Simple Products, 10 Observations

Simple from Michael Rubin

Pushing through the Obvious

When I take a photograph or have an idea... it generally starts rather cliched. It's a little obvious. My first photos of Paris or Mt. Rushmore or North Beach are practically postcards. Pretty. Pretty unimaginative. Seems true with other things -- product ideas, music. And not just things i create, but things i am attracted to and enjoy.

(Andre Kertsz, 1929)

But where it gets good is when i tire of the obvious. How many photos of Coit Tower can you have? Is it possible to capture something about Mt. Rushmore that isn't THE CLASSIC image of that thing? I think that one key element of creativity is getting that cliche-phase out of your system. You have to get bored with where you began, where everyone begins, and move past, After weeks or I suppose years, the products created are nuanced and rich. The work is to get to that place relatively quickly. Some people can reject the obvious with no effort. But in many cases it's more like getting it out of your system. And not resting, not being "done" when that first image or idea rolls out. In every case, the discipline i feel is about allowing myself (or forcing myself) to exhaust all the cliches, laboriously... until i simply cannot stomach another one. Out of that boredom and frustration the first really good products emerge. I love it when that happens.

Developing Your Corporate Lizard Brain

Part 1

John and I were discussing login methods and he pointed out how there is often a lag of 2 seconds after entering your password before a website lets you in. “This reduces spamming,” he explained, although I didn’t get it at first. Most password hacking attempts are automated systems, running through bajillions of guesses to gain access. While a user might not notice a 2 second delay, an automated system that can make many hundreds of attempts per second is going to be seriously impeded by the timeshift –one attempt every 2 seconds instead of 1000 attempts every two seconds – that’s orders of magnitude of change, even with only a tiny noticeable shift for the user.

Part 2

Reed Hastings famously published the Netflix Culture Deck, which was designed to help Netflix stay nimble like a startup and maintain the kind of business environment it deemed necessary for success. In it he shows the slide below, which depicts how complexity grows as size grows and it drives out the high performers. Now I’m at a larger organization where I’m charged with being nimble and start-upish, exploring all forms of innovation inside the company, and thinking deeply about these cautions.  

In a start-up there are literally thousands of decisions and tasks to get done. Signing up for accounts. Coming up with names and logos. Hiring decisions. Product positioning. Many are simple red tape (filling out forms for an iTunes account) and some are mission critical (engineering specifications), but in all cases each decision is made and executed by just a few people who are in very close proximity and communication. The distances between the ISSUE, the decision MAKER and the decision EXECUTOR is tiny.

But with growth there are specialized teams for every task, and consequently every new decision moves to the experts. Regardless of whether you’re asking permission or simply giving notice, the decision has a longer path from stimulus to response. Like adding two seconds to a login, it’s reasonable that any single call is no big deal – but in aggregate the internal resistance changes the work from nimble to labored, and I suggest hampers the ability of the organism to compete in the marketplace and survive when the environment it was tuned for happens to be changing.

When you’re a one-celled animal, everything you need is right there, for better or worse. As you grow into a multicellular organism there is radical differentiation. The head and brain are way up there and the fingers are way over there…

But multicellular organisms can survive, obviously, they just maintain pathways to shortcut the infrastructure. Clearly company experts are there to keep the organization safe. In fact, much about that evolution was about improving the businesses ability to stay safe and efficient. But the cost is that the organization is no longer maximized to stay competitive.

In the human body there are a number of system shortcuts that keep us safe, but perhaps the best metaphor is the spinal reflex arc: a pin prick in your finger sends a signal to your spine which contracts the muscles in your arm to move your hand quickly. That signal did not have to go to your brain to get processed. (John also reminds me that large dinosaurs are reported to have developed a "hind brain" as unmyelinated nerves were too slow to adequately control such a large body...) For large organizations I believe that the best way to stay nimble to make sure there are systems in place that allow considerable self-governance, reflex arcs, hind brains, in key parts of the body. 

