet, helps people get higher quality work done in less time and with more joy. But that kind of utopian phrasing is used by every company in silicon valley, whether they do advertising arbitrage or sell you pet food, all while asking their workers to work crushing hours for lottery pay, no safety net, and 19th century ideas of labor force participation. The devaluing of women and minorities as either workers or buyers is both discriminatory and bad business. It’s true I’ve heard no overt support for child labor, but I expect that’s mostly because kids don’t have CS degrees from Stanford or Harvard.
I believe it is possible to design a kind of financing vehicle that is less subject to these flaws. There is a lot of money to be made in enabling the whole market to participate in the technology economy, and given that productivity has stalled since 2004 (coincidentally around the time that social networks and attention-seeking advertising-driven business models took over), there’s a lot of opportunity to deliver value by increasing productivity.
The major concern about increasing productivity is that it generally means fewer jobs, and the lowest-skilled workers tend to be first and hardest hit. I do actually believe in reeducation and the movement of labor to new opportunities, but you can’t ignore the trauma of career changes and industry churn. My work at Puppet showed that empowering people at the front line is how you drive both change and value. Too many industries focus on getting rid of the experts at the coal face, when instead they should look to elevate them. This would improve productivity while developing careers, instead of destroying them.
Unfortunately, venture capital is structured to require trauma to everyone involved except the investors. Too often, even the limited partners who are the source of capital suffer, with only a few firms delivering the kind of returns that the asset class purports to offer. The industry is built around making many bets and expecting most to fail. Even worse, every company who wants to participate must make a claim to be able to reach these heights, even if they don’t believe it, and then they must risk their own death attempting to keep that promise.
The model itself requires that companies either go public or kill themselves. Nothing else fits in the spreadsheets. Again, this guarantees trauma to nearly everyone involved - even the ones who make it out suffer the whole way, leaving a trail of burned out employees and failed customers.
I think there are amazing companies waiting to be created that can deliver life-changing benefits but can realistically “only” generate $30m, or $50m, a year in revenue. At 25% margins for software, these can be huge sources of profit, but a venture capitalist would derisively call that a lifestyle business and either not fund it, or force it to kill itself in an attempt to scale beyond its natural size. These can be great businesses, but because business funding generally fits into either conservative bank loans, or 10x-oriented venture capital, there’s no model today that respects them. Jason Fried and DHH at Basecamp have doneatonofgreatwriting on this.
Jennifer Brandel, Mara Zapeda and others have launched the Zebra movement, focused on helping founders shut out of the VC world start companies that enrich themselves and their communities rather than their investors. I think this is an awesome effort, and has been an inspiration to me.
It’s true that this kind of company could not have as high a failure rate as venture capital does, but, ah, that’s not exactly complicated. I mean, VC literally requires failures of most of their companies, so I’ve got a nice anti-pattern to work against. There are well-worn practices for improving operations, people, and efficiency at even young businesses, but VCs haven’t bothered to invest in any of them, because again, they expect most everyone they work with to fail. Vista Equity, among many others, has shown that being more than dumb money can be more than just talk.
You might say there aren’t enough entrepreneurs out there, and all the great ones are focused on building unicorns in silicon valley. I say phooey. Tell that to the millions of people who start restaurants, corner shops, and franchises around the US. Frankly, tell that to all the people who pitched the valley but weren’t white men, or couldn’t afford to live in the bay area, and thus could not get funded. Because the valley itself refuses to believe great entrepreneurs can be women of color, or uneducated, or have a humanities degree, there is a long waiting list of great people ready to be given a little money and a little trust.
Silicon Valley today is baseball before Jackie Robinson, golf before Vijay Singh and Tiger Woods, tennis before Arthur Ashe and the Williams sisters. It’s the World Series with only North American teams, the World Championship game with only American athletes. It might do great things and be a great spectacle, but it’s weak sauce, because you know you’re not really competing with the best. In fact, you’ve structurally guaranteed you won’t, with all your stories of pipeline problems, lowering the bar, and various other grandfather clauses.
I do not believe in the primacy of ideas. I do not believe great entrepreneurs are in short supply. I do not believe we will run out of awesome opportunities in software in my lifetime.
I want to collect funding that will enable those unsupported entrepreneurs to reveal and develop their greatness, I want to build software companies in spaces that currently have no software, and I want to generate great returns for everyone involved without hemorrhaging people and money.
Yes, I know that means I have to find a different way to deliver returns to investors, because I don’t want my portfolio companies to have to sell. Yes, I know that means I will be creating a new asset class, with all the complications that entails around convincing LPs to invest in it.
The fact that others dismiss it out of hand for being impractical is exactly what excites me about it.
Please follow along in the rest of my series as I delve into the individual structural flaws in venture capital that I think outline what a competitive funding instrument must find a way around.
It’s only a good practice if you have the cultural discipline to make it work.
