Nick Holzherr

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Over the last 24 months our team has organically moved towards a more and more globally distributed team. It wasn’t deliberate at first but has now become part of who we are as a team.

There are a few drivers for this change:

Step 1: Hire remote talent

We found super-talented people who wanted to join our team who were however located outside our home city of Birmingham UK. We decided to hire them anyway and have them work with us remotely. It really worked for us – the talent we brought onboard was really high caliber and it felt like our team was more productive than we’d ever been before.

Step 2: Build remote culture

We quickly realized that we needed to build a deeper culture around remote working in order to make our team a rewarding one to be part of for everyone. If half the team is onsite and the other half work from elsewhere – it’s easy to adopt a “local team” vs. “remote team” mentality – judging each differently and having a different level and type of communication with each.  Here are a few examples of things we changed to create a remote culture in our team:

All meetings which include a remote person are automatically held via Google Hangouts – and each team member logs in separately. This is important – because otherwise it feels like the remote person is separate/further away. If everyone is on Google hangouts, it changes the feel of the meeting.

Because we still wanted to build strong bonds between everyone in the team, we started organizing team retreats. Our first one was to Budapest in March 2016, our second to Prague in December 2016. We flew the whole team out to live, work and spend time with each other in person. Details on that for another blog post. 

Step 3: Remote policy

We made it a policy that anyone can work from anywhere. But those of us working on-site still ended up in the office. But, over time, this team is also starting to work remotely. Each of us spend afternoons or entire days working from home or from coffee shops, and Viktor, our CTO, moved to Edinburgh to explore a new city.  

Back to my plans

So it’s in that context that I’m travelling for the next few months. I’ll be working from co-working spaces around the world (https://nomadlist.com/ is a great resource for that!)

Roughly my plans are:

March: Australia & Japan

April: Vietnam

May: India

Managing timezones 

In each time zone I’ll be shifting some of my working day to later in the day in order to make it easier to work with the UK (World Time Buddy is an awesome tool to help)

Australia GMT + 11 - work 19:00 - 22:00 (UK 08:00 - 11:00)

Vietnam GMT + 7 - work 18:00 - 21:00 (UK 11:00 - 14:00)

India - GMT + 5.30 - work 18:00 - 20:00 (UK 12.30 - 14.30)

So it’s that easy?

To be entirely honest, I’m a little stressed at the concept of not being in the office. But I like the idea of working remotely, and I like to push myself to try new things. So here goes.  

Biggest challenge: Attending meetings. As a product/sales CEO, I’m often in meetings. Those will need to take place remotely now – although I can fly back for some meetings of course. 

Minor issue: Post. I’ve actually found some cool companies that open my post and scan non-junk to my email – they even pay in cheques!  I’m pretty sure I’ll be using them when I’m back in the UK also!

Expected benefits

I’ve definitely been inspired by Joel from Buffer and my other remote-working friends to take this jump.  Buffer have a great blog post on the big benefits of working remotely and I look forward to seeing how it works out for our team. You can read their blog post here: https://open.buffer.com/distributed-team-benefits/

That's all from me!  Here’s to a productive 3-4 months getting loads of stuff done while working remotely! 

Thanks to: 

Joel Gascoigne for the original inspiration to do remote working

1. Crowd-sourced Investor List 

An amazing list by people involved in Techstars, made viral on twitter, then filled out by loads of people in London. This one has sheets between Company Builders, VCs, Loans, Angel Groups, Angels, Crowdfunding and Accelerators. 

URL: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/10S7_jBpRoWuNMnOYpkjFJArt76dPhFw0tIR7E_ndgnk/edit#gid=221563747 

2. TechStars Berlin List 

The team over at TechStars Berlin made this list of the European technology investment scene. Nice map and data. 

URL: http://tech.eu/brief/map-list-startup-investors-in-europe/ 

Google doc spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1neWbVEVm5nefBMw4xrx9eQLP4YTcfGf2OVulL0QrZRE/edit#gid=314426684 

Other sites worth mentioning here: 

1. AngelList - https://angel.co/ 

This post includes some of the most useful content I’ve come across, but I’m always on the look out for more. I’ll update this post as I find/remember more worthwhile content. If you know of something I’ve missed that you think should be on this list, please do let me know.