The Death of the DVD

I'm so disappointed. I really liked DVDs. Mostly I liked the insanely consistent inventory of everything i could possibly ever want to watch from the entire history of media; if the content existed, then it existed on DVD. When I left Netflix in 2008 they had almost 200,000 titles. The library of feature films on streaming is far smaller and even if you disregard that it is spread across a range of providers, it will likely be a spotty selection for a long time.  

Up until a month ago I had a DVD player as an intrinsic part of my computer, so i maintained both Netflix disk and streaming accounts. But my new laptop has no drive, and while I purchased an external drive, the writing was on the wall. Tablets, phones, laptops... the old DVD player can find no safe harbor. Game consoles will be that last beachhead. But it's a rapid death from here, and our devices will be nimbler and less expensive for it.

I’m not sad about the loss of DVDs per se, but for the remarkable access to content they provided--a magical combination of a standard format plus the right to re-rent and resell; The passing of DVD represents the end of an important era. 

With streaming the content goes back to the walled-world from which we had lived outside. The DVD era will have been a fluke in the space-time continuum where normally creators had all the control over consumers. For 30 years though—first with videotape and then DVD--we could easily share movies and videos. There was an entire human ecosystem of content outside the studio’s reach. Once you purchased that object it was yours to watch, share, rent, sell again. Netflix built an empire on the back of that old ruling. With the death of the DVD the era of owning and real-world peer-to-peer sharing is grandfathered out. Content will never again be so “ownable”. We have entered a Faustian bargain where the convenience of streaming was swapped for a world where we cannot own this type of content --we lease the music, movies and programming we have. Releasing on disc was often a no-brainer; now there are rights agreements to be worked out for every single frame.

So enjoy these last days while you can, while you have access to DVD players still. Because it may not be for a generation before so much historical content is so easily and consistently accessible. Not that there won't be petabytes of new content to keep us satisfied and busy, but something was lost in the trade. And I for one will miss it.

5 Tips for the DIG Innovator Job

500 applications. More all the time. How to choose?

I'm going to breadcrumb some tips in an effort to help you, the people i am looking for, to find me. First of all, since Adobe makes no secret about the research projects and proclivities of the scientists here, I'm providing a couple links to my co-workers' backgrounds. If you're working here, you're working with them, and inventing products that in some way are based on their efforts.

Dan, Sylvain, Joel...


Besides the basic job description, here are my biases, any of which i'd consider good.
(1) Lateral/metaphorical thinkers--not just depth but breadth, across industries, across experiences. Answers and ideas may be out in the open, just not where most people are looking.
(2) Self-directed risk takers. You won't be told what to do here. 20 years at a public company wouldn't seem to reflect well on this, no matter how much innovation you've spawned there. At some point in your life you've thrown caution to the wind, believed you could fly, and jumped off a cliff. I'm less concerned with how that turned out than with the personality that was willing to try.
(3) Hands on.  I care that you are a person who is going to pick up the hammer and do the best you can until resources let you get some help. Not knowing how to use the hammer is a weak excuse for inactivity. You'd have a bias toward action. Meetings, certainty, consensus... aren't driving forces here.
(4) Media savvy. Adobe is largely a content creation tool company, and these researchers are inventing an array of media-ish tools, so some experience/interest/command of media tools is nice. Additionally, i like to see that you can communicate with a range of tools -- paper, powerpoint, photography, video... it doesn't really matter which and how good, but communication and storytelling skills are key.
(5) Enterprise. This work is replete with obstacles. When you hit a barrier do you go over it (brute force), around it (ingenuity), or change the rules (Captain Kirk)? Do you take no for an answer? When do you push and when do you let go?

I want to know what you'd do here. How would you approach these problems? And i want to be surprised and delighted, by you and by your products. If you can't get our attention now, I believe you'll be hard-pressed to do so in a busy company or a crowded market.

Godspeed. I'm rooting for you.

Raise the Floor.

