Passion Capital

The Pivot or Why You Should Listen

The first time I heard the word “pivot” I was playing Basketball at summer camp and the counsellor was showing us the “triple threat” position. He told us always to pivot and avoid getting overpowered by a strong defender. I tried it and it worked; sports always had a way of making sense that I appreciated. I played basketball all through high school, but the novelty of the word had worn off and it was relegated by more complex tactics.

Fast-forward 5 years. My interest in the startup world is growing. It’s exciting, it’s profitable, and best of all: it aims to find creative solutions to complex problems. Watching a video on Seedcamp, a mentor is addressing a group of hungry, young entrepreneurs, telling them to always be ready to pivot. There it was again. That word. Pivot.  

To pivot, as the mentor explained, is the ability (but more importantly, the willingness) to adjust the course of one’s product. Seth Godin very poignantly put it: “Your job is not to find more customers for your product. Your job is to find more products for your customers.” By being flexible and open, you can provide an organic product (or set of products) that is directly influenced by customer feedback. Listening to your customers and allowing them to mold and shape your product in collaboration with you and your team, while always maintaining high standards, is exactly the kind of business I would like to be doing. And this brings me to my final observation: Backgammon.

Backgammon is a game of luck and skill. Two players take turns rolling a pair of dice and try to move their pieces around, and finally off the board, before their opponent manages to do the same. Simple game, complex strategy. I’ve recently been playing alot of backgammon and have been drawing parallels between the strategy of the game, and the entrepreneurial spirit of young startups. As in the startup world, you must be ready to pivot in backgammon. With every roll, the landscape changes and your priorities get shuffled. If you are too stubborn to switch up your strategy, you will lose. If you are too afraid to take some risks that could pay off hugely down the line, or cost you dearly, you will lose. Each piece is a resource, and you must allocate your resources according to the ever-changing conditions on the board. Your pieces are your business; your customers, your dice. They guide you, and not the other way around.

Young startups like Buffer and Blossom do a great job of maintaining a dialogue with their users, offering “Get in Touch” and “Submit an Idea” options on their pages. By integrating a willingness to learn from and grow with your users, you can create a culture of growth. It’s not a hack, it’s an attitude. And in doing so, your pivots will be smaller, more controlled, and you’ll find yourself simply calibrating a well-oiled machine. Lot’s of startups today are following suit and are setting themselves up for real success. 

So don’t forget to pivot. Not just when playing basketball and backgammon, and not just in your business, but always.

Have you had experience changing the course of your business? How did it go? What have you learned from listening to your customers?

Freelancer or Entrepreneur?

I just finished listening to episode #1 of Seth Godin’s Startup School, a podcast on Earwolf. The title of the episode is “Freelancer or Entrepreneur?”, a distinction that I only now came to realize is a very important one.

Seth discusses the differences and points out that freelancers work for money, and if they don’t work, they don’t get money. Entrepreneurs, on the other hand, build a company and give it value by focusing their energy on the disruption of markets. This means, entrepreneurs need to hire people as soon as they can afford to, in order to allow them the time and space to focus on the overall direction of the operation, while freelancers are brought in to complete specific tasks and are paid to do so.

These concepts are quite simple indeed, but they are important for someone like me, who is consantly struggling with the direction of my passion. I have many ideas of my own that I get excited about, but I also have the capacity to get really psyched on the ideas of my friends. This, for me, is the crux of the issue. I need to ask myself: “Am I an entrepreneur, or a freelancer? Do I want to start something of my own, or help someone else’s baby get off the ground?”.

Perhaps I am a bit of both, but if I don’t choose a direction for my passion, i’m afraid it’s going to fizzle. For at least a certain amount of time, I need to commit to one of these activities if I want to get the ball rolling. Later down the line, I’m sure there are ways to juggle both “lifestyles”. Seth himself states that he is a freelancer 80% of the time, and an entrepreneur the other 20% (see Squidoo). 

I’d like to know how you see yourself? Are you one or the other, or sometimes both? Do you have any tips on how to control ecclectic passion?

Cancan, can you do the Kanban?

Don’t worry, I’m not sure I can either. But I’m willing to give it a shot. 

Kanban is a way to visualize and manage workflow, and limit work-in-progress, all while monitoring, adapting and improving the process with the intent of creating higher quality output. The entire process is also inherently collaborative. But Kanban, as it seems, isn’t just some process that helps your company or team work more efficiently. It is a fundamental re-thinking of how we get things done. How I do work - the process - directly affects the quality of my output.Though obvious to some, this concept is very alien to someone who generally pushes out his assignments to the last minute and often uses phrases like, “I work best under pressure”. 

My biggest challenge is beginning a project. I tend to be fixated on the “big picture” and am quickly overwhelmed by all the minutia involved in reaching my goal. They seem to pile up in my mind and all of a sudden I’m backlogged and frustrated. I then begin aimlessly chipping away at a number of different things, making dents in the “surface” of the project, and thereby trying to give it some recognizable features that I can use as points of departure. This, as I am beginning to realize, is a terrible approach. It is how I approach everything in my life. Frontal, forceful, and always with a sprinkle of self-sabotage. It’s what the story of Sisyphus was meant to teach me if my head wasn’t so far up my ass in high school. 

Now, nearly five years later, I’m seeing a light at the end of the tunnel. I’ve always felt that there was something wrong with the approach to my various pursuits. No matter how much passion I brought to the table, I always managed to grind away in the hamster wheel of my mind until I’d used up all my juice and had to recoup for a few months before daring to get out there and try something again. A desire for instant gratification coupled with a huge amount of energy basically left me haphazardly piecing together my projects with no real regard for the process. If I could get it done right away and then never think about it again, I did. Much like a young child making his first structures using glue and popsicle sticks, my structures lacked a solid foundation and thus were never quite as awesome as I had Imagined. Jilted by my abominations, tail between my legs, I managed to always run from myself. Only in the past few months have I opened a door to self-reflection and things are beginning to sink in.

Sitting at the Hotel am Brillantengrund (a hub for creative minds, curated by Marvin Mangalino) I got a chance to catch up with my buddy Allan Berger. Allan is the co-founder of Blossom, a lean project-management tool designed for software developers. I’d spoken with him about his startup a couple of times, but had never managed to achieve a full understanding of what they (Nik and Tosh are also on board!) were trying to do. I knew that they were into the whole Kanban thing, but had no idea what that meant for them as a team, and how it was shaping their product. Listening to him explain what he does to a couple of the people around the table, I was intent to take another stab at it. 

Here’s my take: Blossom is a tool, there is no question about that. But Blossom is also a silent, mutual agreement for any team that wants to get serious about creating amazing products. Any team using this tool, has already taken a fundamental step towards success. They’ve decided to flatten their hierarchy and truly focus on the most relevant tasks at hand. Time is actually secondary. Though the goal is surely to ship, it’s not the number one priority. It’s also not about having a backlog of features, where the second one is finished you move straight onto the next one. Forget the concept of a conventional stack, and try to see the process as more of a self-reflecting, self-informing, and self-improving system that is designed to make you and your team incrementally better at what you do. You also have to want it, because the tool isn’t a cure-all. It’s an option that, if accepted, implemented and continuously reflected upon, can and will take you and your team to the next level. Forget deadlines, forget project managers breathing down your neck. Blossom, which is no doubt rooted in some of the principles of Kanban, but a new manifestion in it’s own right, is shaping the future of how we get things done. The right way.

Thanks to Allan for getting my gears turning again. I look forward to doing some personal Kanban, getting my life in order, and embarking on a few new startup ideas of my own. The right way.