“What are you writing about?” The common response I hear upon telling someone, “I’m working on a book.”

When confronted by a blank page, “what am I going to write?” Is the foremost thought in my mind. What? What indeed.

In persistently asking “what” is it at all possible I’m grasping at the wrong end of the stick?

In Simon Sinek’s TED talk titled “How Great Leaders Inspire Action”, he expounds that people don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it.

And while buy in this context relates to marketing and sales, I believe the message has broader applicability. He explains how most businesses or brands focus on communicating their value based on what they do, as he says, “we make cars that are faster than anyone else,” or, “…are more fuel efficient…”, or, “…can fit more people.” He continues, explaining that some brands in an attempt to differentiate themselves, tell how they do it. Very few, though, are clear about why they do it. The purpose, cause or belief that underlies their existence. Those brands that do, however, are the brands with the cult-like followings; the raving fan customers that queue for days to purchase or experience the latest new thing.

Take Apple, a brand Sinek uses as an exemplar, imagine if Apple marketed like this:

“We make great computers, they are beautifully designed, simple to use and are user-friendly, want to buy one?”

Nothing unusual with this message, as he says, it’s the way most of us would communicate. It starts with what they do and works inwards.

Apple, though, does not market like this; instead, their message is:

“With everything we do we believe in challenging the status quo, in thinking differently, our products are beautifully designed, simple to use and user-friendly, we just happen to make great computers, want to buy one?”

What a difference starting with why makes. Sinek states that Apple “consistently thinks, acts and communicates from the inside out.” They start with why, and as consumers, we feel it. Just compare the brand appeal of Apple to someone like Dell, who also happens to make computers and other consumer electronics.

I believe, there is something akin to Sinek’s why when it comes to writing. On the outside is what we write: fiction or nonfiction; books or plays; poems or sonnets; essays or articles. The topics we enjoy, the stories we like to tell, the genres to which we gravitate.
Some may know who it is they are writing for: children; teenagers; or adults. Those in love, those not. Those who enjoy science fiction, those who read romance, those that enjoy thrillers or are in need of a laugh.

How many though, know why they write?

“Because it’s my job,” doesn’t count and doing it for fame and fortune is perhaps a little hopeful.

Why is hard. It’s fuzzy. What we do is so much simpler, more concrete, easier for us to verbalize. Digging deep into our psyche to uproot our seemingly unconscious motivations and desires is effortful. It doesn’t come naturally to most. But, what if, before putting pen to paper, instead of asking, “what am I going to write?” You ask instead, “why is it I write?” How different would that be?

What is it that drives you, that compels you? What sustains you as you sit staring at the blank page or pound away tirelessly to shape a paragraph, rewrite a sentence or change a word for the umpteenth time?

Are you writing to right a wrong, to set the record straight? To make a difference in the world—leave a dent in the universe, as Steve Jobs would say? To share a story that is burning up inside of you. To educate, to entertain, to inspire, to shock, to elicit a smile or cause a tear to shed. To be the best damn writer, poet, playwright the world has ever seen.

“Enough already!”, I hear you scream, “it’s because it’s who I am.”

Now that’s a powerful statement. There is no more powerful a driver of human action than our beliefs about who we are. When your why becomes part of that, part of your identity, there is no challenge or obstacle, or blank page or recalcitrant phrase or awkward word that can stand in your way.

I’d posit that the Greats knew why they wrote. Shakespeare knew why he wrote. I couldn’t image the great bard explaining prosaically to someone that he’d just met in a pub in Elizabethan England:

“I mostly write plays, in them, I capture the essence of the human condition, want to see one?”

No, he would say:

“I am the chronicler of my time; I see the truth of what it is to be human, endlessly interesting and impossible to reduce to a simple formula, my plays capture the essence of the human condition, want to see one?”

Perhaps what makes great writing is not what is written, but why it was written. Is it not our passion, our drive, our purpose that brings life to the page, that seeps into every word we choose, the phrases we construct and paragraphs we write, grabbing the reader by the scruff of the neck and shouting, “read on, read on, I wrote this just for you!”