So often when i see a new product, particularly something that is a creative tool like a GoPro or the app Vine, it comes to be promoted by some amazing demonstrations of what it can do. It is important what these things can do. In the hands of a professional, under "heightened circumstances," these products can be made to sing and dance. This is the ceiling. It is how great the product can be if you take it to the max. The GoPro and Vine are wonderful products.

But I would like to suggest that the measure of a consumer product is not the ceiling, but the floor; it's not how great can something be if you work it, but how great can something be if you don't. I helped create Petroglyph and the entire "you paint it" ceramics industry, so i had some experience with this: what's important is that even if the customer is a lousy artist, the outcome is assured to be pretty damn good. The mug might be ugly but it still holds your coffee...

Consumer products may get sold for their ceilings, but their success relies on how satisfied the average customer is, the one who doesn't read the instructions, doesn't plan her shoot, can't hold the camera steady, and so forth. If little or no effort produces satisfying output, that's good. Consumer product managers: don't raise the ceiling, raise the floor.

DIG is the Lost Patrol

Okay. One more story from Lucasfilm. It was 1984 and the company was beginning the process of spinning out all the projects from the Computer Division -- in particular the editing and audio products ('droids') and the Pixar image computer. But one group Lucas decided not to spin out. It was the Games Group. Many years before it was LucasArts Entertainment, it was a few guys doing research in interactive entertainment (in general) and "games" in particular. Yes they were making games for Atari but their charter was less clear.

Lucas the man is a storyteller; so much of how he leads, how he manages, is through creating stories. The way he described his vision to the new Games Group went something like this: The army is marching through the desert over here, a giant column, methodical. And out beyond the dunes is the Lost Patrol. "You are the Lost Patrol," he'd say. "Nobody knew for sure where they were or what they were doing, but they were somewhere out there; every now and again somebody might see their flag on the horizon. In some far off day they would return home, bringing news of distant lands and wonders beyond imagining."

The Games Group always thought of themselves at the Lost Patrol.

Lucas is sometimes criticized for the ignorance he must have shown, selling off Pixar, a hardware company he had been gestating for 7 years, to Steve Jobs for "only" $5M. But it took another $5M investment and 7 more years before Pixar could begin to produce Toy Story. The one facet of the Computer Division he kept, on the other hand, ended up inventing avatars, MMORPGs, fractal landscapes, and eventually became a pillar of the billions of value in Lucasfilm. I guess the Lost Patrol found what they had been looking for.

Week 3 at Adobe: Thinking about Metrics

I love it when Steve Arnold comes to visit. He was partly in town for a board meeting of the George Lucas Educational Foundation, which is always kind of interesting.  Any meeting that also includes a little time speculating about the new Star Wars movie is a good meeting. Today’s treat was that he wanted to introduce me to Gregg Spiridellis, CEO and cofounder of JibJab.

I remember seeing JibJab's original viral video. It was 2004, a few years before YouTube, and their quirky election era animation about George Bush and John Kerry was seen in the tens of millions and put him and his brother Evan on the national stage. They turned the opportunity into a company which has been creative over the years with personalized videos for all occasions, effectively reinventing what we think of as holiday cards. They turned it into a subscription service and they have more than a million customers. Now Gregg and his brother are parents of young children, and they are leveraging a new opportunity: personalized media products for kids and families. It’s launching soon so I presume I can talk about it, but it represents a cool opportunity and they’re well positioned to create that space.

