Tag: ben horowitz

Posted on

#unfiltered #8 The Oasis – Fiction, Books I’ve Recommended/Gifted the Most, How I’ve Kept Myself Busy Outside of Work

book, fiction, reading

Lately, I’ve picked up a few fiction books – 2, to be specific – The Three Body Problem by Liu Cixin and Mistborn: The Final Empire by Brandon Sanderson, by recommendation of a friend and founder, respectively. And damn, they’ve rekindled my love for worldly escapes. Prior to high school, I used to be the biggest fanatic of fiction books. Although proportionally smaller, my fictional “library” at home still includes:

  • every single book in the Magic Tree House series by Mary Pope Osborne
  • the entire Redwall series by Brian Jacques,
  • every single one in the LEGO Bionicle series,
  • the Alex Rider series by Anthony Horowitz,
  • Dune by Frank Herbert,
  • The Steel Wave by Jeff Shaara,
  • and much more.

And to further how much I nerded out over fiction, I knew our local librarians by their first name and memorized by library card number by heart (to this day) – all for the sake of fiction. But as I grew older and entered my teens, I was told that I should have outgrown fiction. That it should stay as a remnant – a fond memory – of my “youth”. So, I slowly acquired the taste for non-fiction, biographies/autobiographies, business books and documentaries.

Yet, in some ways, in this serendipitous situation, when now I have more free time, and by fervent inspiration from the two aforementioned angels, I found sanctuary in other worlds. I saw with my imagination and heard with my eyes. For lack of better words, it was magical.

From non-fiction, I’ve been able to walk alongside the greats who have once or now inhabit the reality on this small blue pearl amidst a sea of unknown. From fiction, I’ve been able to walk alongside the greats who have never lived in this reality, maybe never will, but somewhere out there, they hold the keys to our dreams. Each hold a proud seat in my heart, but the latter has been dormant for over a decade.

Books I’ve Recommended/Gifted the Most

I should preface that I’m not the most voracious reader out there – although that’s been changing over the past 4-5 weeks. But here are my favorites which I’ve recommended/gifted the most:

  • 2018 fav – The Messy Middle by Scott Belsky
    • Short (1-3 pages, on average), but incredibly insightful chapters of product/design/leadership lessons from a founder/investor/product leader, especially during messy times post-honeymoon stage of being an entrepreneur. My favorite pages… 232-234. A set of three questions to create a lovable product.
  • 2019 fav – The Trillion Dollar Coach by Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg, and Alan Eagle
    • A dedication to the most well-known least famous person in Silicon Valley. From the book title, you might be able to guess what he did – all of which he took zero compensation for. Having been suggested and subsequently read too many leadership books earlier in my career, when I first suggested this one, I was quite skeptical. I thought it was just another one of those, until I heard the name, Bill Campbell. A name which I’ve heard more than once from various people who attributed their success to him, since 2016. And I’m so glad I didn’t dismiss this one. I only wish I could have gotten to know the amazing person this book is dedicated to.
  • Startup fav – The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz
    • A book that doesn’t sugarcoat the tough decisions in building a company – a set of decisions illustrating on how he dealt with situations when things just wasn’t going his way. Rather than being prescriptive, it gave me a framework for understanding the various struggles a founder will encounter – most of which I had yet to see when I was recommended to read this book. Quite pertinent in today’s landscape, ironically.
  • Most nostalgic/impactful on personal growth – The Art of War by Sun Tzu
    • I was first given this book when I graduated from elementary school, as the problem child, though not in the traditional sense. I had a knack for blaming others when problems arose, but this book helped me understand people better and where people were coming from. In all honesty, I don’t know why it clicked when I was only 10, but it did. Apart from my childhood bias, though specific to leadership in a military regime, you can draw several parallels between the art of war and business and life.
  • Fiction fav – Salamandastron by Brian Jacques
    • Brian Jacques throughout the entire Redwall series just has such a way to weave suspense and an emotional attachment to the various characters. Admittedly, it was the first fictional book I cried to while reading, so it holds a special place in my heart.

For the sake of not overwhelming you with too much, I’ve only included the ones I’ve statistically recommended/given the most, as well as gotten the most positive reactions from folks I’ve offered these to. If you’re interested in a more exhaustive list, feel free to DM me – either through this blog or social media.

