Tech Start-up Lesson 2 – Nice to haves & Must Haves

I can still remember as a child when Duke Nukem 3D came out. It was two years after South Africa did away with apartheid and had become a democracy. The international barriers had come down and the censorship of the old days was no longer there to prevent violent games such as Duke Nukem from reaching our shores. Duke Nukem was the first multiplayer networked game to make it big in South Africa, or at least that was my experience of the whole thing. Every kid that was fortunate enough was able to explore the world of computer gaming in ways never before imagined. Internet Cafe’s were littered with young delinquents just itching to kill each other virtually.

The Duke Nukem success was of course not only limited to South Africa, it was a worldwide sensation so massive that it made the founders profoundly rich. What was to come is widely documented so I won’t delve too much into the whole story. But in a nutshell it would take about 15 years for the team to complete the next Duke Nukem release (known as Duke Nukem Forever) from when development started in 1997. Now there are numerous reasons as to why this was the case but one of the main ones that I have always been fond of is the fact that the project was lead by one of the original creators whom for the first time in his life had the resources to build the game that he felt was worthy. The founder and his team wanted to build the best game the world had ever seen...

They wanted the graphics to be the best, the game play had to be seamless, beautiful, a work of art. It needed all the childish humour and darkness of the originals but only quadrupled this time around.  It had to make the previous Duke Nukem success stories look like tiny blimps on much large radar cast by Forever. The problem however was that the pace of technologic evolution. Every time the team completed a module using techniques based on a certain technological limit, the industry would present a new improved technology with better techniques making what they have done look antique in their eyes. The situation was further magnified by the fact that the team had such deep pockets for the first time that they could very well toil on for years-and-years continually rewriting and improving what they have done. And that is just what they did, for years the team would chase perfection never to achieve it. They would get lost in the world of ideas and possibility. Not being an infinite resource pool the project would eventually run out of funds and get declared dead. This led to the rights being purchased by someone else who managed to eventually ship something that was a far cry from a perfect game, but was at least something.

Now software development is an amazing space where one can get to live oneself out in ideas and solutions. However being the problem-solving ideas people that we as keyboard cowboys are, it is very easy to start drifting from one’s original focus of things that need-to-be-done to things that are not deal-breakers but nice-to-haves. Nowhere in the industry is this more magnified than in the life of a tech start-up. Tech start-ups generally have limited resources and cannot afford to have teams that get stuck in the nice-to-have ideas world. They need teams that can identify a critical path possessing of just enough innovation to differentiate one’s product in the marketplace but that won’t exceed the limited budget of the venture. This is a delicate balancing act that over the last few years I have struggled with myself. So I want to share my personal technique for ensuring that there is no mission drift.

Whenever you have to make a feature or design decision, first ask yourself whether what you are doing is a nice-to-have or a must-have. If the answer is that it is a nice-to-have then shelve the idea on the backlog and refocus on items that are deemed to be must-haves. This is an extremely difficult habit to cultivate for both software developers and entrepreneurs alike since both these personality types generally live in the world of ideas and possibilities of which the tech world has too much of. But there is a reason that in excess of 70% of projects and 90% of start-ups fail. Teams need to focus on shipping something out the door that will start to make money before they can allow themselves to be distracted by the nice-to-haves we all like to gravitate to. Unfortunately a tech start-up lives in the world of shrink wrapped software, written just well enough with just enough features to create a market for itself. With time the system will eventually get to grow and evolve into a place for implementing nice-to-haves, but one should never start out a venture by focusing on what would be great...

Tech Start-up Lesson 1 - Choose your team wisely

When you are single and actively putting yourself out in the dating wilderness, a small part of you is always subjectively biased to the potential partners that you meet along the way.  Most of us who put up emotional walls in a vain attempt of protecting our fragile egos would say that this is not true. But you can’t deny the fact that when we are desperately single and we meet someone nice, part of us hopes that the person standing in front of us will tick all of the boxes we are looking to have checked. Thus many of us allow ourselves to be lulled into the idea of the person instead of the person themselves. We end up focussing on the things that are right with the person while at the same time completely ignoring the warning bells that are screaming blue murder at us about all the things that are wrong about them.

