Over the past few months, I’ve been slowly experimenting with how I can take Hidden Questions online, while not sacrificing the intimacy of the relationships it builds as well.
Hidden Questions started as a question game I played with friends and colleagues, which eventually expanded to other strangers. The goal of which was to deepen our friendship within minutes rather than weeks, months, or even years. In sum, a game where each person has to answer the question truthfully, but is not required to reveal what the question is. The catch is that if the person decides to conceal the question, they have to take a “punishment” (i.e. crazy hot sauce, disgusting foods, durian, Beanboozled jelly beans, etc.). Before they decide to or not, other participants can ask clarifying questions, as long as it’s not “Is X the question?”, and bet additional units of “punishment” if the answeree chooses to conceal the question. Of course, if the answeree does reveal, the people who bet will take the “punishment” instead.
After over 30 sessions in the past 3 months, a few things have been hotfixed since the in-person game:
One-time perishable links – While not the be all end all, vua.sh lets us create a “secret messages” where only the people with the link can access the question – and only once. Once the link is opened once, it’s dead. So, this gives folks a peace of mind knowing that no one can go back and find out what the questions are. The people who create these questions are the last group/individuals who play.
One-slide Powerpoint presentations, reminiscent of Jeopardy, with increasing risk/depth factor of questions, scaling punishments with question difficulty/depth.
Mailing the “punishments” to the people I’m playing with, like Sean Evans and his team does for their show, Hot Ones, where they mail their 10 hot sauces to their guest before the interview. This way, I can keep people accountable to the punishments
Zoom, or an equivalent web conferencing tool – Social distancing at its best. Even better now, ’cause I get to play with people outside the Bay Area as well.
A few weeks ago, I published Part 1 of this post on inspiration and frustration. In that time, its reception has been uplifting. Easily my most popular and well-received blog post to date. It also happens to be one of my favorite posts to have published so far. So, I thought I’d continue to ask people about their cocktail of emotions now, the below two questions:
What is the one thing that inspires you so much that it makes everything else in life much easier to bear?
What is stressing/frustrating you so much right now that it seems to invalidate everything else you’re doing?
But, each person can only choose one of the above two questions to answer.
Three of the below candid responses are people I asked from the first cohort, while the other eight are people I thought would add a new degree of freedom on perspective. All of which were drawn more to their inspiration than their frustration.
In a number of recent conversations with friends outside of venture and “aspiring entrepreneurs”, a couple myths, which I’m going to loosely define here as popular beliefs held by many people, were brought to my attention. 4 in particular.
If I have a great idea and build it, it’ll sell itself.
That idea/startup is over-hyped.
The startup/venture capital landscape is over-saturated.
If it doesn’t make sense to me, it’s not a good idea.
Quite fortuitously, a question on Quora also inspired this post and discussion.
If I have a great idea and build it, it’ll sell itself.
Unfortunately, most times, it won’t. As Reid Hoffman puts it: “A good product with great distribution will almost always beat a great product with poor distribution.” As a founder, you have to think like a salesperson (for enterprise/B2B businesses) or a marketer (for consumer/B2C businesses). People have to know about what you’re building. ’Cause frankly you could build the world’s best time machine in your basement, but if no one knows, it’s just a time machine in your basement. Probably a great story to tell for Hollywood one day (even then you still need people to find out), but not for a business.
That idea/startup is over-hyped.
I’ll be honest. This really isn’t a myth, more of a common saying.
Maybe so, at the cross-section in time in which you’re looking at it. But if you rewind a couple months or a year or 2 years ago, they were under-hyped. In fact, there’s a good chance no one cared. While everyone has a different technical definition of over- and under-hyped, by the numbers, time will tell if it’ll be a sustainable business or not. If it’s keeping north of 40% retention even 6 months after the hype, we’re in for a breadwinner.
Take Zoom, for example. Pre-COVID, if you asked any rational tech investor, “would you invest in Slack or Zoom?” Most would say Slack. Zoom existed, but many weren’t extremely bullish on it. Today, well, that may be a different story. As of this morning (Oct. 12, 2020), while I’m editing this post before the market opens, the stock price of Zoom is $492 (and same change). Approximately 343% higher than it was on March 17th, the first day of the Bay Area shelter-in-place. And, right now, the price of Slack is $31. Approximately 56% up from the beginning of quarantine.
Neither are startups anymore, but the analogy holds. Also, a lesson that predictions, even by experts, can be wrong.
The startup/venture capital landscape is over-saturated.
“There’s too much money being invested (wasted) on startups.”
