ATLANTA LEAN STARTUP

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Today at TechCrunch Disrupt, Founder of Intuit Scott Cook, writer and former CTO at IMVU Eric Ries, and Instagram Co-founder Kevin Systrom gathered to discuss concepts from Ries' new book, The Lean Startup.

See on Scoop.it - Atlanta Lean Startup

Atlanta web entrepreneurs are moving west to find talent...not really a surprise given the lack of access to capital and the general culture.

When you have a long way to go there is a tendency to chase instead of lead.  It's natural to want to copy, duplicate and repeat what has worked in Silicon Valley and San Fran, but usually chasing is out of desperation…rather than leadership.  

Atlanta's ecosystem is just too far removed from those guys.  Our tech startup roots are too nascent and shallow.  Our largest and greatest technology asset, the ATDC, only recently started helping the general high tech startup population as a core service (2 years ago?).  Any taste of Mindspring success has long been washed down before it could be passed on.    

I have never been fond of chasing.  For the simple reason that 'they' are always head of you.  That sucks and makes it depressing to even start the battle.  No "world beater" goes into something that they can never win.  They look to change the conversation to something they can.  

Chasing has never gotten us anywhere.  Atlanta was late to the internet bubble in 2000 but just in time for it to burst.  We took no advantages and all of the heart break.  Investment went from the billions to a couple hundred millions (yes those are real numbers according to TAG)  Rather than chasing Silicon Valley lets dispense with comparison.  It hasn't done girls any benefit to "chase" photoshopped super models and I don't think it's going to help Atlanta.  We have to be our own woman…ummm man or whatever. 

Who wants to invest in a new company called "facenovel" that does everything exactly the same as Facebook just always after it.  Hopefully no one.  Who wants to invest in a social network that connects friends and shares feeds, but around photography.  Hopefully you do because they already sold for a Billion dollars.  Instagram wasn't chasing…it was drafting and drafting I like.  

These guys have drafted well.  

Drafting is all about taking advantage of the person in front of you.  A symbiotic relationship, simultaneously serving and being feed.  We need both.

Some thoughts around drafting…to draft you need to be close.  The further you are away from your partner the less the benefit that you will receive.  You need to be moving forward.  Drafting is different than pulling and dead weight gets dropped quick.  You need to have a similar speed to your efforts and you need to have a partner(s).  The more you have the easier it is on everyone in the chain.  

These are all important for Atlanta.  The Atlanta Sprawl affects our ability to create a cohesive pack culture, the lack of early stage risk capital leaves our speedometer pinned to the ground, articles about Southern tech culture seem to illustrate that their are really two different pelotons and even a self-defeating attitude of malaise in the tech ecosystem that hints at startups being full of dead weight, instead of bright talent.    The good news is that our ability to draft isn't affected by each and every factor (though optimal performance is).

Some things are changing though.  The ATDC has taken on a massive effort to rebuild it's educational/mentoring structure and feedback has been resoundingly positive.  ATL startups have begun to talk the same language about startups (thanks to Flashpoint, TiE Atlanta, Lean Startup, ATL UX group and others) But we are moving slow, missing opportunities and focusing on the wrong issues.  Basically, we are showing signs of drafting, but we are trying to do it uphill…and drafting uphill just doesn't feel the same.  

So how do we get to flat ground? 

Before I give it up, let me give a little back story.  

Before I was into software companies, I played professional sports, soccer.  It was a lifetime commitment from the age of 5 years old.  I wasn't always good.  As a matter of fact, I was pretty bad.  I didn't have the skill that the other kids had as I reached my teen years, but what I lacked in skill, I made up for in persistence and determination.  I even had a coach tell me when I was 13 that I wasn't good, but that I tried so hard he was willing to give me a chance.  He had cut me the year before.

Fast forward 10 years and I was the first 1st team all america (soccer) in my schools history, a college all-star and headed to my first professional team... but it really isn't that uncommon of a story.  You see it at University sport programs, Olympic athlete bios and athletes everywhere.  What is uncommon about the story is that they don't really cover the main reason for why these stories turn around.  They attribute it to amazing skill or hard work and perseverance.  True those stories have those qualities but so do all the failures.  I can't tell you how many better players I passed in my rise.  I can't tell you how many players worked harder than I did.  I worked my ass off, but the saying that someone is out there working 24 hours a day to beat you…its true.  I have seen these guys, but that doesn't mean they are going to make it.  You still have to have talent, a supporting cast… and the ability to work smarter rather than harder.  

Nope, there is another reason why someone or some program succeeds in athletics.  It's called mindshare and it's exactly the same thing that Yahoo! just did by hiring Marissa Mayer from Google. 

You don't need to be the best to capture mindshare, but you need to capture mindshare to be the best.  You need to build momentum, acquire attention, attract talent and let success breed success.  The crazy part of this whole thing is that Atlanta is loaded with Entrepreneur mindshare…it's just more on dirt than digits.   

So we need to focus on what we are trying to capture...  The great news is that it has started.  Two examples are Hypepotamus and TechCrunch.   