This disillusionment can go on for years, since we have a vested interest in continuing it. We want the relationship to succeed. We are in fact genetically programmed to want to make the relationship survive. But unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately) there is more to being human than our primitive evolutionary inclinations. Somewhere in our muddled little hormone-crazed minds there exists a cortex that eventually will successfully tell us that the relationship in question is no longer beneficial to us and that it is time to move on.

Now you may be asking yourself why I am talking about dating in a tech start-up blog. The answer is simple. Starting your own tech venture in many ways parallels that of the dating world. My previous business venture consumed my life for three years (a similar amount of time to that of your typical failed “serious” relationship) and it has taught me many valuable lessons through that time. I am grateful to every single person that I was involved with and what they have taught me directly or indirectly so hopefully nobody will read into anything I am saying and take it personally.

The fact is the beginning of a tech start-up is a wonderful and intoxicating time. The possibilities, the excitement, the promise of riches beyond your wildest imagination, it all is very infectious. So infectious as a matter of fact that like dating one can ignore the early warning bells about the people that one is embarking on the venture with and subsequently get lulled into a fake sense of belonging. Like the honeymoon phase of any relationship in the beginning of a tech venture people tend to always put their best foot forward and show only the best sides of their personalities to one another. Obviously at that stage everyone involved genuinely want the whole thing to work out and the faces that they put forward to one another are reflections of their self-imagined wishes of how things could be for them all. But as time progresses the same cortex that warned you about the misalignments in bad relationships, will start pointing out that all is not well in your team. Just like relationships one could ignore these warnings by choosing blind faith over reason, but it is only a temporary fix to a problem that will eventually consume everything. It is only later in the entrepreneurial journey (when there typically is a lot more at stake) that the wheels will come off the misaligned team frequently with disastrous consequences. 

  

This brings me to my first lesson. The most important and most fundamental lesson that any aspiring tech entrepreneur can learn is that you have to, YOU HAVE TO pick the right initial team for the project. Weak members might not seem like a problem in the beginning, but later on THEY WILL become a problem and trust me by then you are so far down the line that it will never end well for anyone. Above ideas, above innovation, above talent, creativity, even capital, if you do not have the right team you are doomed to fail. The age old adage of people being the most important thing in software is clearer nowhere more than in the life of a tech start-up.

Of course the dating game could go the other way too. You could meet a person that is so right in so many ways that you can’t imagine a life before them (like my guaranteed one reader my dear wife whom I love immensely). The relationship could become the source of years of companionship and mutual love. It could be the most fruitful and beneficial human relationship that we will ever enjoy during your short time here on planet earth. Once again the same mechanics apply to tech start-ups. Having the right team from the start of a venture could drive the venture to greatness faster than one can imagine. It could be the source for long term friendships and profitable companionship that would make past professional encounters seem trivial. The road of a tech start-up is hard, and having the right people to share the experience with simply makes the whole thing magical.

The Obligatory 'Hello World'

So I have been putting off starting this blog for a while. Having your first child and leaving your previous business tends to get in the way of such indulgent, self-entitled activities as spewing out whatever comes to mind for the rest of the world to read. But being an entrepreneur and recently having gone through some serious hurdles in my journey has spurred me on to create the darned thing already. I want to create a record of my personal entrepreneurial journey. I do this more for myself than anything else. I want to record the lessons that I have learnt and will hopefully keep on learning... If others find what I write useful, then that is just a bonus. Being my obligatory 'Hello World' entry and not really having much of a point, let me make it more random and suddenly end with a quote:

"Here's to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes... the ones who see things differently -- they're not fond of rules... You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can't do is ignore them because they change things... they push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do." - Steve Jobs (RIP)