A VC - Latest Comments in Events Often Overtake Companies

Re: Events Often Overtake Companies

reece — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 16:15:41 -0000

Thanks, Fred. Great points. We did take the time to write a business plan (a great exercise) but our development has moved faster than our writing and we continue to evolve the exact implementation, while maintaing our core strategy in (all of) our heads.

Re: Events Often Overtake Companies

Kartik Agaram — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 16:13:00 -0000

"Don't get too attached to your strategic plan."

Often a special case of "do what your users want you to do, not just what you enjoy doing." At least that's where I mess up most often.

Re: Events Often Overtake Companies

ADstruc — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 12:33:34 -0000

Fred, again, another great post. I have found myself saying "balance" a lot the past two weeks. I think it applies to your post as well because events do overtake companies but it needs to be well-balanced and managed from the bottom up.

All the best,
John
ADstruc
john@adstruc.com
www.adstruc.com
We are an early-stage internet startup company building an online marketplace for outdoor advertising. ADstruc is looking to secure seed funding to channel into marketing and operations.

Re: Events Often Overtake Companies

JLM — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 18:09:26 -0000

As always, a very interesting topic. I have always been a fan of "formal" planning even when the plan must be revised on a fairly frequent basis or is written in crayon on a white board. I have found that most (many?) business failures have at their core a flaw which could have been detected by a thorough assessment of their "plan".

The planning process seems to invite input, criticism and improvement while providing a structural opportunity to organize thoughts into a single coherent whole.

See the putt. Be the ball. Armchair fly the approach. Visualization is useful.

Execution only makes the flaws a reality. The flaws could often have been detected in the original plan.

There is a huge difference between a strategic plan, a business plan, a budget and a set of notes which are just organized musings. All have their place in business. What has no place is the intellectual laziness which says we don't need no stinking plan.

In business, like combat, the first casualty of contact is the plan except that the plan provides direction even when it must be abandoned. In a deal shop, the plan may simply require getting to work on time, getting the doors open, ensuring the phone is working and fielding every inquiry. That's still a plan. Not a complicated but an OK one when your inventory is cash.

The plan has to be communicated, overcommunicated and communicated until it can be reduced to a very short tattoo on your left bicep.

This is where "leadership style" becomes an important ingredient in success. Steve Jobs is an interesting example of a leader who has been able to get more out of the same combination of folks than others and his recent and earlier absences have served to reinforce this difference.

Isn't it interesting that the underlying failure of the current health care debate may simply be the absence of a single coherent plan, an easily understood plan, a plan which can be communicated quickly, a credible & believable plan and a plan which can be reduced to a tattoo.

Now President Obama is trying to do the planning, packaging and education which should have been done before the effort was even announced.

There is a reason the sequence is READY, AIM, FIRE rather than READY, FIRE, AIM!

Re: Events Often Overtake Companies

markallenroberts — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 14:42:56 -0000

The Struggle is to quickly identify the right activity, and dismiss the YAFo’s as I discuss in my blog post : http://nosmokeandmirrors.wo...
Great post
Mark Allen Roberts

Re: Events Often Overtake Companies

fredwilson — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 09:59:10 -0000

there you go

Re: Events Often Overtake Companies

leeschneider — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 09:53:11 -0000

Fred, my biz partner and I had a started to build a strategic plan when our plans were derailed basically by our options in the commercial real estate market and several other small issues, including funding. Had to shift gears, and have yet to put our new plan down on paper (i.e. formal biz plan). Instead, we've taken to blogging and lots of email conversations, and it seems that we're accomplishing the same goal of a business plan without actually having one. I wrote a post a couple months back about scrapping our original plan. http://www.bgreenlifestyle....

Re: Events Often Overtake Companies

markslater — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 09:02:38 -0000

Especially if there are early signs of take up that gets all the flies around the nest in a tizzy. I'm yet to have both the fortune and challenge of a situation like this, but have seen it with close friends. Everyone has an opinion, people behaviour becomes questionable.

I just read that absolutely crap book by mezrich about the Facebook founding - amongst the tripe were some poingnant examples of how Mark Z had to battle the ambulance chasing crowd - ofcourse its hard to know what was true in that book .

