Over the weekend, I was brewing up some mad lemonade. ‘Cause well, that’s the summer thing to do. Since I’m limited in my expeditions outdoors, it’s just watching the sun skim over the horizon, blossoming its rose petals across the evening sky, in my backyard, sipping on homemade lemonade. If you’re curious about my recipe, I’ll include it at the bottom of this post.
When I’m cooking or performing acts of flavor mad science, I enjoy listening to food-related podcasts, like Kappy’s Beyond the Plate, Kappy’s CookTracks or Bon Appétit’s Foodcast. Unfortunately, all are on a temporary hiatus. So, I opted for the next best – YouTube videos. And recently, a curious video popped up in my Recommended feed. A 2010 TED Talk with Thomas Keller.
Thomas Keller. An individual probably best known, among many others, for his achievements with The French Laundry. Needless to say, I was enamored by his talk. But the fireworks in my head didn’t start going off until the 12:46 mark.
What happened at 12:46
Keller proposes the following equations:
cooking = ingredients + execution
…where:
execution = skill level + desire + training + mentorship + tools + leadership + team
That in order to reach your “rapid rate of evolution”, you need each and every one of these. Though I don’t believe that these variables are listed in any priority, Keller spent a lot of time stressing “desire”. Desire, as opposed to passion. Desire to prove something to someone trumps passion. Synonymous to what I call obsession. Passion is what keeps you up during the day. It’s often fleeting. And may last for short sprints. Desire or obsession keeps you up at night. A personal vendetta you have towards a specific problem or obstacle you’ve faced at some point in your life.
A few years back, a brilliant early-stage investor who heads one of the world’s largest and most successful (by track record) CVCs (corporate venture capital), first told me about his go-to hiring practice:
“Hire passion; train skill.”
While I would now change one of those words, he’s got the essence.
Taking it a step further
So, if you’ll allow me to, I’ll put on my nerd cap once again. To propose the sister equation to his:
Growth =
(obsession) x [(resources) x f(skill) + (mentorship + leadership + team) x f'(skill)]
… where:
- resources represents the cumulative amount of tools and circumstances you have in your status quo.
- f(skill) represents the ever-changing value of where your skill is at, at any given point in time.
- f'(skill), or the first derivative of the skill function, represents your potential, achieved through the practice of honing that skill. Aka training.
- mentorship, leadership, and team all help actualize how much more efficient you are in skill acquisition.
- obsession is the multiplicative coefficient to the overall function. Where how driven you are in pursuit of a goal determines how fast and focused you will be to get there.
Why does it all matter?
The VC/Startup Parallel
My colleagues, who are early stage investors, and I often get asked how we evaluate founders. I mean, yes, there are the:
- Numbers, like traction and market size and growth,
- And the moat, like product, business model, or unique insight.
But, all else equal, what about the founders themselves? How do we know when we should have the conviction to back, or in my case, refer a founder? Or how I’d like to put it:
What’s the delta between a good founder and a great founder?
While I don’t claim I know it all, Thomas Keller’s equation suffices the mental model we go through. What resources, strategies, people, and insights have you brought to your disposal, even before you’ve gotten an investment?
At the time of investment, when we’re only given, for the most part, a cross section in time, f(skill) is a function of a founder(s)’ domain expertise, product expertise, and their ability to run a money-making, (potentially) scalable business. While obsession is a function for grit and ambition.
Let’s get one layer deeper
On domain expertise:
- How big is the market? How fast is it growing?
- Who are your major competitors? What did they get wrong? What did they get right?
- Who will become your major competitors?
- Is your largest competitor an incumbent, another startup, or an existing mental model?
On product expertise*:
- What metrics are you optimizing for? What metrics should you be optimizing for? Is it a data problem? Or is it a prioritization problem?
- What does your churn look like? Why?
- How have you built inherent loops onto your platform that make it lovable? Or to achieve minimum viable happiness, as Sarah Tavel puts it.
- What does product-market fit look like? How will you measure it? Why?
- Who are your current users? What are the traits of your users?
