For Starters #8: Is this a 10yr project?
First, over the past few weeks a common theme has emerged in my conversations; C-suite asking for help to better understand their B2B customers. Whether to grow sales and guide marketing of an established product or shape a startup's initial offering - leadership senses a disconnect between themselves and their customers. If this sounds like you or someone you know, let's discuss.
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“Almost all things have origins earlier than you thought” - Tyler Cowen
A quick timeline I like to keep in the back of my mind when I consider starting a new venture:
90 days: core problem validated
18 months: initial solution released to early customers
36 months: initial solution publicly released
5 years: household name in primary market
10 years: emerging player in rural America
20 years: dominant player globally
For starters, if things are wildly successful you need to be intrinsically interested in solving this specific problem for a decade, or two, maybe three. This week's email is about how I think through if an opportunity space can support my interest for multiple decades.
Back in For Starters #1 - (https://tinyletter.com/garrickvanburen/letters/for-starters-1-the-end-is-inevitable), we talked about the Lindy Effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect) in the context of the expected lifespan of a given business venture.
Lindy’s true intent is to describe nonperishable things (so, not people or business ventures, so arguably I mis-applied it), which makes it a fantastic principle of deciding what to point your venture at.
“The secret is to focus on the things that don’t change.” - Jeff Bezos
There’s a lot of problems in the world. Many of these problems have been insufficiently solved for quite a while; 10 years, 20 years, 40 years. If a new venture wanted to ensure it was best positioned for long-term success, it’d be pointed at one of these persistently, insufficiently solved, problems (be warned, some are tarpits - https://www.ycombinator.com/library/Ij-dalton-michael-avoid-these-tempting-startup-ideas)
There are three reasons to targeting old problems:
the longer it’s been unsolved, the larger the Total Addressable Market - both in terms of talent and customers.
the longer it’s been unsolved, the greater the clarity of the insufficiency
the longer it’s been unsolved, the more time and space you have to iterate toward success - because Hofstadter's Law ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hofstadter's_law )
There’s two strategic directions you could take these problems:
The simplest and most straight-forward is to declare the chosen problem as a your venture’s mission, e.g. “Universal access to all knowledge”, “Earth's most customer-centric company”, “America’s Finest News Source”.
Or use these problems as an input to a new hypothesis about the long-term future, where this problem is even worse than it is today (or sufficiently solved). This is a bit more effort, the payoff is; a vastly increased opportunity space, an articulation of how the world will be different when you’re successful, a way to observe if your hypothesis is emerging, and an outline of a response plan as the competitive landscape emerges.
For example, a couple of my long-term hypotheses:
Computers are in the background
Companies are ever smaller
Globalization is over
The Futures Wheel - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futures_wheel - is one of my favorite ways to explore and identify this second space. The goal of the wheel is to start with a bold statement like say - “An AGI escapes OpenAI” - at the middle and then list out the smallest next order consequences around it. Then around each of those next consequences, what's the next order consequence?
Repeat until you’ve filled the wall with interconnected consequences comprehensively describing this scenario.
I like to do two or three of these exercises with unrelated starting points, and have teams look for connections across wheels. Wherever a disproportionate number of connections converge (either intra-wheel or inter-wheel), you’ve got a potential North Star to focus your present day activities.
A couple of warnings:
Because your North Star is a couple of consequences away, what you're doing may seem pretty goofy to others. Until it's not.
It’s a powerful exercise. Once we started with the most ridiculous thing the team could think of at the center. Within 90 days that ridiculousness was current reality and the team needed to respond. Time can be all jeremy bearimy sometimes.
I’m just glad they were prepared.
If the Futures Wheel sounds like a helpful strategic exercise for your team - give it a shot. If you’d like some help applying it - just reply.
A couple final notes:
A special welcome to the TechStars | Minnesota Twins 2023 class ( https://www.techstars.com/newsroom/minnesota-twins-accelerator-by-techstars-announces-its-third-class ).
A huge ‘thank you’, this US Thanksgiving week, to all of you for joining me on the ‘For Starters’ journey. I appreciate your replies each week.