If you haven't heard of Hypepotamus, it is a free, 'living space' for web startups, artists and journalists.  What makes it so unique in the battle for mindshare is that there is no business model.  No rent, no grand scheme other than unifying, recording and broadcasting all that Atlanta is doing in the web-tech community.  This is a bonified 'Holy shit' moment for Atlanta web-tech.  This isn't corporate space with office hours.  This is wide open community space with a walk up and share stuff attitude.  It is everything that we haven't had and if you haven't seen it, you should get out of your chair and go to the biltmore to meet someone there…anyone.  

As for TechCrunch, people have already written about it.  What's important is how we leverage that moving forward.  How are we helping others get covered by them.  How are we spreading the word and how does that change mindshare around Atlanta's web-tech scene.  

Anyone want to use our successes to create more success?  Anyone want to join the web-tech peloton to capture mindshare?

These are just opinions so let's meetup and discuss...

Since the topic lately has infrastructure, and Atlanta's relative lack thereof, perhaps we should start applying some lean thinking to how we can establish the infrastructure - I'll start here is an LLC document anyone can use.

What else can we do quickly to build up the infrastructure, here are some ideas

Definitive answers on how to structure a company that investors can easily invest in

Definitive answers on how to set up web hosting (dedicated, shared, cloud, etc)

Sample worksheets on how to do market research and customer development

I recently completed reading The Lean Startup by Eric Ries.  Without a doubt, this book is a must read for all entrepreneurs and business leaders.  The real gem of this book is Eric Ries’ formula for launching a startup: build ⇒ measure  ⇒ learn, which he calls the “feedback loop.”  Ries details each aspect of the feedback loop, but it is clear that “learn” is the key variable of the formula. According to The Lean Startup methodology, “learning is the essential unit of progress for startups. Any effort that is not absolutely necessary for learning what customers want, can be eliminated.” 

 With that in mind, Ries goes on to explain that in order to know what efforts will lead to learning and what efforts should be eliminated; startups must form a series of hypotheses.  These hypotheses should serve as the foundation for what’s needed to learn and specifically attempt to answer 1) how the startup will grow and 2) what value it will provide to customers.  These hypotheses are the bread and butter of the feedback loop.  With them, startups can then define what aspects of their business must be measured in order to validate the hypotheses.  By linking business metrics to the startup’s value and growth hypotheses, a startup can then eliminate what Eric Ries calls vanity metrics (metrics that look good in a press release but really don’t mean anything to the value or growth of your business).  Eric Ries defines these hypotheses based metrics as “innovation accounting” metrics.

So what does all of this have to do with the role of a Business Analyst (BA)?  Typically, a BA's role on a team starts with the process of requirements elicitation and ends with the creation of a product requirement spec detailing what features will be built for the next release.  To that end, Eric Ries states that “we write the feedback loop as Build-Measure-Learn because the activities happen in that order, our planning really works in the reverse order: we figure out what we need to learn, use innovation accounting to figure out what we need to measure to know if we are gaining validated learning, and then figure out what product we need to build to run that experiment and get that measurement.”  This is exactly where the BA can support a Lean Startup, since learning as a first step is exactly what the requirements elicitation process is all about.

This is why the skill set of a BA fits perfectly with the reverse build ⇒ measure  ⇒ learn planning process.  In my role as a BA over the years, one of the main skills I have developed is the ability to elicit requirements in the context of a pre-defined scope. When you are in a room of diverse stakeholders tasked with defining the requirements for an upcoming release, you learn the art of facilitation that requires taking “nice to have features” and putting them of the proverbial “parking lot” while at the same time driving the conversation to focus on those critical features that will make or break the release without making anyone feel marginalized.  This art of facilitation is exactly what I believe would be invaluable to a Lean Startup.

The business analyst in a lean startup should be the chief adjudicator of product features using Eric Ries’ concept of “innovation accounting” as the foundation for defining the scope.  As such, the principal BA skill that must be utilized more than any other is this ability to facilitate and adjudicate the iterative development of product requirements using the elicitation process, and then tracking each requirement using an “innovation accounting” requirements traceability matrix that:

maps each requirement to the value and/or growth hypotheses

identifies which requirements will provide measurements for validated learning as well as define the measurement

prioritizes requirements based on the direct impact on the primary engine of growth

In a perfect world every startup would have a dedicated BA.  However, I understand that it makes sense in most startups for the BA to double or triple up as the product manager and/or project manager.  In either case, I believe having a single owner of an “innovation accounting” requirement traceability matrix managed using the fundamentals of business analysis provides three benefits: 

a  higher quality product road map

a tool to help developers build the product right

an objective analysis for managers to measure if they are building the right product

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This post was initially posted on www.atlantatechstartups.com (a google group by Sanjay Parekh dedicated to ATL tech conversations)

See on Scoop.it - Atlanta Lean Startup

Within the bubble of Silicon Valley, everyday conversations can touch on private jets and billion-dollar deals. But if you look past the ostentation, truly magical work is taking place.