I hate being late or unprepared. No doubt the product of years of training in management consulting and Fortune 500 executive experience. Meetings should matter, and effective communication before, during and after makes a difference for desired outcomes.

Meeteor is an awesome new tool that does a great job of helping us make the actual meeting time more productive.

But what about actually scheduling the meeting?  That problem is getting worse, not better!

It should be easy. You need to meet with some people. You send a bunch of emails and messages to figure out a date, time and place that works for everyone. You put it in your digital calendar and start scheduling around the commitment. But too often it seems like something changes in the countless email string and I am the last person to know. Missing meetings or showing up at cancelled meetings has become a regular mistake.

Weren’t digital tools supposed to solve this problem?

I am a normal business guy with some interests in youth sports. I receive 250 non-spam emails a day in seven different email accounts, pushing my unread e-mail count North of 40,000 for the past six months. Unfortunately, that degree of clutter is typical these days.  Email is no longer good for scheduling.

Last year, I was hopeful that Slack would help remove this clutter problem. It’s a cool app for teams. But, for me, it has created more random clutter. Now, when people want to meet, I’m notified in both Slack and Mail.  Is this one meeting, or two? Who knows? It will change three times and I will probably miss it anyway.

Sound familiar?

It should not be that hard.  Our time is TOO IMPORTANT to be trapped inside of email or messaging apps.

New “bot” personal assistant apps have been launched recently to help this problem. But, these apps still live within the stream of existing communication platforms intended for another purpose. It’s no surprise that early adoption is an issue, since:

• Only about 1/3 of emails are opened
• The average elapsed time between an email send and open is 45 minutes.
• Messaging apps like Slack provide more immediate response, but finding the relevant information in the endless message stream presents extra challenges

Even highly-funded bots require 8 emails to set up a meeting. They are simply automating and applying natural language processing to an outdated process. They solve the problem for one person, not the group. As soon as more than 2 people need to get together, the group ping-pong game starts. “Me” apps like these have limited value if you’re working with teams. “I will have my bot talk to your bot” doesn’t work.

Our time is TOO IMPORTANT.

Why can’t a simple app do all the work in one place, outside the cluster of e-mail or messaging apps? You tell the app who you want to meet with, and the app acts on behalf of everyone to find the best time and place to meet. This is the idea behind Skejul.

Skejul moves life logistics into the 21st century and out of legacy email and enterprise systems.  We live in an always on, on-demand world, but our lives are about more than just work. We need to balance work, family and social activities. And we need a platform to bridge this gap.

We need a new platform to manage our most precious resource – TIME.

We are slowly working through some of the misperceptions of lean startup that are too common.  Lean does not mean short-term.  And, it does not mean cheap.  But does lean mean niche?

Well, you hear that a lot from start-up pitches, especially during demo day at accelerator graduations.  It usually goes like this:

“We started out solving big problem X in a big growing market,  then applied lean startup and pivoted to solving smaller problem Y in a niche market.”

Of course, no one actually says this until the cocktail party.  You have to read between the lines a little.  But, the general point is that “lean startup”  led them to pivot to a niche product/market fit.  

The repitition of this story creates a misperception that lean startup means niche**.

Lean is about learning, and you could just as easily learn that the problem you are solving is bigger, not smaller,  than initially thought.  Airbnb and Ubber did not niche down by applying lean principles.  In fact, they learned that the problem they were solving was ultimately larger than initially thought.  

One of the benefits of a fast Build-Measure-Learn cycle time should be that you can test bigger ideas more often.  So, it is not a given that end-product of Lean Startup will be a smaller opportunity.  Lean Startup is much more focused on managing downside risk and eliminating waste than reducing opportunity size.   I would argue that continuous application of lean principles is how start-ups can more efficiently navigate to much bigger market opportunities.

Despite this academic argument, I am still waiting to see a demo day presentation that explains how the application of lean startup tools opened founders’ eyes to a 10x opportunity. It would be great to have more examples to point to.  The simple reality is that there are a lot more small good ideas than big ones. 

(**Note –  This is nothing against niche opportunities.  My personal inclination is toward solving smaller, narrower problems instead of bigger, broader problems.)

Almost every startup now claims to be “lean”.  The funny thing is, when you start asking questions, the conversation usually turns to the following:

• “Our developers work for practically nothing”
• “We don’t get paid and work long hours”
• “We are working out of coffee shops, our houses and low cost coop space”
• “We spend very little on marketing”
• “We share hotel rooms and fly Southwest”
• “We are using offshore developers”
• “We have accomplished a lot over the past X years with only Y funding”

These are not necessarily bad things.  In fact, being frugal in a startup situation makes  a lot of sense.  This frugality is in stark contrast to start-ups who “make it” to a big Round A/B and immediately rent out expensive office space and go on a hiring binge.  So, in many ways a cheap startup is better than old school dotcom spending.

But, this is not Lean.  This is Cheap — which sometimes makes sense, unless you do crappy work because you are not spending enough money.  No one wants to buy or invest in crappy work.

It reminds me of the manufacturing debate in the 1990’s — implement Lean Manufacturing versus moving jobs to Mexico/China. One had nothing to do with the other.  Most companies eventually learned that moving old manufacturing practices to low labor cost regions simply created more quality and logistics problems.  

Leans does not mean Cheap.