Re: Events Often Overtake Companies

fredwilson — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 07:43:06 -0000

That's great. You are doing it right

Re: Events Often Overtake Companies

fredwilson — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 07:42:03 -0000

That's great. You are doing it right

Re: Events Often Overtake Companies

Pierre — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 03:38:31 -0000

From my previous (and current) experiences, I can only agree with your two points, especially when your product is meant to address or even *create* a new need. In the consumer internet space, it is often the case that startups are not only successful because they solve a problem, but frequently because they make people realise they had this problem in the first place. And it's often the case that this need becomes really apparent post product launch, and is rarely exactely the one you had identified at inception. That's probably what you mean by "listening to the market".

Re: Events Often Overtake Companies

fredwilson — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 22:19:10 -0000

send me an email
i am intrigued

Re: Events Often Overtake Companies

Jeff O'Hara — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 21:35:09 -0000

Fred thanks for the inquiry. Edmodo is a social networking platform that teachers can safely use with their student. We have been compared to Twitter or Facebook for schools. I would say we are similar to what Yammer is doing for the enterprise, but we are serving the specific needs of Education. Our goal is to be the biggest/best social platform for education.

Most of our users are K-12 teachers and students, which is who we built Edmodo for. As of this writing we have 85,000 registered users since we launched 12 months ago. Approximately 85% of our monthly users are U.S. based.

So far we have accomplished this with 2 people (my co-founder and myself), zero funding, and a lot of hard work and determination. If your still intrigued and interested in hearing more, I would love to talk sometime.

Re: Events Often Overtake Companies

Michael Shafrir — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 21:23:03 -0000

We've done a variety of things -- hack days, Apprentice-style contests,
"ideafactory" wikis, and group contests. All work to encourage innovation
in a now more slowly-moving product dev cycle.

Re: Events Often Overtake Companies

avneron — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 20:52:24 -0000

which model of the Harmony remote are you using?

maybe this thread could help http://forum.boxee.tv/showp...

Re: Events Often Overtake Companies

fredwilson — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 19:43:06 -0000

Right. There are a number of comments to that effect here. It gets a lot harder to do that when you are bigger. But I think it is worth trying to do that somewhere in your business at all times

Re: Events Often Overtake Companies

fredwilson — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 19:38:04 -0000

I've seen a number of companies launch quietly with pretty good success. That lets them test ideas and then do a big "launch" when they are ready

Re: Events Often Overtake Companies

fredwilson — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 19:37:03 -0000

That's true. Its not as easy to do this. But I would encourage you to create some kind of 'skunkworks' in your organization where you can still experiment on new ideas

Re: Events Often Overtake Companies

fredwilson — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 19:33:05 -0000

That's great. This isn't a new idea for sure

Re: Events Often Overtake Companies

fredwilson — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 19:32:04 -0000

I'd like to learn more about edmodo. Where is it mostly used?

Re: Events Often Overtake Companies

fredwilson — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 19:31:07 -0000

We don't require anything in writing from the company prior to making an investment. If they have it, that's great. But if they don't, we can usually pull it out of them in a meeting

There are many examples of successful startups where the strategy was largely in the entrepreneur's head for the first year or two

It's actually a bigger problem inside the company when it isn't well articulated on paper than outside of the company. The team needs to know the strategy cold

Re: Events Often Overtake Companies

fredwilson — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 17:40:06 -0000

that is true.
i am certain he was talking about startups

Re: Events Often Overtake Companies

Matt Blumberg — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 14:30:08 -0000

Fred, I generally agree with the point, but Albert's specific point makes a little less sense as companies get larger and older, at least for their core products

Re: Events Often Overtake Companies

fredwilson — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 11:06:02 -0000

Great points eric

Your first point is why we are so enthusiastic about investing in consumer facing web services. We like the fact that they can be very agile and get a lot of traction quickly with very little capital invested

That said, we do have some enterprise focused companies in our portfolio and I encourage them to be agile and reactive to the market. I think enterprise saas companies can learn a lot from the consumer web services

As for your latter point, you must absolutely not take the head fake from the market. I'm not sure how one can recognize the head fake but your caution on that point is well taken

Re: Events Often Overtake Companies

fredwilson — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 10:49:04 -0000

They do. Avner just told me that some of his colleagues at boxee use that remote with their app