A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here.

Did you read Ryan’s Journal yesterday? One of the things he talks about it the importance of starting with ‘why’, instead of just rushing in.

I get it, ‘because I’ve always been a ‘why’ person.

Founders would do well to ask ‘why’ more often, as in “Why are we building/doing this?”

The importance of that particular ‘why’ is data-driven, which is important, since the tech world especially believes that everything important is data driven.

I can cite dozens of sources, but I’ll use data from CB Insights, since it’s a startup and it’s product is data.

Tackling problems that are interesting to solve rather than those that serve a market need was cited as the No. 1 reason for failure, noted in 42% of cases. Or, as Treehouse Logic said, “We had great technology, great data on shopping behavior, great reputation as a thought leader, great expertise, great advisors, etc, but what we didn’t have was technology or business model that solved a pain point in a scalable way.”

A lot of people don’t like asking ‘why’, because, more than most, it is an uncomfortable question.

It usually requires introspection and frequently doesn’t return the desired answer.

Founders don’t like the why question for the same reasons, especially when it interferes with their beloved vision, let alone their worldview.

There are two ways of internalizing that data.

The obvious: Not asking ‘why’ increases my chance of failing by 42%.

The less obvious: Asking ‘why’ increases my chances of succeeding 42%.

If you subscribe to the less obvious approach, or want to, the simplest was to implement it is to embrace the Lean Startup methodology

Doing so may mean abandoning your initial vision, or, at the least, tweaking it, which could bruise your ego, but the payoff is huge.

And the bruising should be easier to handle knowing that you got a 42% boost on the road to success.

Image credit: HikingArtist

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here.

As you all know, startups are 80+ hour weeks and pre-launch adds at least 10 hours.

However, I wanted to share John Buchan’s words (he was an historian and Canadian politician), because it’s the kind of thing that can easily fall through the cracks when you’re living with intense startup pressure.

But it shouldn’t.

The task of leadership is not to put greatness into humanity, but to elicit it, for the greatness is already there.

It’s what we, as founders, owe to those who dare to take the trip with us.

Image credit: HikingArtist

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here.

As I keep saying, I do love CB Insights daily newsletter. It provides me with needed information, but my love stems from Anand Sanwal’s quirky, irreverent, incisive comments, like this one.

I now see toothbrushes in a whole new light after this comment by the founder of a subscription-as-a-service toothbrush company.

Does this guy actually believe that something (AKA a toothbrush) that has no wheels, software or circuits can substitute as an “extension of personality?”

The only “change the world” ethos I can find here is greed coupled with the ability to sucker people who are either too lazy, too incompetent or too busy on social media to take care of their basic necessities.

Good grief, is this the best the vaunted Silicon Valley innovation machine can produce?

Image credit: HikingArtist

I first mentioned Public-benefit company (PBC) as a viable alternative to the typical Inc corporate structure in 2015, especially for entrepreneurs with an eye on more than money.

The next year I expanded on that when Kickstarter changed its legal status to PBC.

Don’t confuse PBCs with B-corps; both are profit-making entities and both have stated values, but PBCs are legal entities and legally held to their specified values and mission.

“A value is only a value if it’s non-negotiable.” –Kickstarter co-founder Perry Chen

PBCs come in all sizes, both public and private. The variety is obvious in this list of the Top 25 PBCs globally in 2016, including

Method Products, Patagonia, Etsy, Toms, Clif Bar and now Danone.

What is Danone?

Danone is a French multinational food-products corporation based in Paris and founded 99 years ago in Barcelona, Spain. The company is listed on Euronext Paris where it is a component of the CAC 40 stock market index.

Danone is present in over 130 markets and generated sales of €21.9 billion in 2016, with more than half in emerging countries. In 2015, fresh dairy products represented 50% of the group’s total sales, early life nutrition 22%, water 21% and medical nutrition 7%.

Some wonder how/why large, public companies would even consider a legal status that doesn’t put shareholder interest first.

Emmanuel Faber, Danone Chairman & CEO , explains.

The reason I am writing is because this new major milestone is a breakthrough point for Danone on our global B Corp roadmap. With our major North American activities being certified as of today, it is now proven that it is possible to certify as a B Corp for large organizations that are committed to being change agents, for business and for the world we live in.

Obviously, if a company with such far flung parts can do it shoots holes in those who claim it’s not possible.

And before you claim that startups can’t spend time/resources on stuff like this, remember that Marc Benioff implemented his 1/1/1 philanthropic model when he founded Salesforce in 1999 and that certainly hasn’t slowed its growth.

These days, the definition of success involves more than just money.

Image credit: Danone via Wikipedia

Yesterday’s Golden Oldie ended with my sarcastic comment about tech’s distorted and manipulative approach to data a la “gut instinct” and “pattern recognition,” especially when it comes to age and gender equity.

Data only matters when it supports prevailing prejudice.

A couple of years later I linked to articles that clearly showed that age was more a mental state than a physical one, including this one.

