CraveWorthy

I’ve noticed over time that one of the things that gets overlooked is the importance of rest when building a startup. It is actually one of the most important jobs of a CEO or founder of a startup. Let me explain:

When you’re starting out with a team, you are going to be sprinting towards many milestones but a lot of the actual day to day is more comparable to a marathon. When you are running a marathon, you need to learn how to pace yourself and not burn out. The great thing about a startup is the you get to work on things that have a meaningful difference and your contributions are always felt. This is a blessing and a curse because you can tire yourself out very easily due to the amount that you want to work.

A CEO of a startup needs to have the experience and leadership to be able to tell their team to take the weekends off, do something fun and come back well-rested and ready for the next sprint. On a macro level, there will also be obvious times when it makes more sense to take a breather and refresh yourself. I think that the best way to recharge is to spend time with family and friends, enjoying a great meal and taking your mind off work if only for a day.

I’m a diehard basketball fan so I’ll also use an analogy to drive the point home. This year, the Lakers had many high expectations for having a great season and perhaps winning a championship with newly acquired players Dwight Howard and Steve Nash. The season was tumultuous, primarily due to a mix of injuries and taking some time for the team to gel. Their playoff dreams were destroyed when Kobe Bryant suffered a serious injury. I would posit that the reason he got hurt in the first place was because he had played an unsustainable amount of minutes post-All-Star Break. One key reason was due to coaching. Mike D’antoni – new coach for the Lakers this season after Mike Brown was unceremoniously fired – did not have the ability/clout to instill in Kobe the need for rest. I think that Phil Jackson, who previously coached both Kobe Bryant and Michael Jordan would have saw the red flags. Not to say Kobe wouldn’t have gotten hurt, however, the point remains: knowing when you need your team to sprint and rest and getting them to do so is an important trait for a leader.

One little example to conclude – At our startup at Skillz, we recently had a prize for the person who had the best story to tell after this weekend about something fun that they did!

Fellow cravers,

Wanted to share some exciting news with you. The startup that I’ve been helping to make a reality has officially come out of stealth mode today and into public beta. What does that mean for you? If you have an Android device and you want to play for more than just gold stars and virtual currency, than check out http://Skillz.com. It’s the world’s first tournament platform for mobile games where you can play for keeps.

Here is a video describing Skillz in 30 seconds:

Longer thoughts about Skillz:

I’m definitely exhausted but that’s how you should expect to feel right after launching. You wouldn’t want to think to yourself, if only there was something more that I could have done.  I also want to express how incredibly awesome my team has been. We’re spread out in two different offices but are united by the same mission: to change the world of videos games for the better.

I sometimes wonder why I like this idea so much and it really stems from the fact that it lies at the convergence of a few trends that I see in the tech industry that are very interesting to understand. These include things like the ubiquity of mobile phones, carrying out simple financial transactions, and the concept of asynchronous competition.

I’m also loving the idea of b2b business models that are structured with a strong win-win outcome, whereby if you create something of value and your customer creates something awesome as well, you both benefit equally from the process. Advertising in its current state has been prone to miss on this promise because of not aligning with consumers, but not all ads are bad and I wonder what that industry can do to rebuild trust. 

Lastly, I just wanted to say that I truly believe that more and more of the most talented people in our generation are going to want to join startups as well as be drawn towards technology. For these people, I want to say that the road ahead is by no means easy but hang in there.

Long live Skillz!

One of the things that I love about early stage companies and working with or being a part of the founding team is that your work is reflected across all aspects of the company. The analogy that I like to use is when an architect inscribes their name on the first brick of a building. Your personality, preferences and style can be found in the very first iteration of what you release into the world.

On that note, I’ve been fortunate enough to be a part of a talented team that is launching a startup nationally very soon. We’re still in stealth mode right now (startup speak for not revealing everything about the product and business strategy) but for now, I’d like to take a second and reflect on all the things that a startup needs in order to launch. Hopefully this will serve as a guide for other entrepreneurs as well as serve as a wake-up call to people who think that a company is launched with the flick of a switch. (It’ll also help me remember all the things that I have been working on with my respective teams!)

Each one of these requires countless hours of hard work and I want to commend my team for their great work which you’ll hear about soon. If you ever have any questions about any of these as a fellow startuper, feel free to drop me a tweet.

Web/Mobile Properties

• Company Website
• Consumer-facing website
• Business-facing website
• Mobile app (if applicable, no pun intended)

• Case Study
• One-pagers for B2B companies
• FAQ
• Social Media
• Analytics (for tracking conversion funnel)
• Blog (for thought leadership and company culture)
• Public Relations (specifically media outreach)
• Competitive Tracking
• Media Roundup

Business Development

• CRM (Salesforce)
• Conferences
• Sales Templates

Customer Service

• Customer Service Playbook
• FAQ
• Contact Us

Engineering

• SCRUM
• Team Product Reviews
• Product Testing/QA
• Functionality Requirements
• Performance Testing

Admin

• Terms of Service
• Privacy Policy
• Payment Processing
• Welcoming Team Members
• Legal
• Recruiting management software
• Team Reporting/Performance Reviews
• Team Weekly Calls

I’m sure there is a lot of others that I missed out but this hopefully gives you a high-level checklist of what you need to have in place.

One more thing that I have learned is that if you want to be a person who is able to make a difference in an organization and have people trust your decisions, you need to be able to consistently deliver the extra 5-10% of work that exceeds expectations. Part of it is attention to detail (typos, reporting numbers, etc) but the other half is taking a step back and asking yourself, if the person that I am reporting to isn’t there to give me feedback, would I present this and call it the best that I can do? If not, it’s probably a sign that you need to get back to work.

I had the pleasure of hopping into a startup panel yesterday downstairs from my office for a few minutes and wanted to share something cool I learned.

The panel was presented by PostRocket and Yammer called, “Growth in Enterprise” and featured prominent techies such as Hiten Shah as moderator (President and Co-founders of KISSmetrics), Alex Malinovich (Vice President of Enterprise Sales at GitHub), David Barrett (Founder of Expensify), Drew Dillon (Director of Product Management at Yammer) and Geoff McQueen (CEO at AffinityLive) and Tony Huie (Head Business Operations at DropBox).

The panelists were talking about some useful tactics that they used to get product feedback. David shared an example of when he was first starting up Expensify in the first two years.  He would send a randomized email to subscribed customers shortly after they had used the software. Here’s the kicker: you would expect the email to be flashy with formal headers and stylized footers. Not at all. Instead it was just a plain-text email with a sentence that went something like, “Hey, what’s up? How did you like using the service?” That was it.

As David said, the email converted at 12% (which is freakishly high) and provided some of the best feedback they have ever received on how to improve their service. Apparently people took the time to write pages and pages of feedback. Could you imagine getting such a non-pushy email from the founder/team member? Simple yet effective.

It’s interesting how a lot of the time, doing the exact opposite from what people expect yields huge dividends. This is just one case in point and hopefully you’ll get to give it a try sometime.

Cravers,

Just wanted to give you a quick update. Exciting news! I’m shipping off to SF to join Lookout Gaming and help them launch/ grow their awesome platform. Be on the “lookout” for more posts related to entrepreneurship and startups. I’ve already been working with the team for 2 weeks and their passion + dedication is incredible. Boston has been a wonderful place for me to grow in my career. So many talented young people are gravitating towards technology and the result is that industries are being revolutionized before our eyes. I’m grateful for supporting the ecosystem and will always look for ways to pay it forward. I want to thank all my mentors and friends, you know who you are. It’s been a wild ride and I look forward to catching up soon.

Be sure to follow this space.

Vale,
David