Netflix Churn, from Seeking Alpha

One of the things that I’ve been noticing these days is that many traditional sorts of retail are being supplanted by subscription models via the cloud. Adobe has moved this way. JibJab has too. This growing wave requires a noteworthy change in business thinking. The metrics to focus on when you're selling "products" are different from those when you're a subscription service, and the levers on those valves are new. When business is all about subscriptions, then the metrics you need concern acquisition and retention. You want more people to join. You want fewer subscribers to quit. And whatever you do to try to make that happen, no matter what tactics you use, retention and “churn” are central to measure. And you know who rocked at this science? Netflix. In 2002 Netflix was approaching its first million subscribers and churn was huge, more than 7% each month. Systematically and with executional precision, the company managed to crank down on churn until 2005 when it was under 5%... At that point it got a lot harder to crank it down. (While not a real issue when you're small, as subscriber numbers grow, the value of churn percentage points continues to increase.) As a product director there in 2006, when subscribers crossed 4M, I was familiar with efforts to move retention down through the decimal points in the 4% range. By then the low hanging fruit had been plucked and the company was fracking the ground to extract retention. I’m getting the sense that those early Netflix lessons are going to be remarkably applicable in the proliferation of cloud-based subscription business these days. 

My First VC Taught Me This

Everyone has an idea for a new product.
But not every great idea makes a great business.
And not every great business makes a great investment.

I think of this often. Thanks Pam.

Adobe's DIG and PIXAR

I mentioned in an earlier post how I felt like a like an anthropologist living among natives in New Guinea, (or perhaps a spy in the house of love). I've seen this odd grouping before...

Lucasfilm's Graphics Group, 1984
[From Droidmaker; Courtesy of Lucasfilm Ltd, © Pixar]

In 1984 this was the Graphics Group at the Lucasfilm Computer Division. Here was a successful film company that had research teams working on new media. They were led by a mild-mannered creative academic, Ed Catmull, hired by Lucas to set up the division. And after some years of foundation work, they brought in an outsider, John Lasseter, a Disney animator with a passion for tech. He inspired everyone and provided real world structure to their academic pursuits. In those days, John did things like taking everyone to the deYoung museum to look at Maxfield Parish paintings or to Mt. Tam to watch sunlight stream through trees. So here was their DNA: Catmull, Alvy Ray Smith, Rob Cook, Tom Porter, David Salesin, Loren Carpenter... 9+ PhD-types and Lasseter, the core of what became Pixar a few years later. And while I'm no Lasseter, I feel like DIG has a similar dynamic-- I'm in close proximity with this mix of scientists and mathematicians working on media tools that I will help shape into real products. It may not be coincidence that DIG is lead by mild-mannered creative academic Salesin (third from right in the 1984 photo) who was intimate with the structure of that proto-Pixar lab (and Lasseter's flatmate back then). I reckon it's a recipe he's seen work.

Corporate Innovation and Parenting

It's only day 3 of SXSW and i'm tired of the jargony terms "disruption" and "innovation". (Both in my own title!) They're everywhere this year. Every company wants to be innovative, and many are. Some companies have the capacity or interest in fostering their own disruption. This is, of course, harder. There's no buzzy product this year as in prior SXSWs -- no Twitter or Foursquare. This year the buzz is about using lean methodologies and about being disruptive. Eric Ries' Lean day was SRO.

Innovation is not disruption. But i'll save the semantic blog post for another day.

As I seek to help Adobe by disrupting Adobe, I constantly feel like a child, with Adobe as my parent. I believe the metaphor is pretty good, so i'll push it;

Adults have mortgages and jobs and dependents and responsibility. They're a little jaded. They've seen it all. They know a ton. It's not that they don't WANT to be fun and frivolous, but they are mature enough to understand that keeping your job is important. The family depends on you.

Parents were once kids, but now they're all grown up. And no matter how much they loved rock n' roll back in the day, swearing they'd remember, their children's music feels like noise.

But kids have a different job. They not only cannot behave like adults, they shouldn't. Kids' job is to grow and learn. They have to learn to speak, they learn math, history, reading. They learn by imitation and they learn by experimentation. Trial and error. It's impossible to learn without having a safe place to try and fail. They need to be somewhat irresponsible. Kids make mistakes. They are naive and don't know the rules. Sure they learn them and the hope is they don't hurt themselves or others in the process, but the crux of the kid's job is to experiment, to try and to fail often.

