Tag: startups

Planning a Saudi pivot

Saudi Arabia plans to pivot its economy but cultural issues may prove hard to overcome

In the face of a volatile oil price and falling reserves, Saudi Arabia’s new Crown Prince is looking at pivoting the economy to knowledge based industries.

That is a hard task in the face of Saudi Arabia’s religious, cultural and work cultures. This is not a society easily dragged into the 21st Century.

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s plans seem even more daunting when Richard Florida’s 3Ts of the Creative Class are considered – Talent, Technology and Tolerance.

It may well be easy to buy in the technology, but attracting the right talent to Saudi Arabia is going to be hard particularly given it is one of the most intolerant societies on the planet.

Saudi Arabia though has plenty of challenges, so a few big bets may be in order. Tolerance though might be the deal breaker.

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Silicon Valley’s unicorn monoculture

Silicon Valley’s obsession with finding the next tech unicorns could be its weakness.

What happens in Silicon Valley when your startup doesn’t fit into the current hot ‘unicorn’ categories?

I recently spoke to one female founder about her business and why she chose to setup on the US East Coast rather than follow the popular path of establishing a San Francisco base. Her answer shows the obsessions Silicon Valley investors have and why the Bay Area model may not be right for all companies.

Originally we planned to set up in the Bay area. That’s what you do right? So our company’s registered office was in Palo Alto and then I started plans to have three of my staff and myself relocate to San Francisco. I took onboard some Silicon Valley Advisors and this was a pretty horrific experience that taught me a lot. Here is my experience of trying to set up in the Bay Area then not. This is my cautionary tale to other Aussie Start Ups.

The Valley comes with a certain formula that gets beaten into you. Here’s how it goes:

A Start Up must:

  • Be in the Bay Area
  • Have had an MVP in market
  • Be an incorporated US company, preferably a Delaware company if you want US VC investment
  • Have a Run Rate (annual revenue) of $3-5million dollars in order to attract investment
  • Not be enterprise software
  • Be a SaaS company like Atlassian with a similar business model
  • Have a product that is inexpensive where clients can self-install and there is no professional services or servicing required

I found the Silicon Valley Advisors I dealt with to be arrogant, formulaic and could not see potential outside of the standard Unicorn-creating formula. So I realized the Bay Area was not going to be a good fit for My business. Additionally I figured that none of our clients were actually based in the Bay Area and I needed to be near them. As a FinTech company the logical thing was for us to go to where our clients were so that we could constantly listen to them. Listen to their problems, understand their business, build relationships, have them help us figure out what our product should be and pay us

So we moved to NYC and set up on office in Chelsea. From NYC it takes only a couple of hours to get to Boston, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Columbus, Chicago, even Texas to be with clients.

Also the investment discussions are much more ‘normal’ and investors are respectful of me as the CEO and Founder and my background and potential to build a significant, revenue led and profitable large software company. They are backing me and value that I am experienced. Not once has age or gender come up. In fact to be fair, probably the opposite. Being a woman over 40 seems to be appealing to East Coast clients and investors.

The founder’s experience also betrays a herd mentality among the Silicon Valley investors, something that may be a weakness for the industry and the region. It certainly indicates the dominant business model may be very fragile as markets turn against tech unicorns.

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Japan looks to startups

Japan’s efforts to encourage startups is a pointer to the rest of the world’s economic future

Can Japan reinvigorate its startup community? A story in the Wall Street Journal describes some of the attempts to encourage entrepreneurs in an economy that has been stagnant for a quarter century.

In many ways Japan is a prototype for the modern global economy, just as the Japanese tried to stimulate their economy following their 1989 bust by pumping money into their deeply corrupt construction industry , so too has the rest of the world tried a similar strategy with the banking system after the 2008 crisis.

The results in both cases been the same stagnation as the money is wasted on non productive schemes and speculation rather than investment in job and wealth creating businesses and innovations.

Now the Japanese are looking to a bottom up stimulus to their economy which challenges the country’s social norms where getting a ‘safe job’ with a large corporation is seen as the best prospect for young people.