Here are the phrases that surround a Lean Startup approach:

• Customer interaction
• Experiment
• Measure
• Learn
• Cycle time
• Pivot

There is nothing in the Lean playbook that focuses on being cheap.  Its about a process and an investment in learning. 

Way too often, as startups get desperate for cash, they turn “cheap” by ignoring iteration, rapid deployment and learning in search of the hail Mary pass.  Somehow, they convince themselves that they do not have enough time or money to learn.

Lean is not about how much you spend.  It is about what you do and how you do it. 

 

 

 

 

I have been hearing some discussion that Lean Startup methodologies are too short-term oriented.  The logic goes like this:

• MVP’s (minimal viable products) are low quality, sloppy products
• Too much focus on the process, not the big goal
• It forces entrepreneurs to limit their vision
• The process just asks customers what they want 

The conclusion reached is that Lean Startup is a fad or phase.

It is hard for me too be too critical of this thinking.  I actually remember thinking the same thing when I heard the buzz about six sigma and lean manufacturing in the 1990’s.  But, then I went through training and ended up leading projects.  I learned that Lean Manufacturing/6 sigma tools are part of a process and culture built around eliminating waste and continuous improvement.  That is not a fad or short-term oriented.  In fact, it is the exact opposite.  

Lean Startup is about learning in an entrepreneurial setting.  This learning allows you to manage risks and focus your limited resources more effectively and efficiently.  That is what entrepreneurial management is all about.  How can that possibly be short-term?  It is about sustained growth.

Lean Startup brings process and management discipline to the startup/innovation economy.   You cannot teleport from point A to point B.  You have to cover the space in between.  Lean Startup is about navigating that path, and sometimes changing your destination to point C.  

Focusing on the right things in the short-term enables the long term to happen.  That is not short-term thinking.  That is being humble enough to recognize that learning is important and can result in greater long term success  if you focus on process and management discipline, based on facts.  

A few weeks ago, I had the chance to have dinner with Lynda Applegate, who leads the Entrepreneurship program at HBS.  I was lucky enough to have been in her first technology class in 1987.   In her opinion, with the fast changing world that we live in, there is no difference between entrepreneurship and management.  They are now indistinguishable.  Bringing management discipline to entrepreneurship is not short term thinking.  It is simply entrepreneurship going mainstream, moving from Las Vegas to Main Street.

 

 

The first time I heard the term “business model” was in 1999.  I was in Philadelphia, meeting with Mark Walsh at VerticalNet.  At the time, VerticalNet had just gone public and was valued at $12 billion.  

Following the dot-com bust 3 years later, VerticalNet was dismantled and parts were sold of for less than $10 million.

In the HQ conference room, with $1 million+ of furnishings and artwork, and the first corporate wifi network I had seen (my Dell laptop didn’t even have wifi!),  the VerticalNet team explained all their different ideas for monetizing vertical market portals across first B2B and then consumer markets.   

All of these business models were very actively being pursued across 33 different vertical B2B markets (SEC filing):

1. Two-sided marketplace => bringing buyers and sellers together
2. e-Commerce => directly selling products snd fulfilling orders tailored for participants in a specific vertical market
3. Media => eyeball driven advertising model based on best content for a specific content (basically online trade journals)
4. PPC search => with online buyers guide and market specific search engine/keywords
5. Community => professional network around a specific industry
6. Career center with job placement
7. Online education and industry courses for purchase

The VerticalNet team explained, with unbridled enthusiasm, all of the revenue model opportunities that were possible through a internet “portal” (remember that term?).  

The VerticalNet business model was  “all of the above”.

As we left the meeting, Mark Walsh pointed to his cell phone and said “You guys need to start paying attention to wireless and mobile”.  This was 1999.  

I was hooked on the buzz.  A month later I made a high risk pitch to Emerson’s executives that we should invest in the electronics portal of Vertical Net and start a new business around it.  Chuck Knight was CEO of Emerson, and at that time was on the board of IBM, Morgan Stanley, Baxtor Travenol and Anheuser-Busch.  I spent 10 minutes trying to explain to Chuck what an internet portal was. He didn’t “get it”.  It was a doomed idea.

Thankfully, the executives thought the idea had little merit.  And, a week later I turned down an opportunity to join the VerticalNet team — an offer that included a lot of stock options.  It was just too scary for me too.

All those good ideas were years ahead of their time.  But, they were all in one place, at one time, in the suburbs of Philadelphia.  

Reflecting on this after 15 years, I am struck with the following thoughts:

• Ideas are a dime a dozen.  This is a really hard pill to swallow.  Ideas without execution have no value.  There were a lot of ideas in that conference room in 1999, and many of them were very good.

• The lean startup approach/principles have pulled us out of the dark ages of startups. VerticalNet was as far away from a lean startup as possible.

• We have come a long way in understanding web and tech business models.  We can point to so many successful examples now. VerticalNet was vertical marketing combination of FreeMarkets.com, LinkedIn, Lynda, Google and UpWork. This has made us all a lot smarter.

• Being right about ideas is impressive, but ultimately meaningless unless customers are ready to participate.  There was no Build, Measure, Learn at VerticalNet.  It was more just build and sell.

• Finally, “first to market” creates a lot higher risk than competitive advantage.  This happens over and over and over again.

• The chasm between cool and business value is always lot wider than you think.