Keeping Body and Mind Busy

For many of my other friends and colleagues, they have found similar solace in books. Many in the kitchen. Some with instruments and a camera. A handful with a mic and Twitch or Anchor.

Because I have saved 2-3 hours of travel time every day now, I’ve been:

  • Doodling at least thrice a week in my Leuchtturm notebook, specifically their medium sketchbook (180g/sqm, so on the thicker end of pages);
  • Jumping on game sessions with friends over the weekends, like on Skribbl.io or recently, Songversations (Discord is definitely my favorite medium of social interaction, especially with all the bots they have. My favorite of which is the Groovy music bot where I can tune into music alongside my friends);
  • Reaching out to 1 new person I’m insanely curious about every week;
  • Idea-journaling every day;
  • Trying new recipes and methods in the kitchen;
  • Trying new home workout routines;
  • Reading fiction and non-fiction;
  • Writing for this blog 😀 ;
  • And, a new social experiment between friends, family, and colleagues, in hopes of making this world feel a little smaller, just a little closer, and a whole lot more interesting.

So, if you have the time and privilege to, explore new/’new’ genres and mediums of storytelling, creativity, and activity. Some may very well surprise you!

Photo by Ksenia Makagonova on Unsplash

#unfiltered is a series where I share my raw thoughts and unfiltered commentary about anything and everything. It’s not designed to go down smoothly like the best cup of cappuccino you’ve ever had (although here‘s where I found mine), more like the lonely coffee bean still struggling to find its identity (which also may one day find its way into a more thesis-driven blogpost). Who knows? The possibilities are endless.

Stay up to date with the weekly cup of cognitive adventures inside venture capital and startups!

Posted on

Brand as a Moat

startup brand, moat, defense, defensibility
Photo by Keith Johnston on Unsplash

What is the underlying notion that makes this product work?

It’s the question that almost every investor, especially early-stage startup investor, tries to answer when they’re entertaining potential investments. Some close cousins include:

  • What social, economic, or political trend is enabling this technology/business to work?
  • Why will people want to continue using this product? Consciously? Subconsciously? How much will they regret not being able to use this product?
  • Why is this idea crazy good, and not just crazy?
  • Is there a predictable road to traction? Product-market fit? $1M ARR? etc.
  • Is this a scalable business?

Needless to say, when I chat with founders, their business’s defensibility often comes up. Every business – small or large – needs to be defensible. Grandma’s cookies are just that good ’cause of that ‘secret’ brown butter element. Or Sally’s lemonade stand sells better than her neighbor’s down the street since she can keep her drinks cool for longer. Just like every good medieval castle has a moat, possibly filled with alligators, every good business has to have that one (or many) unfair advantage, as they call it in B-school. Not that I ever went, but I’ve heard from friends and professors who have. And this is even more true if you want to build a scalable business.

Those who have gone generally claim that their moat is their experience at X Fortune 500 company. Those who have a technical background often claim that their moat is their IP – patents owned and pending. Neither are wrong. And frankly, there are a multitude of factors that come into play when arguing for a business’s defensibility. And most of the times, it’s a permutation of the above and more. But the purpose of this post is to focus on an often discounted notion of brand as a moat. Both the company brand and the personal brand.

Disclaimer:

I should mention that before you even consider your business’s defensibility, and subsequently, brand, first, make a damn good product. I’ve seen too many founders take that leap of faith before they even have a product. They pitch the dream of them making a better world – the company vision – before they even figure out the first steps they need to take to get there.

The only ‘exception’ to this rule, at least from a fundraising and pre-PMF perspective, is if you have an amazingly robust personal brand. Though that may help with early traction, it won’t be enough to sustain a scalable business in the long run.

The startup brand

Your startup’s brand is a collective composed of the:

  • Company mission,
  • Company vision,
  • Internal culture,
  • And, the openness and responsiveness of the team.

The vision is that ultimate dream. The mission is what you’ll do now to get to that dream. Back in college, someone I really respect put it to me like this:

“The vision is the Sun. The mission is that ladder up. You can’t get to the Sun without building a ladder. If you only stare at it, you’ll eventually blind yourself. And if you just build a ladder, or else you might up on Mars instead, poorly equipped to survive there.”