While this is a change from the accepted wisdom, the entrepreneurial model really isn’t that strange for the Japanese with a range of successful technology companies started by post World War II entrepreneurs ranging from Sony to Softbank.

The Japanese model though may not be suited to the Silicon Valley venture capital model and this is where it’s dangerous to make comparisons with what works in San Jose, Tel Aviv or Shoreditch.

Japan’s strengths in industrial engineering may well make its businesses well suited for the Internet of Things the Wall Street Journal article quotes serial entrepreneur Taizo Son as suggesting. Interestingly, the 43 year old serial entrepreneur is the youngest brother of SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son.

Another area where Japan is a glimpse of the future is in the aging population and it may well be that harnessing the abilities of older entrepreneurs is another area where the country can either show the way to success or what not to do with an older, stagnant economy.

In many ways Japan is a pointer to where the world is heading. How they manage the early twenty-first century will be a lesson for the rest of us.

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The benefits of an unsexy business

Being a startup in an unsexy industry can have its advantages believes Zerto founder Ziv Kedem

Being a startup in an unsexy industry can have its advantages believes one founder, particularly when your only competitors are sales and marketing focused corporates that struggle to innovate or execute on new ideas.

“There are some advantages of being in a non-sexy industry,” says Ziv Kedem, co-founder and CEO of Israeli company Zerto, “It means there are not too many people doing it and not too many can convince VCs this is a multi billion dollar market.”

Kedem was speaking to Decoding the New Economy during his recent visit to Sydney about Zerto, a disaster recovery software company – a distinctly unsexy business – which is his second startup following the sale of his first, Kashya, to storage giant EMC in 2006.

The advantage with being non-sexy is often the only competitors are large corporations, a prospect that doesn’t phase Kedem. “If the competition is only coming from the large vendors then there won’t be any innovation there,” he smiles.

Sales and marketing focus

Kedem’s view is many large companies are focused on sales and marketing, which means they don’t have the skills or the motivation to execute business plans in new sectors.

In many respects this echoes the experience of Seth Godin who expected Google becoming a competitor to his Knol business would be the fledgling company’s death knell. Instead Knol survived and Google’s notoriously poor attention settle upon another shiny, sexy industry to disrupt.

The problem for those non-sexy industries is raising investor money as the presence of a Google, Microsoft or Amazon in the market tends to scare VCs, private equity firms or retail investors away.

Crowdfunding downsides

Unlike his compatriot, John Medved, Kedem doesn’t see crowdfunding as a way around an investment drought as smaller investors are attracted to the ‘sexier’ businesses as well and raising the substantial amounts necessary for enterprise ventures is difficult on those platforms.

When a startup can find an investor, Kedem recommends not being shy about raising funds. “It’s rare to meet someone who raised too much,” he states.

Kedem also recommends investing in the team and looking for skills that the company will need in the future, not just today. Talking, to everyone from investors to customers to peers, is also important and he believes this is why Silicon Valley and Israel are so successful as technology hubs.

Believing in yourself

The most important aspect for an entrepreneur is self belief says Kedem, particularly when raising funds. “You’re doing the investor a favour when you go to them,” he says.

Ultimately that self belief is probably what everyone in business needs, particularly when facing a huge competitor.

Regardless of how unsexy your business is, believing it addresses a problem that people will pay to solve, may well be its greatest asset.

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Running a post conventional company

Organisations are having to adapt to rapidly changing times, Holacracy is an attempt to move on beyond older management structures

One of the most derided organisational theories of recent times has been Holacracy, a system of running organisations without managers.

The idea behind Holacracy is job descriptions are outdated and unnecessarily limiting. Modern workplaces and roles are far more fluid than the traditional, almost militaristic, structure of the hierarchical organisation chart.

Creator of Holacracy, Brian Robertson, describes in a Medium post how the anti-management theory came around during the early days of running a tech startup in the early 2000s.