Online courses

Startup Class by Sam Altman, president of Y Combinator Y Combinator president Sam Altman recently put CS183B at Stanford University online. Videos of the lectures, associated reading materials, and assignments are all available. This course includes well known tech startup CEOs lecturing on topics they know well. http://startupclass.samaltman.com/ 

How to Build a Startup by Steve Blank Steve Blank is an entrepreneur, professor and leader in thinking on tech startups. He’s articulate and his material is definitely worth learning. https://www.udacity.com/course/ep245 and http://steveblank.com/slides/

Audiobooks

Greymatter by Greylock Partners is a series of stories from some of the world's top technology entrepreneurs and is recorded from a class at Stanford University. Every audiobook is packed full of really useful tips from highly successful technology entrepreneurs.  They cover startups from seed through to IPO. https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/greymatter/id1089013200?mt=2

Blogs 

Paul Graham is a Y Combinator co-founder and tech VC. He writes a series on useful topics. http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html 

Andrew Chen is a startup investor and advisor and currently works at Uber on growth. Each post is on an important topic, he’s very articulate and likes numbers. http://andrewchen.co/ 

Fred Wilson is a tech VC. He blogs regularly, with some interesting/useful thoughts on technology. http://avc.com/

Books

The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses by Eric Ries http://www.amazon.com/Lean-Startup-Entrepreneurs-Continuous-Innovation/dp/0307887898/ 

The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company by Steve Blank & Bob Dorf http://www.amazon.com/The-Startup-Owners-Manual-Step-By-Step/dp/0984999302/

Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers by Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur http://www.amazon.com/Business-Model-Generation-Visionaries-Challengers/dp/0470876417/

Other links

This list didn’t make the shortlist, but is worth looking at if you have time:

SaaStr: http://www.saastr.com/

Exponential CEO - A lot of material on corporate innovation http://www.exoceo.com/podcast

Here are some great virtual learning platforms:

https://www.edx.org/

https://www.coursera.org

https://novoed.com/courses

I’ve gone through this process many times, and along with feedback from trusted advisors, I have found the wealth of resources available online really useful. I wanted to share what I’ve found. If you have any suggestions for additional resources that I’ve missed, please email me and I’ll add them to this post.

A good deck is useful way beyond investor pitches; I use parts of mine in big client pitches and when introducing new team members to the business.

Best Practice 

Best practice: Lessons from analysis of how investors look at decks http://techcrunch.com/2015/06/08/lessons-from-a-study-of-perfect-pitch-decks-vcs-spend-an-average-of-3-minutes-44-seconds-on-them/ 

Best Practice: How to pitch a VC by Dave McClure, 500 startups http://www.slideshare.net/mobile/UTR/how-to-pitch-a-vc-dave-mcclure 

Same presentation with updates and suggestions from others: http://www.slideshare.net/mobile/slidesthatrock/how-to-pitch-a-vc-redesigned 

Video by David Rose (Entrepreneur and investor) on things you should know before pitching a VC. https://youtu.be/lzDBrMisLm0 

Example: Sequoia's Investment Memo on YouTube (this is how your business will get appraised) http://milesgrimshaw.com/sequoia-investment-memo/

Examples 

Curated list of decks: http://www.pitchenvy.com/ 

Curated list of decks 2: http://bestpitchdecks.com/ 

Curated list of decks 3: http://alexanderjarvis.com/blog/2015/05/19/pitch-deck-collection-from-vc-funded-startups/ 

Mixpanel’s deck is considered as a great deck by many investors. https://mixpanel.com/blog/2014/12/18/open-sourcing-our-pitch-deck-that-helped-us-get-our-865m-valuation 

Reid Hoffman’s LinkedIn Series B Pitch – accompanied by tips / advice http://reidhoffman.org/linkedin-pitch-to-greylock/ 

There’s definitely a popular belief that running a tech startup is cheap, without too much consequence if you fail. The reality is quite different. Many idolise founders like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk - especially within entrepreneurial circles. Stories of the struggles of entrepreneurs putting themselves in big personal debt and living of “the ramen diet” don’t get much attention, and when they do, are seen as part of the battle scars necessary to be successful. But take a look at the percentage of companies that fail where there’s no rosy end for the majority of people. There are many many examples of people having lost fortunes of different sizes failing at companies – as well as becoming depressed, even suicidal, after putting everything they have into succeeding, but proving their sceptics right.

Contrary to popular belief, tech startups are immensely expensive to grow. Techcrunch reported in 2013 that the average successful US startup has raised $41 million. Take Uber as a recent example - they’ve raised $6.9B so far. My company Whisk.com is at a much earlier stage but has also raised $2M so far.