Culture is something that you can set at the beginning, but know it’ll be an evolving beast with every new hire and every new incident. What you let happen defines the new culture. Although I share my thoughts in a post earlier this year, Ben Horowitz puts it into a much better perspective in his book, What You Do is Who You Are: How to Create your Business Culture. Quite a story-filled read, especially when you’re looking for something to do at home now.

And, the above three culminates into how your team acts.

  • Do your current customers/users feel like their concerns are either addressed or at least, valued?
  • Do they feel they are a valued member of your community?
  • What is your customer satisfaction rate? NPS score?
  • How do you prioritize and act on customer feedback?
  • Are your users engaged? How do you reengage them, if they become inactive?
  • For apps, what are they saying on the App Store/Play Store?
  • And, how are new customers hearing about your product? What do they hear? What are their explicit and implicit assumptions when using your product?

Why it Matters

Together the 4 elements answer the fundamental questions:

  1. Why would a potentially great customer want to use your product?
  2. Why would a potentially great hire want to join your company?

In the past few months, many VCs have been shifting their investment focus from consumer and towards enterprise/SaaS. There’s the argument that consumers are (1) more expensive to acquire (increasing CAC; the average number of apps a person downloads a day is zero), and (2) harder to retain. (For a more in-depth explanation, I would recommend you to check out the “Consumer App Conundrum” section here.) Aka, it’s more competitive than ever in the consumer markets. When we get closer to perfect competition over a saturated market seeking attention, having a great product just isn’t enough anymore. When some of the most active and vocal consumers happen to be people on the younger spectrum (millennials and Gen Zs), to fight for their attention, you need a brand that resonates with them on causes they care about – whether it’s diversity or climate change or another social cause.

We see this notion affecting two other verticals: the public sector and enterprise.

  • The privatization of X (let X be education, healthcare, transportation, etc. for all that were empirically public sector functions)
  • The consumerization of enterprise

For the purpose of this piece, let’s look at the consumerization of enterprise. What does that mean? Before enterprise sales worked from a top-down approach. A founder of an enterprise/SaaS startup pitches to a senior executive at a Fortune 500 (or similar) company. And the executive makes the call and the budget allocation towards their team’s usage of said product.

Now, many startups/companies, like Slack, Trello, Lever, and Soapbox, are taking the bottom-up approach, garnering brand loyalty among the people who will be/are using the product itself. And I predict that’ll be so in the near future for Superhuman, the fastest email client, and Woven, my favorite calendar app, as well. After all, progress happens at the most junior level. If you take it in relation to a tech startup of 200 in its growth phase, the founders or executives can make a plan and set deadlines. But if your most junior developer isn’t working on it, the whole business halts to a stop. All this makes me quite bullish on products in the low-code/no-code space, as well as in towards the future of work.

Moreover, this has led enterprise products to be heavily personalized, constantly updating, and has paved the way to multi-modal business models (i.e. subscription and pay-per-use). All this maximizes user satisfaction, which in turn affects their productivity, and transitively, the business flow.

Although the job market looks wildly different now than it did 3 months ago, when I assume the average founder is looking for cash preservation over growth, you still should be cognizant about the latter going forward.

Your Personal Brand

Your personal brand as a founder, or just as a professional, really matters. If you are a founder or thinking about becoming one, start building a public voice. Get people excited about you and what you’re all about.

Why?

Personal brands are extremely scalable and have built-in virality. You put one post out. Some percent of your followers engage with your content by liking or commenting. Then either by social media’s algorithms or by their innate excitement, they’ll share your content with their friends. Subsequently, new folks discover you and your content. And this becomes a virtuous loop, or network effects, as we call it, that helps get you scalable traction. This is why celebrities, like Dr. Dre and Maisie Williams, and their ventures garner quite a bit of traction among consumers and among investors. This is also why influencer marketing has been so bullish over the past few years.

At some point in your company’s lifespan, your personal brand will become the company brand. And that’ll become either shining beacon or the downfall of your company. More than just the followers you have on social media and in public, you are judged by everyone constantly on your aptitude and behaviors. How open, conscientious, agreeable, extroverted, and neurotic are you? (Yes, I took the 5 traits from the Big 5/OCEAN test.) Each and more have an impact on your personal brand. If we look at the culture behind Facebook, we see how large of an imprint Zuckerberg has on it. For Apple, Jobs.