- Who are your future users? How many degrees of freedom are they from your current users?**
*Note: The scope of these questions will change as you scale your team. Usually around 50 employees is when founders start hiring product folks, and stop focusing on every detail of the product. Also the stage when the business, arguably, becomes distribution-centric over product-centric.
**Highly recommend checking out this post by Bangaly Kaba on Adjacent User Theory, if you’re having trouble answering this question.
On ability to run a business:
- What kind of leader are you?
- What does your ability to hire look like? Can you convince great talent to leave the option of safety and salary to help you?
- Who is in your network? In terms of sales channels? Hires? Advisors? And what do they say about you when you’re not in the room?
- Are you coachable?
- How do you resolve disagreements on your team?
- What obstacles/risks will you have to overcome now? Soon? In the longer run?
As you may know already, the more granular you can get in each of these categories and questions, the better.
The Wider Parallel
Of course, not all of us are founders. Yet, the same formula holds. We often tend to focus on what we don’t have. It may be mentorship. Or a “good” team for a group project. Or the $1000 DSLR that ‘all’ photographers have. And sometimes we forget what we do have. In over-indexing our weaknesses, failures and what we don’t have, we under-allocate to our strengths. While I may not have a snazzy DSLR, I do have a cellphone camera and Adobe editing software. Back when I didn’t have Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator, I found great pride in using and wowing people with Microsoft Paint and PowerPoint. Yes, you heard right. I once edited pics and drew digital art on PowerPoint.
While I’m not urging you to forget about your weaknesses, I am urging you to spend more time on maximizing your strengths. We have a saying in venture, “it’s not about the number of misses you have, but the magnitude of the wins you gain.” For example, you could have made 100 investments and watched 99 of them go to zero. But if just one of those investments makes 200x. You’ve just doubled your investments.
When it’s not just about you
At the same time, consider who in your community and circles have no or limited access to any of the variables in the equation.
Growth =
(obsession) x [(resources) x f(skill) + (mentorship + leadership + team) x f'(skill)]
Which underrepresented or underestimated populations could use a helping hand? I hesitate to use the term ‘communities’ here since many are or feel isolated – either mentally, physically, or both. Moreover, there are dilemmas and problems we know nothing about.
Since there are multiple attributions to that line, I’m going to just cite where I first heard it – on The Tim Ferriss Show. So, I’m going to end on this note, someone out there once said:
“Everyone is fighting a battle we know nothing about.”
So, if, like me or Thomas Keller, you’ve led a life of privilege, in one way or another, help fill in one of the variables to complete the growth equation for someone else.
Photo by Severin Höin on Unsplash
As promised…
“Cup of Lemonade”
Voila, la recette pour la citron pressé! Apparently, Google Translate mocks what little French I know by claiming ‘la citron pressé’ is ‘a squeezed lemon’ rather than ‘lemonade’, as I was taught. Not that Google is wrong, literally.
The Core
- 5 lemons, juiced and strained
- 1 1/2 cups of water
- Feel free to tune based on how concentrated you want the lemonade to be.
The *Mwah* (Chef’s Kiss) Syrup
- 1/2 cup caster sugar
- 1 cup water
- 2-3 sprigs of fresh rosemary
- 4 whole cloves
- 4-8 whole allspice (personally add a bit more)
- Zest of 1 lemon
- 1 tsp lime juice
The Steps
- Mix all the syrup ingredients in a small saucepan. For the zest, I recommend large pieces, so it’s easier to strain out later. Bring to a boil and make sure all the sugar is dissolved. As soon as the witch’s brew boils, turn down the heat to shallow simmer for 1 minute. The whole time, stirring to make sure the sugar and ingredients don’t stick to the sides of the pan. After 1 minute, turn off the heat. And let rest till the syrup reaches around room temperature.
- Juice 5 lemons, then strain out the pulp and seeds.
- Once syrup has cooled, mix the lemon juice and syrup. Strain and funnel the liquid into a bottle.
- Add water. Tune for taste.
- Chill.
- (Optional) Mix with other purées or flavors for a little pizzazz.
#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.
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