Unlocking the last 1% to make something out of nothing
Isaac and I presented some thoughts on entrepreneurship to the leaders of Globe Telecom in Philippines yesterday. My thesis is that starting something new from nothing requires a massive amount of energy and discipline. This energy comes from properly aligned and motivated people, and the discipline is the emerging science of entrepreneurship. Startups in large and small contexts can practice this discipline. It is not special to geeks in the garage. However, for the entrepreneur inside to chase down the value, special conditions are required and these conditions are challenging to put in place.
I started thinking deeply about what this actually means in my Long Thoughts for 2013 post and this led to some changes to our own model. Here is the deck from yesterday. It is designed for talking to, rather than reading online so I will provide the narrative below.
- We start with the entrepreneur inside an organisation, inside us, inside me.
- What drives me as an entrepreneur?
- Impact is the goal
- Something at stake – upside/downside
- Forward momentum – traction
- Fanatical belief
- Controlling the path
- Without these things I will fail as an entrepreneur.
- My first career was to lead KAOS Theatre for 8 years and it is where I learned ‘purpose driven’ work. Purpose was to make spectacular new form visual theatre that no one had seen before. We convinced a consistent group to work together for 8 years, we wrote manifestos and theories, we taught, we gave workshops, we made new performances all over the world. Hmm sounds a bit like Pollenizer. Impact, something at stake, traction with audiences, fanatical belief and control drove me. Not the money.
- Seth Godin describes this as ‘emotional labour’ and emotional labour has big outcomes from small inputs. Introduce love, fear, risk and joy to the work as you fly close to the sun.
- Pollenizer. What we do, and why our environment needs to foster emotional labour.
- Definition of entrepreneurship: Pursuit of opportunity beyond resources controlled. Broken down with examples from Pollenizer:
- Pursuit: Runway Thinking
- Pursuit: Chasing specific markers of value urgently. Do we have problem/solution fit? Do we have product/market fit?
- Opportunity: “Bottom left” – where to start now to show immediate traction and “Top Right” – the big opportunity where this could go. Only proceed when bursting out of earlier circle of momentum.
- Example of Facebook evolution
- Opportunity: how the “Top Right” can change as you learn. Example of how Pygg learned to be for school communities. Getting to Plan B because Plan A is almost certainly going to be challenged
- Resources: Fix the resources. Variable is the output, or the ends.
- What Makes an Entrepreneur Entrepreneurial
- With given means, imagine different ends and make one of them real
- Theil’s Law and why teams need to be vested. Founders not employees. Upside and downside at stake.
- Pollenizer transforming employees to founders
- Startup Science – harnassing emotional labour while managing the risk
- Demand risk > lean iteration
- Technology risk > manual testing, resist technology, Wizard of Oz approach.
- Execution risk > focus!
- Financing risk > tranched funds and “Dijkstra’s Dollar” – making the money visceral
- Flearning – make it OK to fail. Through failing we learn. If we don’t learn, we will not succed.
- Working with entrepreneurs in partnership
- Example: Pollenizer plus NineMSN
- Example: APN and GrabOne
- Workshop
- Example of how an entrepreneur thinks and works. Lean Canvas.
The Globe team pitched some great businesses from their canvas including a social network and booking engine for clubs and a ‘real world Monopoly’ game where players are actually investing through a mobile game experience. I think we invented 24 businesses.
Globe itself is a fascinating company, transitioning with it’s eyes open from a telco of the past to a telco of the future. There are no illusions in this team about how hard that will be but they are determined to smash through. Some two things that I love about them:
- An entrepreneurial mindset emerging within including getting products to market urgently using manual testing and customer development techniques
- An amazing incubator (Kickstart Ventures) which is genuinely integrated with the mothership
Big companies can be entrepreneurial and Globe is leading the charge.
Thanks for having us.