In closing

The best thing about brands as a moat is that it’s effectively free! But both take years of work in building. As someone on the investing side, I love stellar brands. And it’s one of the elements of a business I weigh heavily on for its potentiality in network effects, summarized in the “Why you?” component of my NTY investment thesis (why Now, why This, why You).

Hmmmm, now thinking about it, personal brand may be the biggest reason I’ve been changing my handwashing habits in the past week… after watching Gordon Ramsay, Alton Brown, and Conan O’Brien‘s tutorials on it.

Stay up to date with the weekly cup of cognitive adventures inside venture capital and startups!

Posted on

#unfiltered #3 Plan Bs – Should we have them?

I woke up today with a thought that’s been gnawing at me for years now. Why do we have backup plans – Plan Bs, Plan Cs, etc? Does it inhibit our drive? Or readily prepare us for the worst? At what point are we sacrificing our commitment for safety?

When I started this blog, my writing mentor recommended that I have 10 pieces written and ready before I launch my blog. And I did exactly that. All cards out, I still have 8 of my pieces saved in my backlogs, which as you have already deducted, I’ve used 2 of my pieces already. Why? My mentor told me that, in my commitment to publish content weekly, I will indubitably have dry spells – dry weeks. And I did… twice. So, I regressed to my lowest common denominator and pulled something out of my archives. But during those two weeks, it helped me stay in my comfort zone. That instead of fighting writer’s block (if such a thing exists), I chose to run from it.

Part of the reason I started this #unfiltered series is to help me be content with content. I am guilty of 8/10 times second-guessing my way out of doing something. If I contemplate over something long enough, I’ll realize fears that I never thought possible, and opt for the safer option – not doing it at all.

From when we were young, we’re taught to always prepare backup options. When applying to colleges, we’re told to apply to our 2-3 reach schools, and 10-15 other schools we’re confident about getting into. When applying to jobs, one of my hometown neighbors, 2 years my senior, advised me to apply to 200 jobs, expect 10-20 interviews, another 3-5 for final rounds, and 1-2 offers to choose from. Effectively, asking me to apply to 198 backup alternatives.

I get it. As the saying goes, beggars can’t be choosers. Both high school and my early years of college have drilled that saying into me – by my peers and by my teachers.

A part of me hates it, but a part of me realizes the truth in there. I saw that circumstances played an even larger role for my friends and peers who:

  • are going through tough times in this pandemic and economic downturn,
  • (whose) parents came from a lower income bracket,
  • are POC (people of color),
  • are female,
  • are/were open about their different sexual orientations,
  • didn’t graduate from a 4-year college,
  • lost limbs or appendages due to accidents or conflict,
  • are/were in debt,
  • and much more.

Half a decade back when I set out to meet one new person that drew my insatiable curiosity a week, I realized I’m a goddamn privileged person living in the 21st century. I’m a perfectly healthy, heterosexual Asian male who graduated from a 4-year university. If all hell breaks loose and my net worth goes to absolute zero, I have my parents’ home to go back to and a room and bed to call my own. And as a full disclaimer, the fact I’m contemplating this question in the first place means I’m privileged enough to do so.

And because I’ve had the liberty to do so, I realized that my greatest personal achievements came from when I didn’t give myself the option of a Plan B. For the people I reached out to and am in touch with above my weight class, I either have given it my all or was prepared to do so. For swimming, I treated each competition as my last, meaning I either gave it my all or nothing. And during more nights than I can count, I beat myself up over my inability to reach a milestone.

Yet, now in the land of venture, we learn to hedge our bets and come up with contingency plans. We learn once again to diversify our portfolio, and not put all eggs in one basket. Does that lead to why many investors fundamentally don’t have the conviction to lead deals?

On the founding side, you have it almost flipped. When you are trying to make ends meet, there will be times you have to take that one option and go all in. And you can’t let go until you do everything you can to make it a reality. When you sit in a position of privilege, you can have several contingency plans to hedge your bets. Ben Horowitz, author, founder, and investor, illustrated the dichotomy in his piece (and one of my favorites) about peacetime and wartime CEOs. There’s a part of me that strives to find that sense of urgency, like a wartime CEO. And go all in. Maybe this pandemic is the test where I can find where my values really lie.