And a parent's role is not to hamper this process. The parents' job is to give broad boundaries and otherwise encourage this risky behavior in as safe a space as possible. Too much restriction, and all parents know what will happen -- rebellion -- usually dangerous. Just as most companies would love to innovate profoundly and avoid being disrupted by competition in a changing landscape, parents all want to be good parents with great self-reliant kids; but it's harder than it looks -- to create that space, to let go of that control, to love them anyway. Kids generally want to make their parents proud and have meaningful lives.

I'm okay being at kid at Adobe. I'm optimistic that Adobe will be a great parent.

Product Design

I've said this often, but it's worth repeating.

1. Film editing is product design. And product design is editing.

Most people tend to think of editing as the throwing out of bad material. This is not completely true. Editing is about throwing out good material to make the remaining material better.

2. Throwing out good material is profoundly painful. Some of the work of a film editor is certainly the editing, but a considerable part of the job is taking care of the director and producers; they spent a fortune on this film, they worked hard to get these shots, and here you are just tossing out their precious material, you heartless bastard. So your job is to help them feel okay with this cutting. They must be soothed. They must be convinced that you truly are looking out for their best interests and that you both have the same goal -- a great movie that will make them look good. You're an editor. You're a therapist.

This is also the nature of product design. Coming up with cool features is like the shooting of the film. The hard parts of the job are both the editing, and then managing of that pain.

Hey Adobe: This is one of those red flags we are looking for:

"Designing User Interfaces in Keynote *Not in Photoshop"

The seeds of disruption to large companies are all over this place, with demos of funky new video editing apps to social photo tools. One of my favorite talks so far at SXSW was from Ted Boda, a UX designer from (of all places) Netflix! His talk was fully educational, one of those talks where you go home and everything is different.

Adobe, Field Report, Before SXSW

Matt sits across from me at work. He's got a whiteboard covered with math. I look at it while I work. It makes absolutely no sense to me and I find it fascinating. I asked him to explain it to me, you know, in layman's terms. I went to college and all, but i had to work exceptionally hard to follow. Everyone around me here is like him. I'm living among the natives and they have taken me in.

In Search of... Creative Entrepreneurs.

I’m looking for a few entrepreneurs to join me in a great experiment and unique opportunity. I’m looking for people who are continuously seeing opportunities. They should be undaunted by putting themselves out there, betting big and playing smart.

If you’re a person like this you might not be tempted to join a big company. It might feel like selling out. I get it. But let me see if i can change your mind. Allow me to paint a picture of what I've found inside Adobe over the past week. This place is a treasure trove of excellent inventions. The company is generally hard at work with well-known creative products like Photoshop. To improve these (and other) software requires global teams of—not product engineers in the traditional sense—but research scientists in fields of mathematics, computer science, artificial intelligence, machine learning… they are PhDs, professors, mentors to students. The Creative Technologies Lab (CTL) at Adobe is a successful group, responsible for many of the powerful tools inside Adobe’s professional media products.

Now, imagine that you were challenged to develop and release an array of inventive, useful, entertaining or empowering products from the inventions the CTL is making, and has been making, for many years. It’s magical in a James Bond, 007-Q kind of way, and any entrepreneur would thrill to create a product out of any one of them.  

So if this sounds like an excellent opportunity to you, please introduce yourself to me, and explain to me why you should be on this team. Maybe it should feel like your entire career has been building to this moment. Here’s what I need: Send a concise cover letter, introduction or maybe short powerpoint. Surprise me. Please attach a resume--- but! if the intro doesn’t hook me, i won’t get to the resume. Email me at rubin@adobe.com  or find me at sxsw next week. Lots to do. I’m looking forward to meeting you.

Innovation at Adobe

I spent the week getting oriented, getting wired into the Borg, and, you know, getting the lay of the land. A lot of up and down stairs. There are elevators too, but mostly stairs. After meeting someone in the lobby, on more than one occasion, I was asked “are you a stair person or an elevator person?”