Writing is an arduous task, as the saying goes, if it were easy, everyone would be doing it; but if you have a powerful enough why anything is possible. It’s not what you write; it’s why you write that matters.

…or how to go from idea to founding team before you do.

Much has been written about how important “team” is to the success of a startup and surely no team is more important than the founding team. If true, then why is it that so many entrepreneurs look to blind luck or happenstance as they go about building one? I know that I have been guilty of spending more time interviewing and vetting a potential employee than I did a co-founder.

I’ve been fortunate to be part of the founding teams for three startups in Silicon Valley, with my third landing me in New York (post-acquisition) three years ago. Since then I’ve had the pleasure of meeting many New York entrepreneurs embarking on their first entrepreneurial journeys. All of them, without fail, have an idea they are passionate about. Some may have already quit their day job to chase their dream. A few might have raised some seed funding to help finance it. What I find most surprising though, is that rarely is there an established founding team. Invariably, I meet solo entrepreneurs looking to build a team. If this is you read on.

Thanks to Steve Blank and Eric Ries of Lean Startup fame, there is plenty to read on how to develop your business or product. But how should you approach developing a founding team? There is little doubt that going it alone stacks the odds against you. Based on a survey of 650 companies, the 2012 Startup Genome Report identified that “solo founders take 3.6x longer to reach scale stage compared to a founding team of 2 and they are 2.3x less likely to pivot” (the latter being of particular relevance given the report also identified that “startups that pivot once or twice raise 2.5x more money, have 3.6x better user growth and are 52% less likely to scale prematurely than startups that pivot more than 2 times or not at all”).

The best time to start building a founding team is long before you quit your day job and a great way to start is with a Kitchen Cabinet. No, not that kind of cabinet. The term Kitchen Cabinet was coined in the 1800’s during Andrew Jackson’s presidency of the United States. It was used to describe a collection of unofficial advisers he consulted (to the chagrin of some) in parallel to the United States Cabinet. As you search for like-minded individuals that might have an interest in your idea, instead of asking them to quit their well-paying jobs at Google or Facebook to join you as a co-founder and work for no salary until you can (hopefully) raise some funding, instead pitch them your idea and see if they’d be willing to dedicate a few hours a week to kick the tires on it.

You’re looking for people with complementary skills or experience to your own. People with differing perspectives that can act as a sounding board and question your beliefs and assumptions, all in the name of honing your idea into a well-formulated business opportunity. To be clear, this isn’t someone you have to pay. A software development partner or consultant willing to build your product for cash and/or equity doesn’t qualify, they come with their own agenda. And you should be upfront with everyone that there is no guarantee that anything will come of their efforts. They aren’t committing to joining you should you start something and you aren’t committing that they would be part of it, even if you did. Of course, the whole point of the exercise is to be on the lookout for a potential co-founder or early hire, but that bridge could be six or nine months away. Your Kitchen Cabinet will force you to get your idea out of your head and subject it to the critical thinking of others while the risks are still low; after all, no one has given up their day job yet. And you’ll get a chance to work with people you may later wish to partner with (or not as the case may be).

I first got exposed to the concept of a Kitchen Cabinet in 2004 thanks to Manish Chandra, (currently Founder/CEO of Poshmark). He had an idea for a collaborative bookmarking site, yet as a first-time entrepreneur faced the challenge of how to build a founding team around it. Over a period of nine months or more he invited over a dozen individuals, people he’d worked with, friends, and friends of friends, to meet at his house on Saturday mornings to discuss, conceptualize and prototype what ultimately became Kaboodle (acquired by Hearst Corporation in 2007). I was one of those individuals who gave up their Saturday mornings to refine the idea and many months later took a leap of faith and gave up my day job to start Kaboodle with Manish and Chetan (another Kitchen Cabinet member). By then we’d all had a chance to work together vetting the idea, researching solutions and building prototypes. Manish got to observe who was committed, who contributed beyond a few hours at the weekend and who might fit culturally. And, there was an added bonus, since there’s nothing quite like a bit of co-creation to bind a founding team together. I’ve used the Kitchen Cabinet multiple times to good effect. My only regret is the one time I didn’t.