To be frank, I haven’t come up with a conclusion to the dilemma. For now, I can only hypothesis-test and keep good track of the data that comes my way. But, so far, I can say that one’s tolerance for risk is positively correlated with one’s free cash flow.

#unfiltered is a series where I share my raw thoughts and unfiltered commentary about anything and everything. It’s not designed to go down smoothly like the best cup of cappuccino you’ve ever had (although here‘s where I found mine), more like the lonely coffee bean still struggling to find its identity (which also may one day find its way into a more thesis-driven blogpost). Who knows? The possibilities are endless.

Stay up to date with the weekly cup of cognitive adventures inside venture capital and startups!

Posted on

Setting Culture

Photo by Aron Visuals on Unsplash

I just started my second read of Ben Horowitz‘s new book, What You Do is Who You Are: How to Create your Business Culture. It’s a brilliant deep dive on what culture and virtues mean for a growing company or team. From the most successful slave revolution in history to prison culture to the samurai bushido, Ben draws parallels between those and startup culture, where you can get a snapshot here.

On page 31, Ben wrote “Create Shocking Rules.” Why “shocking”? So people will ask why. So people will pause, think, and remember them. What is “shocking”? In a time when raping and pillaging was the norm, Toussaint Louverture, the man who led the Haitian Revolution, forbade officers from having concubines. And he kept to that promise. When “shocking” isn’t the only game changer, you need uncompromising commitment to those rules. Weak follow-through is another fallacy in creating the culture you want. What you let slide will define the new culture, with or without your approval.

Sun Tzu and the Concubines

Rereading about Toussaint Louverture reminded me of a story my dad used to tell me by my bedside. About another brilliant general, who lived 2000 years prior to Toussaint during the Spring and Autumn Period, and best known for authoring The Art of War, Sun Tzu.

Through his thirteen chapters, dubbed The Art of War, he eventually earned an audience with the king of the State of Wu. Hoping to test Sun Tzu’s strategies to its extremes, possibly expecting to see Sun fail, the king asked Sun to test it on his harem of concubines.

After accepting the task at hand and separating the concubines into two companies, Sun had them all take a spear in hand and said, “I presume you know the difference between front and back, right hand and left hand?”

The women answered, “Yes.”

After explicitly explaining what “Eyes front”, “Left turn”, “Right turn”, and “About turn” meant, he issued his first order at the sound of the drums, “Right turn.” But, the concubines responded with fits of laughter. Sun Tzu proclaimed, “If words of command are not clear and distinct, if orders are not thoroughly understood, then the general is to blame.”

In another attempt, he called out, “Left turn.” His words met the same fate as the ones he uttered just prior – with laughter. This time, he said, “If words of command are not clear and distinct, if orders are not thoroughly understood, the general is to blame. But if his orders are clear, and the soldiers still disobey, then it is the fault of their officers.”

Subsequently, he ordered the heads of the two companies beheaded, whom happened to be king’s favorite two concubines. Seeing what had unfolded from his pavilion, the king sent a messenger to plead with Sun to keep his two favorite alive. But Sun did not relent.

After their execution, he immediately installed two new officers, and from then on, the concubines followed every order that Sun issued to the T.

Using the principles he shared and taught in The Art of War, Sun Tzu won many battles for the State of Wu, most notably, when Sun Tzu led an army of 30,000 to defeat an enemy numbering ten times more than the troops from Wu. As Jon Stewart, former The Daily Show host, once said:

“If you don’t stick to your values when they’re being tested, they’re not values: they’re hobbies.”

In Closing

In his book, Ben shares quite a bit how some of the best leaders in the world shaped their organizational culture. It wasn’t from catered lunches or having dogs in the office every Friday. Culture comes down to setting “shocking” rules, paired with a set of priorities, and more importantly, keeping them. Culture is what your team members remember about your organization and how it made and makes them feel 20 years down the road.

Though not perfect, my former swim coach instilled the same virtues in us. He was never a fan of tardiness. To him, it demonstrated a lack of character and commitment. And to enforce that, if we were late, by even a minute, to get into the water (not arrive at the pool), the offenders had to swim the entire warm-up in butterfly – the whole 2000 yards. And not one person escaped that law, not even him – not that I ever saw him late.

Proudly powered by WordPress