It’s a nice working environment. The building itself is a landmark: it was built in 1905 and survived the earthquake and fire of 1906; later it housed Baker & Hamilton, a company that sold shovels to the miners during the California gold rush. It still has many of its original structures, skylights and stairwells. There are original foot-square columns of solid, perfect redwood that are stories tall. There are cool bank vaults with enormous black steel doors, to be discovered here and there as I poke through the cube farm. It’s also profoundly earthquake reinforced, and I have to duck under a monstrous girder extending into the third floor to get to my cube.

Perhaps because my title is “senior innovator” in a group charged with “disruptive innovation” I am consistently getting introduced to interesting, dynamic folks where ever I go. I suppose what surprises me most is just how many really amazing and innovative things are actually going on here. I was lulled into believing my little piece of the Adobe world would be the innovative part. Now I better understand that we’re just one execution of innovation, and that the path to the future would have many faces and require a number of approaches. There’s a lot going on all around me.  

When I was at Netflix, I used to say that the leadership of the company had two agendas, a public one and a private one. The public one was to build a new movie distribution business. That’s the Netflix everyone knows. The private one was about the business itself: could a start-up company grow by some set of principles in such a way as to maintain the excitement, fun, and nimbleness of a start-up even as the organization grew larger. The now-famous “Netflix Culture Deck” is a snapshot of learnings there.

Similarly, I have two agendas at Adobe. First, a public one about delivering delightful and useful media tools; but privately addressing a different challenge: how can a large industry leader be innovative enough not to get disrupted from the outside, and ultimately clobbered by newer companies. I hope that in time we can release an “Adobe Innovation Deck” that outlines our recipe for successful disruptive innovation. It’s only my first week, but that’s my plan.

MOOC LESSONS & DIG

In preparation.
Reading an opinion piece in Wired about MOOCs (Massively Open Online Courses) and how they disrupt education. (Wired 2-20-13)

(When established players want to (successfully) catch a disruptive wave, however, they have to set up an autonomous business model with different resources, processes, and priorities. Otherwise, the very capabilities that serve them well in their traditional business can represent liabilities in the one they’re disrupting. This is how IBM was able to go from the mainframe to personal computing business in the ’80s and ’90s, and it’s why MOOCs have done well in spinning themselves off into separate entities.

Although the big three MOOCs — Coursera, edX, and Udacity — all leverage capabilities from their “parent” universities, they still have to be careful about which ones to adopt and which ones to avoid. Ideally, they should be able to pull what they want instead of having their university parents push resources (like administrative processes) to them.

The only place the direction of this relationship doesn’t matter, according to our research, is brand. Being associated with the likes of Harvard, MIT, and Stanford doesn’t hurt, especially when it comes to signaling quality (i.e., “endorser” brands), as long as the disruptor can signal some separation for a job well done (i.e., “purpose” brands) in the new disruptive realm — hence the power of the “X” in edX. Leveraging its brand helped IBM move through multiple disruptive waves.

All of this speaks to me...


So a question for me is: how long will it be before someone tells me to take down the following image, my private mantra for commitment to real disruption?

Let's see.

ADOBE D.I.G.

Day -1 at The Disruptive Innovation Group

I couldn't be more excited these days. We're still in the magic zone, the hours that are before the work begins, when it's all honeymoon and dreamy. I start officially on Monday, but i was happy to pick up my badge this week.

But this will not be simple. Every day companies try to avoid getting disrupted by young upstarts, eyeing the horizon for where things are going. It's a difficult problem. Groups like DIG have been created in other places at other times, and as far as I can tell, few succeed. But I believe that Adobe can do this. They are uniquely positioned and qualified. Hell, i'm not even onboard and i'm mixing up the Kool-Aid.

I think the first disruption of DIG has to be the group itself. Its very DNA has to be antithetical. Not contrary with a point of being contrary, but focused solely on its own success without regard for the host. While we know our fates are linked and goals the same, everything else will need to be a startup, I'm convinced of this. 

More thoughts to follow.