But, what if you aren’t able to find anyone to join your Kitchen Cabinet? Well, either your idea isn’t very compelling, or you aren’t very compelling I’m afraid. Either way, you should stop and reevaluate what you are doing. If you can’t even get a couple of people to give up a few hours a week to work on your idea what makes you think you could successfully attract investors, employees or customers later on?

And no-one is going to steal your idea. I hate to break the bad news, but ideas are two-a-penny. What matters is execution. Taking the acorn of an idea and growing it into an oak tree is indescribably hard and any thoughts you share today will evolve so much between now and your ultimate success, that the risk of someone stealing your idea and getting it right is comparatively low compared to the risk of keeping it to yourself and going it alone. And, once you’ve incorporated, you can protect your company’s intellectual property by making anyone who contributed to its early development an advisor; in exchange for advisory shares, they assign all intellectual property over. A just reward for those in the Kitchen Cabinet that helped get the company started, yet, for whatever reason, wasn’t able to jump on board.

I share my Kitchen Cabinet story with entrepreneurs, usually, after they have told me how great their idea is and, with an expectant look, continue on to say that they just need to find a great CTO to join them as a co-founder. Sell me on your idea. Enlist me in your cause. Invite me to join your Kitchen Cabinet by all means. Just don’t ask me to be your co-founder the first time we meet. That’s like asking someone to marry you on a first date.

Recently I had pause to reflect and look back on my experiences driving product for the last 15 years. I consider myself a technologist first, yet have always been drawn to the sphere of product management and have generally held both CTO/Head of Product positions. Product management is probably one of the least well-defined roles in most, certainly technology, companies. The role where you see the most variance from one company to another as to what the role even entails.

That said, I posed myself the question, what makes a great product manager? In my experience, great product managers:

1. Are able to take the acorn of an idea and grow it into an oak tree. Good ideas can come from anywhere, quite often, not from the product managers themselves.
2. Apply critical thinking to everything they do. They listen, ask great questions and understand the real need. They then work out the most elegant solution to the problem in partnership with the business/design/development teams.
3. Say NO a lot. Someone has to.
4. See the forest for the trees. Not everything is urgent, not everything is equally important, they prioritize needs/features/issues and hone in on what truly matters at that moment in time.
5. Can harness, not stifle creativity. They understand amazing products come from the minds of great UI/UX Designers and Art Directors and ensure these folks have the space they need yet ensure they don’t go off the reservation.
6. Understand the difference between form versus function. They care about making it work, then making it fast, then making it pretty.
7. Have strong opinions, yet aren’t opinionated. They bring an opinion to help shape or lead a discussion, yet don’t get wedded to a single point of view.
8. Are curious first, critical second. They remain open-minded at all times and their natural response is: “that’s interesting, tell me more”.
9. Are the most flexible people. The law of requisite variety states that the most flexible person wins, ensuring product gets delivered requires a lot of flexibility.
10. Don’t hold out for perfection. There is no such thing as bug free and it’s impossible to satisfy all the business needs all of the time.
11. Release early and release often. There’s nothing to be learnt from an unreleased product. The longer it takes to release the more painful the lessons.
12. Serve and protect. They serve the needs of the business and protect the development team from those same, ever-changing needs.

 

There are often areas within a business where the traditional rules of operation breakdown and continuing to do what you’ve been doing no longer works, places without structure, without defined roles & responsibilities, a place of uncertainty…a gap.

Very few people can operate in the gap, most need structure (processes/roles/responsibilities) to be effective and when thrust into the gap become overwhelmed and  fall into a state of paralysis/inaction. Others rail against the gap (nature abhors a vacuum as they say), desperately trying to create the structure they crave. Their actions become divisive as  their focus shifts to closing the gap instead of the job at hand. They no longer see the forest for the trees.

Which brings us to the rare few who are able to operate in the gap, they don’t become overwhelmed, they don’t fall prey to their fears, uncertainties and doubts, they don’t try to close the gap, they simply get on and do and by doing fill the gap. With each step forward the fog begins to clear and structure (process/roles/responsibilities) emerges that then allows others to come join them.

There are gaps in any business and if you’re starting a new one, then by its very nature, you’re in the gap. So mind the gap.