The impact of our deep dive into agile software development went far beyond just “how we built software”?—?it infused our culture and gave us a foundation of principles and practices for the management of the company as well. Over the next several years, we’d do our best to express this paradigm in everything we did. Agile principles became a guidepost and a measurement for all of our future experimentation, as did the highly overlapping principles of the lean movement.

Given the tech startup roots of the idea, it’s not surprising Holacracy applies many of the principles that make up the Agile and Lean movements – particularly the hostility to micro-management.

Moving on from Holacracy

It’s notable that Robertson posted his background on Holacracy on Medium as the service was one of the more prominent adopters of the organisational theory, however the publishing platform has now dumped the philosophy.

In his post about why he and his business partner have dumped Holacracy, Medium founder Ev Williams said “the system had begun to exert a small but persistent tax on both our effectiveness” however he still thought the concept has merit and traditional management structures are too slow to deal with the demands of modern business.

The management model that most companies employ was developed over a century ago. Information flows too quickly?—?and skills are too diverse?—?for it to remain effective in the future.

Williams’ point is right, the 19th Century military structure of businesses was fine at a time when product cycles could be measured in years if not decades. In today’s world where the life of companies, let alone products, has been drastically compressed a much more flexible and fast moving way of organising businesses is needed.

Dynamic times

Along with needing far more flexible and fast moving structures, organisations also have the tools to create them. Again, the days of memos moving through layers of management via manila envelopes are long gone and now we have collaborative, real time communications methods.

One of the great changes in business over the next decade is going to be the rethinking of how organisations are managed, Holacracy may turn out not to be the answer but it is an early attempt of making sense of a very changed business world.

Management are the one group that really hasn’t been disrupted over the past thirty years. As strange as it might sound, Holacracy is a taste of the radical changes the executive suite are about to experience.

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Home delivery services fail to pass the Uber test

It appears the attempt to corner the home delivery market has failed

One of the group of businesses most affected by the downturn in Silicon Valley investments are the home delivery services.

For the last three years services such as Instacart and Doordash have attracted billions of investor dollars on the promise of become the “Ubers of home delivery.”

Like all Silicon Valley VC plays, the investors in these delivery services were prepared to throw vast amounts of cash at the businesses in the hope they could achieve a monopoly position.

“All these companies are massively subsidized to support growth and restrain growth of competitors.” Quartz magazine quotes Tim Young of San Francisco’s Eniac Ventures, “there’s a point at which the music stops, and investors are no longer willing to see their money go to those subsidies.”

That point seems to have been reached as it becomes apparent none of these businesses will dominate the industry which appears not to be so big after all.

History shows what happens when the money runs out as not being pretty. Already with cash problems looming, the companies are looking at ways to slow their cash burn through reducing contractor rates and slashing overheads.

Instacart is unlikely to survive and if the company does it will be as far smaller business than its investors hoped. Those are the risks when staking money in a tech mania.

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Collapsing unicorns and business basics

The first tech unicorn to collapse, Britain’s Powa technologies, reinforces business basics for tech startups

UK e-commerce service Powa Technologies, once valued at £1.8 billion went into receivership after the lead US investor called in the £200 million loans it had made to the business.

It turns out most of 1200 corporate clients the company had claimed as clients were actually expressions of interest in the service rather than firm orders.

Powa now has the distinction of being the first of the tech unicorns to go broke – although it’s almost certain 2016 will see many of the companies with private billion dollar valuations join them.

While the focus on Powa’s demise will be the deceased unicorn aspect, the company’s story illustrates some business basics.

The key one is that sales only count when the money is banked, all too often cashflows, profits and valuations are inflated by booking income long before it’s received – if ever.

Another aspect is valuations are not cash in the bank, Powa may have been valued at £1.8 billion but it only had raised £250 million in capital along with a similar amount in loans. This was not enough to keep the business going at what must have been a spectacular burn rate.

While tech startups have unique aspects, the basics of business remain constant; Cashflow is king and adequate capital is essential. These are aspects managers, investors and employees need to watch closely.

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