Stopping the factory used to be sacrilege - companies figured they were only making money if the line was moving - so when Toyota adopted this practice on their manufacturing line is was a huge shift. It was taken so they could resolve quality problems immediately, which saved them time and money because otherwise the problems occurred in many cars and had to be fixed later. It was better to pay the price of stopping the line now than the price of redoing the work later.
This was a huge cultural shift throughout the organization. Management had to recognize the cost of fixing quality later, and change their short-termer mindset around the moving line. The workers on the line had to learn not to let problems slide by, to ask for help immediately and not rest until the problem was truly resolved. Everyone had to learn to diagnose problems in the line without blaming individuals, otherwise trust was impossible and the real problems could not be diagnosed. (This is also where Toyota developed their ‘Five whys’ practice for getting to the bottom of problems.)
While we’re obsessed with individual techniques like Kanban, the team at Toyota knows that it’s culture that allows them to win, not the tools they use. That difference is also exactly why it took decades for the rest of the industry to catch up: You can adopt technology quickly, but culture? Not so much.
We experienced the same problem when we tried to adopt this practice in our software teams. People loved the ability to stop the factory, and they used it all the time. Often, it did actually increase the quality of the work we did. But overall, it made things worse for us, not better. It was causing arguments, bad relations, and most importantly, was reducing our long-term efficiency, not increasing it. It became nearly impossible to ship software.
What went wrong?
We had adopted this practice without developing the cultural discipline to make it work. People weren’t stopping their own lines to resolve systemic quality issues; instead, they were stopping the work of other people to question their decisions. A technique for improving our work became a technique for attacking our strategy. Disagree with the product that team is building? Stop the factory! Don’t like the database they chose? Pull the cord!
Yuck. That’s not how that’s supposed to work. It didn’t help that I’ve always pushed hard for people at the front line to be opinionated and educated about as much of the product as possible. Suddenly they’re applying those opinions to the work of others, and we’re not building higher quality products, we’re just arguing non-stop about what we should be building and how.
This required that we develop a couple of new cultural skills. When you read about the Toyota system, it’s striking how much of what they accomplished was essentially cultural technology - that is, tools for developing and sustaining culture - rather than manufacturing tech.
Our failed experiment at letting anyone stop the factory showed that first everyone needed to understand the value in stopping the line. We started to point out that they should be focused on their own work, not others’, and thus should only be able to stop their own line. Most importantly, remember back to the point of pulling the cord: You’ve discovered that your own work is compromised because of a quality problem in the system, and you need time and help to fix it. That had to be why we stopped the line, and nothing else.
That being said, people’s concerns about decision making in other parts of the organization needed to be heard. Expert teams should being given the power to build what they think is best. But even the best teams need outside reviewers, need other experts to question their assumptions and conclusions.
Our work cycle needed to include productive, constructive feedback opportunities. The best process like this I’ve ever seen is in Pixar founder Ed Catmull’s Creativity, Inc, where he describes their “Brain Trust” system for helping directors make great movies. This is such a great system that it’s worth reading yourself, but the aspect that stands out is the responsibility of the team giving feedback to the director:
Your job is to help them see the flaws in their proposal. You can not and must not propose solutions, and you can not demand that they agree with your complaint. Even if you’re the CEO. You are a collaborator helping someone do their best work, not a competing director trying to get your ideas into the movie.
See the parallels to the value in stopping the line? It’s about improving the quality of work, not making a power play, or being right about something.
Pixar has a critical second layer to this process: Management decides whether to ship the movie. This allows them to give the director full responsibility for the movie. If directors don’t agree with the team’s list of flaws, that’s fine, but in the end, you have to convince the management team that the movie works.
The thing I love about this is it gives you concentric circles of iteration and control. The movie team makes decisions constantly about what to do and why, then they loop out to the Brain Trust to get feedback on what they’ve done, and finally there’s a business cycle that determines whether the movie should ship. Everyone gets to contribute, but your business concerns are isolated from the work cycle, giving teams the freedom they need to build something great.
I was never able to figure out how to adapt their process to software, but I hold out great hope that there is a way, it just requires a lot of evolution. Pixar gets to take five years to make a great movie, but you never get that kind of window to make software. They also kept all of the iteration inside the building, where modern software should be built in layers, in collaboration with your users and the market.
Even without being able to directly adopt a better practice, we recognized the need for two layers of process. We thinned down people’s ability to stop the work of others, and at the same time built feedback loops at larger intervals and in different forums for strategic concerns to be heard. We also began building cross links between teams that allowed those with concerns to collaborate with those doing the work, rather than leaping in and shouting ‘stop!’.
There are many great inspirations for how to build better software, faster, but all require some level of adaptation. I am absolutely convinced we will see a software production system as coherent and clear as Lean Manufacturing, but I also think it’s going to take a long time, a lot of experimentation and failure to get from here to there.