From the outside, it may very well look that way. Every day, every week we see this startup gets funded for $X million or that startup gets funded for $YY million. According to the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA), $133 billion were invested into startups last year. Yet, it pales in comparison to the capital that’s traded in the public markets.
VC funds see thousands of startup pitches a year. Per partner (most funds 2–3 partners), they each invest in 3–5 per year (aka about once per quarter). Meaning >99% of startups that a single VC sees are not getting funded by them. That doesn’t mean 99% never get funded, but it’s just to illustrate that proportionally, capital isn’t being spent willy-nilly.
If we look at it from a macro-economic perspective, if we are reaching saturation in the startup market, we should be getting closer to perfect competition. And in a perfectly competitive market, profit margins are zero. The thing is profits aren’t nearing zero in the startup/venture capital market. In fact, though the median fund isn’t returning much on invested capital. A good fund is returning 3–5x. A great one >5x. And well, if you were in Chris Sacca’s first fund, which included Uber, Twitter, and more, 250x MOIC. That’s $250 returned on every $1 invested.
If it doesn’t make sense to me, it’s not a good idea.
Revolutionary ideas aren’t meant to conform. If an idea is truly ground-breaking, people have yet to be conditioned to think that a startup idea is great or not. As Andy Rachleff, co-founder of Wealthfront and Benchmark Capital, puts it: “you want to be right on the non-consensus.” Think Uber and Airbnb in 2008. If you asked me to jump in a stranger’s car to go somewhere then, I would have thought you were crazy. Same with living in a stranger’s home. I write more about being right on the non-consensus here and in this blog post.
Frankly, you may not be the target market. You’re not the customer that startup is serving. The constant reminder we, on the venture capital side of the table, have is to stop thinking that we are the core user for a product. Most products are not made for us. Equally, when a founder comes to us pre-traction and asks us “Is this a good idea?”, most of the time I don’t know. The numbers (will) prove if it’s a good idea or not. Unless I am their target audience, I don’t have a lot to weigh in on. I can only check, from least important to most important:
How big is the market + growth rate
Does the founder(s) have a unique insight into the industry that all the other players are overlooking or underestimating or don’t know at all? And will this insight keep incumbents at bay at least until this startup reaches product-market fit?
How obsessed about the problem space is the founder/team, which is a proxy for grit and resilience in the longer run? And obsession is an early sign of (1) their current level of domain expertise/navigating the “idea maze”, and (2) and their potential to gain more expertise. If we take the equation for a line, y = mx + b. As early-stage investors, we invest in “m’s” not “b’s”.
In closing
While I know not everyone echoes these thoughts, hopefully, this post can provide more context to some of the entrepreneurial motions we’re seeing today. Of course, take it all with a grain of salt. I’m an optimist by nature and by function of my job. Just as a VC I respect told me when I first started 4 years back,
“If you’re going to pursue a career in venture, by nature of the job, you have to be an optimist.”
Happened to also be one of the VCs who shared his thoughts for my little research project on inspiration and frustration last week.
Stay up to date with the weekly cup of cognitive adventures inside venture capital and startups, as well as cataloging the history of tomorrow through the bookmarks of yesterday!
A few weeks ago, around the time I published Am I At My Best Right Now?, I started noticing more and more that my friends, colleagues, and people that I’ve met since were going through tough times. Two lost a family member. Some were laid off. Two were forced to leave this land I call home. Four broke up. Three burned out. Countless more told me they were stressed and/or depressed, and didn’t know how to escape this limbo. After I published that post, another handful of people also reached out and courageously shared the troubles they are going through now. How it’s been so hard to share with others. And yesterday, while editing this blog post, I found out that one of my high school friends had passed.
Inspiration and Frustration
During this time, I had a thought: Frustration is the absence of inspiration. There were many times in my own life when I was beating myself up because I couldn’t think of a solution. And a small percent of those times, I didn’t even bother to think of a solution since I was so engrossed in my frustration with myself.
In these unprecedented times and inspired by the conversations around me, I decided to show that we’re not alone. So, I asked people who I deeply respect and who could shed light as to what it means to be human. I asked just two questions, but they were only allowed to answer one of them:
What is the one thing that inspires you so much that it makes everything else in life much easier to bear?
What is stressing/frustrating you so much right now that it seems to invalidate everything else you’re doing?
In turn, they responded via email, text, or on a phone call. Of the 49 I asked, so far, 31 responded with their answers. 4 politely turned me down due to their busy schedules. Another one turned me down because she didn’t feel like she could offer value in her answer.
26 responded with what inspires them. 5 with what frustrates them. All of whom I know has been through adversity and back.