Social Networks and People Over 50

As I was posting and tagging old photographs today I noticed that perhaps one in three of my ol’ friends, classmates and childhood neighbors– were NOT online, not on Facebook, not even on Linkedin. Sure they can be called. They can certainly be emailed. But they don’t participate in any of the main social tools available. I don’t judge. I’m just saying I wasn’t easily able share a link or photos with these folks.

Later this year (much later!) I will turn 50.  When I step back to view the landscape I’d say relatively few people OLDER than I am engage in these social networks (particularly once you leave Silicon Valley). Conversely, almost everyone YOUNGER than me is. So while there are no pithy names for my end-of-the-boomer generation, I’d suggest we seem to have evolved into a grey zone of the digitally disconnected.

If this was a war, and I’m not saying we’re at war with the young, but IF this was a war, we would be totally outflanked. Being connected makes a group highly nimble, information flowing rapidly in all directions. It’s not just “socializing” and it’s easy to paint the digitally social with a brush of “what I had for lunch” but the fact is that being communicative and connected is a distinct advantage in many fields, perhaps all fields—finding businesses and getting jobs, networking, ideation, education… and by excluding ourselves wholey from that realm, everyone over 50 (and honestly, anyone who self selects out) is crippling themselves.  It’s true in many industries: people want to work with other people they like, we want to work with friends or at least “potential” friends. Hollywood is like this. Out of sight out of mind. If they keep bumping into you at lunch you have a better chance of working with them at some point. In real estate it’s location, location, location—you have to pay to get bumped into easily. In the digital realm, you’re the property and the network is the location. You don’t want to be “spam.” But you do want to be found.

I used to think this was a small thing, just a lifestyle choice, and that folks who abandoned (or never tried) using social tools were just folksy. But today I’m thinking they’re doomed, clinging to their horse, riding along the side of highways cursing the speeding cars. Not being able to be tagged in an old picture isn’t the problem but it was a symptom of the real problem: a digital divide where many of my friends seem to have camped on the wrong side of the chasm. To my unFacebooked friends I say “give in.” I’d post this on my wall, but they’d never see it. Anyway, I’m just preaching to the choir…

Rubin's Rubrics for Entrepreneurs

1. Simple works. Every time. Never underestimate the public’s unnaturally short attention span.
2. Cheaper and easier tends to trump high-quality and powerful.
3. Find what everyone else is doing and don’t do it.
4. It’s all storytelling. And it’s better if it’s funny. (And WAY better if it’s sexy.)
5. Always Be Closing (ABC)
6. Find the niche, start with the tribe. You need a beachhead to launch the attack.
7. Many paths to success. No one right answer.
8. Even the right answer can fail. There’s always always a significant element of luck.
9. Watch your cashflow.
10. A blank canvas can be murder: Constraints and limitations are necessary for good development.
11. For long slogs, visualize the conclusion.
12. Being entrepreneurial is a personality defect--

Danny, my screenwriting brother, has long maintained his Rubrics of Writing. I've always admired that. This week I've found myself talking a lot about how I develop products, how I start projects, and what i've learned in my career. This list fell out of that work. I hope it helps someone.

Simple works. Every time. Never underestimate the public’s unnaturally short attention span.

This gets demonstrated to me everywhere I look. But the data came from Netflix. We tried many things to improve the service, improve the value for our customers, but the fact was that every time we simplified the web experience, removed some feature, retention went up. Retention was one of our objectives. Simplification directly impacted that. There are tons of examples of this across industries.

Cheaper and easier tends to trump high-quality and powerful.

I have been continuously shocked over the decades that when new formats were invented that were clearly inferior to existing formats (in terms of quality), they won out, largely due to their convenience. Audio formats, photo formats, video formats...  pros still want the AIF and RAW files, but consumers want small and cheap. This fit with what I call the "Peter Principle of Products" which is that manufacturers keep adding features until their product becomes complex and nearly impossible to learn, and only appeals to the advanced existing client base, but no new users would adopt it; this makes the product ripe for disruption by a simple elegant solution. And the game starts again.