Vivek Wadhwa, a Duke University researcher, worked with the Kauffman Foundation in 2009 to explore the anatomy of a successful startup founder. That survey of more than 500 startups in high-growth industries showed that the average founder of a successful company had launched his or her venture at the surprisingly high age of 40. The study also found that people over 55 are almost twice as likely to launch high-growth startups than those aged 20 to 34.

In March, Forbes again focused on the fact that older entrepreneurs are more successful.

…late-career entrepreneurs benefit from the kind of deep domain expertise that younger counterparts lack. The more intimately an entrepreneur knows their particular industry, after all, the better positioned they are for success. A newly published study of hundreds of companies confirmed just this: the startups most likely to succeed have technically savvy founders who know their space inside and out. A classic example is Garmin, maker of the ubiquitous GPS devices. The company was started in 1989 by two career aerospace contractors (in their 40s and 50s, at the time) who pooled their technical know-how to turn military-grade technology into consumer tools. Today the company is worth more than $10 billion.

Even Brian Acton was almost ancient when he founded WhatsApp at 37.

Earlier this month, KG sent along an article from TechCrunch that added more data.

What they found is that the average age of a startup founder is about 41.9 years of age among all startups that hire at least one employee, and among the top 0.1 percent of highest-growth startups, that average age moves up to 45 years old. Those ages are taken from the time of the founding of the company.

The researchers broke down the population of founders along a number of lines, including geography and industry. They found little difference in their results between subcategories, and, in many cases, the subcategory definition actually increased the average age. For instance, industries like oil and gas can have average founder ages as high as 51.4 years old. The researchers wrote that “The only category where the mean ages appear (modestly) below age 40 is when the firm has VC-backing. The youngest category is VC-backed firms in New York, where the mean founder age was 38.7.”

One interesting dynamic in the data is that older entrepreneurs appear correlated with better startup performance. “For example, the 1,700 founders of the fastest growing new ventures (1 in 1,000) in our universe of U.S. firms had an average age of 45.0 (compared to 43.7 for the top 1% and 42.1 for the top 5%),” the researchers wrote.

As you mull these numbers, stay aware that these are companies with actual, and often substantial, revenues, as opposed to valuations based on fundraising and hype.

Image credit: Hawking.org

Poking through 11+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.

Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.

Since the start of this blog 12 years ago, I’ve written numerous times about the sheer idiocy of using age to screen talent. This post mentions several examples that easily refute Vinod Khosla’s ignorant comment on age and creativity, but here is an even better example, since software is supposed to be a young person’s game.

Yukihiro Matsumoto was born in 1965; in 1995 he released the Ruby programming language to open source. Of course, at 30 he was still within Khosla’s window. In 2012 he open-sourced MRuby, in 2014, at the ripe old age of 49 he open-sourced his work on streem, a new scripting language and he is still going strong.

Age as a criteria when hiring is just plain stupid, no matter the size of your company.

Read other Golden Oldies here.

It’s always interesting to see young people following in the footsteps of their predecessors.

Even more so when they hotly deny doing it.

But the frosting on the denial cake is that they are following in some of the stupidest footsteps.

Which they are doing in droves.

Last week I wrote how stupid it is to stereotype 80 million millennials.

Before that is was management’s stupidity regarding Gen X.

Age, however, is the biggest stupid and has been for decades.

For Boomers, the breakpoint for when a person became hopeless and valueless was 30; Millennials raised it to 40.

As bad as age discrimination has been in general, it is far worse in tech.

VC Vinod Khosla crystallized and popularized this mindset back in 2011.

 “People under 35 are the people who make change happen. People over 45 basically die in terms of new ideas.”

That means you can expect no more creativity from Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Marc Benioff, Parker Harris and Satya Nadella. (For insight to other fields read the article.)

Not to mention that 32 year-old Mark Zukkerberg only has a few good years left.

There are thousands more at all levels, I just picked recognizable people to better illustrate the stupidity.

The difference between when the Boomers did it and now is the notice and action being taken.

This past week, the EEOC joined a probe behind a federal class action lawsuit against Google filed last month, charging that the search giant “engaged in a systematic pattern” of discrimination against applicants over the age of 40. The suit, expanding upon a related case filed earlier this year, cited data from Payscale that placed the median age of Google’s workforce at 29, with a margin of error of 4%. By contrast, the median age for U.S. computer programmers is 43.

Actually, I will probably find it somewhat amusing to watch founders as they try to meet candidate demand for the compensation and perks of the past few years in today’s do-more-with-less/revenue-based-business-model world.

That also goes for many, not all, by a long shot, tech workers who are looking for those same jobs and perks.

So heed the advice I recently gave a founder who took advantage of my standing offer of free help (both my phone number and email are posted on this blog).

He asked how to land a “star” candidate looking for “yesterday’s” compensation and refused to consider anything less.

My advice was to take a pass, refer him to Facebook or Google hire a reality-based programmer who can do the needed job and was sincerely interested in his product and vision.

The only thing he might lose were a few late night bragging rights.

In short, grow up, get smart and hire talent — no matter its age or color or gender.

Image credit: Ben Sutherland

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here.

Unlike most folk, when tech types want to improve their sex life they assume there’s an app for that.

If there isn’t they create one.