Hopefully our experience, our successes and failures, can help you get there faster.
I was asked by a CEO recently, “How do I know if my product is ready to scale?” He thought he was ready to raise money and start growing the company, but he didn’t really know how to be sure.
Venture capital exists to invest in enterprises that have a huge opportunity but are also a big risk. Yet VC firms tend to actually be pretty conservative, relying on pattern recognition and social networks to make their decisions. This turns investor pitches into bizarre encounters where you have to help them see the huge risks in your business and how this risks can generate massive returns, but you also must convince them that you have all of that risk managed, so there’s no reason to be afraid. I’ve been turned down so many times by investors “until we’d taken the risk out of the business,” and every time, I’d sit in the car outside their office park thinking, “But don’t you exist specifically to make big bets?”
I can’t tell you how to raise money, because no matter what it’s hard, and there’s no special trick to it. Well, there’s one trick: Sell a company for a billion dollars. Do that, and you’ll never have trouble raising money.
This article is only for those who are not quite so lucky.
What I can help with is framing your company so that you can more coldly see and explain where the risk is, and with that hopefully you can help others get excited about the vision in your head, the beautiful thing you’re trying to build.
Step one is understanding your market risk. If you’re raising money, you have to convince your prospective investors (if you’re talking to typical valley VCs, anyway) that you can build a company that can do $100m in revenue at some point. So, convince me your market can support a company that can hit that scale and still grow. That means the market needs to be hundreds of millions, and probably billions. With Puppet, we knew the overall management market was between $6B and $25B a year, depending on your definition, which made this part pretty easy for us, but lots of companies are creating a market, so they have to spend a lot of time on this topic.
The next big question is why you, particularly, will win. Sometimes this is called technology risk, but companies win for many reasons other than technology, especially these days. Puppet didn’t necessarily have the best tech in the world, but we had a focus on the user that no major player in our space had. Everyone else was worried about the buyer, and we focused on helping the individual users succeed. Other companies have a cultural edge, or even just a mindset that others can’t copy. Whatever it is, though, there needs to be some reason why you’re going to take this big, awesome market.
I call this strategy risk. You’re planning to take the market in a particular way, and you think it will work but you don’t really know until you play.
A high-growth company usually trades off strategy and market risks. If everyone else agrees this is a great market, then you’ll have lots of competition so you need a unique strategy that sets you apart. If it’s a mature market with clear revenues and margins, you need a great strategy to fight against big incumbents, who won’t go quietly. If, on the other hand, no one else agrees this is a good market, and you get it all to yourself, then the strategy doesn’t need to be differentiated, so you can run the least risky strategy you can think of.
You can’t walk into a VC’s office and say there’s neither market nor strategy risk, because that business is just too obvious. It’s either so obvious it’s actually stupid, or so obvious that you’re one of a hundred players running the same game - both of these are bad bets. You’re not getting that funding round.
The last piece is execution risk. You’ve got a good market, you’ve got a solid strategy. Now convince me that you, particularly, can build a team and make this happen, within the window you have available. This is 99% about the team. Can you hire people? A lot of them? Get them working together? Do you know how to ship software, sell software, market it, etc? Some of this you can do through force of will, some you can do by just being smarter or faster, and some requires that you really nail a couple of pieces, but most of it is about building and scaling a company that can execute your strategy. This is the grit, the work, the hard part. The best strategy in the best market is worthless if you can’t do the work.
There’s one more critical point about risk. It should be obvious, but somehow it’s not.
You want to minimize the risks you take. There’s something about what you’re doing that’s unlikely, probably scary, and quite possibly stupid. That thing has to exist, because it’s what makes your business valuable. Without that huge risk, you can’t possibly achieve the massive payoff you’re looking for. Take that risk, put it on a pedestal, love it.
And then do everything you can to not let other types of risk into the rest of your business. If you know your major risk is strategy, why introduce a massive execution risk at the same time? No. Your work is scary enough that you should be conservative everywhere possible. Pick something you know works when you have that luxury, because you won’t get it very often.
This frame should at least get you the first three slides of your presentation. There’s plenty more to know before you can convince someone you can go out there and win, but being able to clearly talk through the risks in your business and how you’re managing should at least help you get a seat at the table.
I’m a tech founder and recovering SysAdmin. I helped found DevOps and grew up in open source. These days I am convalescing from a decade of physical and mental neglect while running Puppet.
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A rendering of the structure of lactase
This huge structure is all necessary to enable the protein to place a lactose molecule near a water molecule in exactly the right arrangement to ensure the reaction happens immediately, every time, instead of eventually, sometimes. For all this structure, the site where the reaction takes place is quite small, just big enough for the two target molecules. Those 1927 amino acids mean the protein is about 37,000 atoms. Lactose is 35 atoms, and water is, ah, 3.