Find what everyone else is doing and don’t do it.

This one came from my mom when I was younger. There are ample good examples of competition being good and also for not going first ("pioneers get the arrows in their backs...") and you'll hear about how the iPod was NOT the first MP3 player, or how Apple came very late to the "phone" game... but the simple fact is that less competition means less risk. Why compete if you don't have to? 

It’s all storytelling. And it’s better if it’s funny. (And WAY better if it’s sexy.)

You stand up and pitch. You go to meetings and you network. You post on Facebook. You educate about your product. In business this is often referred to as "communication skills" but at the end of the day, you need to be a storyteller. The story is how your product fits in the world. It's how you came to your idea. You have to describe an imaginary product or service so clearly that investors can imagine it and engineers can build it. Storytelling enrolls others--teammates, investors or customers. It's the core of marketing. Being comfortable (and good) at finding and telling these stories is central.

Always Be Closing (ABC)

You can't be here if you haven't watched Glengarry Glen Ross at least once, and perhaps memorized the "steak knives" speech. I just said it's all storytelling. To be more complete, i'd say it's all SALES. Always be selling, always be closing. Don't just "do" things, but have an objective. Entrepreneurship is selling things that don't exist. It's the hardest kind of sales.

Find the niche, start with the tribe. You need a beachhead to launch the attack.

Consumer products are the hardest things to sell. If you hear yourself say "it's for everyone" you're doomed. Better is a product for a very clear, targetable, findable, audience. Ophthalmologists. Videogame players. As you broaden the audience, noise increases, competition increases. Go bigger slowly: moms with young kids, sorority sisters, travelers to paris. You should take pause if your audience is "Men 18-45".

Many paths to success. No one right answer.

We said this a lot at Netflix. You're not looking for the path, just a path. Any path is good if it leads where you want to go. Be efficient later. The odds that you find it are relatively small, so think broadly.

Even the right answer can fail. There’s always always a significant element of luck.

For every successful YouTube and Facebook there were a host of very very similar products that failed. The formula for success is complicated: a great team, a great market, a great product... all of these put the odds in your favor. But at the end of the day it's just dumb luck. Luck that someone else didn't enter the field of competition at the wrong moment, luck that the government changed some law this year, luck that the video went viral...  it's not ALL luck, but to disregard how much is luck is disingenuous and dangerous.

Watch your cashflow.

This is still business. Everything costs money. And running out of money is death. You don't know how long it will take to succeed. Maybe never. But to give yourself the best chance of success you have to watch the cash, give yourself as long a runway as you can muster, cut costs to the point of pain, and know basics of running a business whether you're the engineer or the sales guy. Undercapitalization is the single biggest killer of small business. (I didn't look that up, but i'd guess it's true.)

A blank canvas can be murder: Constraints and limitations are necessary for good development.

I think it's far easier to improve on things than invent them from whole cloth. Whether this is remodeling a house or editing a movie, it's the constraints that make it fun. It's problem solving as opposed to art. I'm all for art. But it's a tough business. Ask a writer. Nothing is harder to look at than a blank page.

For long slogs, visualize the conclusion.

You don't want a blank canvas for your objective. You want it very clear. For me this means that when I start a book or app, i spend too much time designing the cover or icon and put them up near where i'm working. By the time the book is done it's never the final cover, but that's not the point. The point is that while working I look up at the cover and think "there it is, it's almost done, now i just have these pesky details to fill in." It helps.

Being entrepreneurial is a personality defect.

It is. Mostly it's being delusional. The odds of anything you do working and succeeding are astronomically small. Didn't Han Solo say "Never tell me the odds"? You'd have to be self deluded to believe that you can do better, that you can make a difference, you can best the incumbent, you can disrupt the status quo--in spite of the odds. But there you have it. You do. And you can. And believing this is essential. It's fucked up. 

So good luck out there. I hope this was as useful a romp for you as it was for me.