[Jakub] Konik’s foundational story is a simple one: he was having sex with his girlfriend, and he started wondering how many calories they burned during one particularly memorable session. Stunned to discover there were no existing apps that could answer that rather specific question, he came to the conclusion that he should create one.

Wow! It doesn’t take much thought to see how connected sex toys can make a difference.

And before you laugh, know that at least a couple of the companies received funding.

So, give a cheer for this sexy version of ‘change the world.’

Image credit: HikingArtist

When a new innovation is announced do you ever wonder how much of their own Kool-Aid the founders have drunk?

At how often reality doesn’t support the vision?

And to what lengths they’ll go to prove their vision is reality?

Think Theranos.

Think ride-hailing companies, such as Lyft and Uber.

The vision they sold was that they would lessen traffic congestion.

The reality is far different.

One promise of ride-hailing companies like Uber and Lyft was fewer cars clogging city streets. But studies suggest the opposite: that ride-hailing companies are pulling riders off buses, subways, bicycles and their own feet and putting them in cars instead. (…)  One study included surveys of 944 ride-hailing users over four weeks in late 2017 in the Boston area. Nearly six in 10 said they would have used public transportation, walked, biked or skipped the trip if the ride-hailing apps weren’t available.

The reality of that vision is simple. Skip the bus/subway/rail/bike/feet and summon a car to add to the crowd.

And it’s unlikely that antonymous cars will improve things.

If anything, they will likely exacerbate the problem, since they will be even cheaper.

Speaking of Uber and visions.

In spite of the $17.3 billion lavished by investors, Uber’s 2017 loss was $4.5 billion and in its nine years of life it burned thorough $10.7 billion, 2/3 of its total funding — another record.

Wow! That’s some Kool-aid.

Image credit: Rob

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here.

Regular readers know I have a thing for CB Insight’s co-founder Anand Sanwal and the newsletter he writes. The great data is a given, but the real draw for me are his common sense and wicked sense of humor, both of which infuse his prose creating an irresistible combination.

Monday’s newsletter shared a contrarian view of failure taken from his presentation at last year’s at SaaStr.

Acknowledging and being ok with failure is one of the best things about the startup community. We now celebrate the act of writing a startup failure post-mortem as courageous. (…)  Most are vapid puff-piece post-mortems that talk about being too early to market or suggest investors weren’t committed or offer up trite discussion of why they’ve joined a “larger platform” whose vision aligns with theirs.

Once again Anand is my hero by saying stuff out loud that needs to be said.

I’ve always believed that failure is a learning opportunity, but I never thought it should be enshrined and lauded.

Any more than Mark Zukerberg’s “move fast and break it” should have become a startup mantra.

Anand ends with this comment.

Now, even when you fail, you are a success.

Yup — in Startupland, everyone is a winner.

It reminds me of today’s “everybody gets a trophy” attitude.

Jean M. Twenge, author of The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement. “But the ‘everybody gets a trophy’ mentality basically says that you’re going to get rewarded just for showing up. That won’t build true self-esteem; instead, it builds this empty sense of ‘I’m just fantastic, not because I did anything but just because I’m here.’”

That attitude permeates everything else, so why should Startupland be any different?

Image credit: HikingArtist

I’m not sure whether to laugh or cry when I see ads for stuff that responds to voice command, especially when it is for stuff like changing the TV channel. I guess that using the remote takes either too much energy or too much intelligence to work it.

Everything today is about convenience, a trend I’ve been suspicious, although I wasn’t sure why.

However, after reading an op-ed piece by Tim Wu, a law professor at Columbia and the author of “The Attention Merchants: The Epic Struggle to Get Inside Our Heads,” called The Tyranny of Convenience I’m starting to understand what about it makes me itch.

In the developed nations of the 21st century, convenience — that is, more efficient and easier ways of doing personal tasks — has emerged as perhaps the most powerful force shaping our individual lives and our economies.

Granted I’m known as a digital dinosaur, but there are some conveniences — washing machines, telephones, cars, email, and Skype chat, among them — I’m all for.

However, I have no cell phone, avoid any app, service, etc., provided by Google, clean my own house, wash my own clothes, shop for my own food, and do my own cooking just as I’ve done since I was 18.

I search using ixquick.com, no ads, no tracking and my life functions just fine without always being connected. I’m not on social media and don’t suffer from FOMA; I meet friends for meals and fun and we talk on the phone in-between.

I suppose that all sounds very inconvenient these days, but I’m never bored and enjoy the feelings of accomplishment that come with doing stuff yourself, as well as figuring out better ways to do it — it’s called ingenuity.

I’ve seen many “convenient” items come to market years after I came up with a similar approach to use for myself.

Americans say they prize competition, a proliferation of choices, the little guy. Yet our taste for convenience begets more convenience, through a combination of the economics of scale and the power of habit. The easier it is to use Amazon, the more powerful Amazon becomes — and thus the easier it becomes to use Amazon. Convenience and monopoly seem to be natural bedfellows (emphasis mine).

Professor WU (or someone) needs to do a follow-up article entitled, “How Convenience Killed Creativity and Strangled Entrepreneurship.

Image credit: jim212jim