Admittedly, the hardest part about this study was how I was going to organize all these responses. Unlike the one about time allocation I did over a month ago, where I knew exactly how to organize the data before I even got all the responses, this one, I really didn’t know how to best illustrate the candor everyone shared. In fact, I would be doing a disservice to them, if reduced their honesty and courage to be vulnerable to mere numbers. So, in the end, below, I let everyone speak for themselves. Sometimes, simplicity is the best.
Thank you to everyone who contributed to making this blog post happen, including Brad Feld, Mars Aguirre, Shayan Mehdi, Thomas Owen, Chris Lyons, Mark Leon, Jamarr Lampart, Christen Nino De Guzman, Louis Q Tran, Sam Marelich, Dr. Kris Marsh, Quincy Huynh, DJ Welch, Jimmy Yue, and many, many more heroes who helped me and the world around us behind the curtains.
Last week, I started building a Quora presence. Admittedly, I’ve been a long-time lurker, and only recent answer-er on the platform. Partly to practice sharing thoughts. Partly to answer more specific queries. And partly to have fun. Yes, fun.
It just so happened that I came across a curious question then.
As an entrepreneur, have you found that the cognitive biases (i.e., systematic deviations from rationality that affect human decision-making) described in this article affect the decisions you make for your business?
The question cited this article. And the article itself detailed on 3 of the many cognitive biases entrepreneurs (well, people in general) come across.
Confirmation bias – anything we see or hear that supports our own beliefs reinforces our beliefs, whereas the opposite sparks disagreement
Sunk cost fallacy – our tendency to continue to hold onto hope for bad investments
And, overconfidence – overestimating yourself and underestimating everyone else.
My answer
Simply, yes.
In fact, not just entrepreneurs, but most people are affected by the mentioned cognitive biases – confirmation bias, sunk cost fallacy/loss aversion, and overconfidence. It’s just that many people aren’t aware they have them, which can be detrimental to business, relationships, mental health, and more. I think the article even ranks the 3 from least noticeable to most noticeable from a self-assessment point of view. I’ll give an example of each – all of which I’ve seen before:
Confirmation bias – Stanford engineers are smart. → I will continue hiring Stanford engineers. The flip side is that you’ll be looking less into other populations of engineers who could also be amazing, like folks who are underrepresented and underestimated. Therefore, creating this self-perpetuating loop.
Sunk cost fallacy – I’ve hired this VP Sales that came highly recommended from multiple sources. But over the course of 6 months, I realized that this VP (1) couldn’t meet, much less beat, quota each quarter, and (2) has been unable to hire other great candidates to fulfill quota each quarter. But she will change. She’ll get better. She’ll grow into the role. While it’s okay to hire for passion, make sure candidates have at least a baseline of skills required for the role. And in a VP hire, a good proportion of the job description is hiring. The sunk cost here is the VP hire. While I don’t have to fire her, unless she’s really not doing her job at all, I need to find someone to top her who can perform in the role as fast as possible.
Overconfidence – My product is amazing; all of our competitors’ products suck. I’ve seen this way too often when founders pitch their startup. And while it’s great to be confident in your own product/team/yourself, it should never eclipse your perspective to value the work and commitment and results of others. A question I love asking founders who say “my product is amazing, everyone else is bad” is: What are your competitors doing right? If you were them, what would you say about your own product?
In closing
While these 3 are only a few among the myriad that plague our cognition (i.e. left digit bias, hindsight bias, anchoring bias, fundamental attribution error, etc.), hopefully, this post will shed a little light into the world of our own psychology. Sometimes before we can fix something, we have to first be aware of it.
Stay up to date with the weekly cup of cognitive adventures inside venture capital and startups, as well as cataloging the history of tomorrow through the bookmarks of yesterday!
People seem to love origin stories – both in theatre and in life.
“How did it all start?”
“How did you get into this career?”
Or…
“How did you meet your wife/husband?”
And well, I can’t say I’m one to push back on that.
There’s something truly magical about “Once upon a time…”. And I’m no stranger to fairy tales. Growing up, I was largely influenced by older female cousins and family friends. As soon as our parents left to their wine-sipping adult gossip around a table of blackjack, my cousins and older female friends would drag us to watch their favorite Disney movies on the VCR, namely princess movies. I’m not exaggerating when I say I’ve seen Beauty and the Beast more than 100 times or Cinderella more than 50 times. In fact, my friends in elementary school would talk about their favorite movies – Transformers, LEGO Bionicles, Peter Pan, and Tarzan. Yet, mine was Disney’s 1998 Mulan.
And they all started with “Once upon a time…”
So, it was no surprise when friends, colleagues, and then strangers started asking me:
“How/when/why did you start hosting social experiments?”