Making billions by cloning companies 

Pablo Picasso famously said “Good artists copy, great artists steal”. There is a new breed of founders rising to fame who simply copy (clone) existing businesses, often launching clones in markets where the successful original hasn’t launched yet. The most famous cloning outfit is Rocket Internet, founded by three German brothers Marc, Oliver and Alexander Samwer. Over just seven years they've copied Ebay, Facebook, Zappos, Amazon and Groupon, selling some of them back to the people they copied to help the originals grow market share in new markets. In 2014, their company was valued at between $4 and $5 billion.

Rocket Internet are not the only ones – there are loads of cloners out there now and their results can be highly impressive. At 26 years of age in 2005 Wang Xing started cloning Facebook, quickly becoming the most trafficked website in China. Since then he's gone on to very successfully copy Twitter and Groupon, creating billions of dollars in value. But people took note quickly. Whilst cloning Groupon, Wang had to “defeat an armada of fellow clones - an estimated 3,000 Chinese group-discounting businesses that sprung up in just one year in cities all over the country.”

Copying businesses has many advantages; a proven market and reproducible processes and products. These all exponentially increase the speed at which a company can take flight. There’s generally a lot of testing, learning and interacting involved to achieve something brand new that works and that process can easily take 100x that of copying something that exists. You also have a relatively low likelihood of success when trying to create something entirely new - you don’t know whether your service is wanted, at what price, or what it will cost you to deliver.

Importance of innovation

Journalists often ask “What drives you?” and “What do you consider as success?”. For me I think success and drive comes from building something that changes lives – building something amazing – something that pushes boundaries – something innovative. As Steve Jobs said, making “a ding in the universe”. Passion and belief in a company's vision and mission is crucial - simply copying people doesn’t inspire me. 

But, I think the two can be combined.

Copy so you can innovate

Most businesses are improvements on existing businesses or processes. Designing every part of a new tech business from scratch (which many startups do) takes a lot of work, primarily because you quickly learn that one part doesn’t work and you need to re-work it. Reworking this first 20% over and over results in the product vision seeming further and further away. Instead, I would hazard a guess that copying 80% of your business from what others have done in a similar space, so that it takes 20% of your time, might be a wise strategy. The business might then be able to dedicate a much larger chunk of time to the 20% that really makes your business special - your competitive advantage. One could of course argue that Rocket Internet do just that-by eliminating the 80% share on innovation, they are able to focus their energy on growth. Founders can choose how that time is allocated though. I think there’s a serious lesson to be learnt from this and many are taking advantage of this already. 

Copy 80% so that it takes 20% of your time, and spend 80% of your time to innovate.

Interesting articles on this subject:

Venture Beat: How ‘venture builders’ are changing the startup model 

Forbes 2014 “Germany's Samwer Brothers To Become Billionaires With Rocket Internet IPO” 

Forbes 2011 “The Cloner” 

Techcrunch: The Rise of the Company Builders 

It’s not all entirely fictional though. Famous mathematician and computer scientist Richard Hamming said “Given two people of approximately the same ability and one person who works ten percent more than the other, the latter will more than twice out-produce the former. The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more the opportunity - it is very much like compound interest.”

A great example is Warren Buffett, who estimates that he spends 80 percent of his working day reading and thinking, getting through 500 pages daily. The Omaha World-Herald reported that when he began his investing career “he would read even more, hitting 600, 750, even 1,000 pages a day."

"Go to bed smarter than when you woke up."

Charlie Munger

Resources:

The Week: The Warren Buffett formula: How you can get smarter http://theweek.com/article/index/248655/the-warren-buffett-formula-how-you-can-get-smarter

Most successful people will tell you that prior to their success they had to put a huge amount of work into learning how to make their idea work.  Take Dyson as an example; In the 1970’s, frustrated with his Hoover, Dyson invented the cyclonic vacuum cleaner whilst being supported by his wife’s art-teacher salary.  It took more than 10 years after his idea to see success.

The same is true for a lot of tech companies. After 14 months, AirBnB had $200 dollars in monthly revenue. The founders of AirBnB funded the company on credit cards at the start of recession. After launching mid 2008, they couldn’t raise any investment. They soon became more successful after joining the YCombinator accelerator, but even in December 2010 there was no hockey stick growth.

Source: Google Trends for AirBnB term

Don’t fall into the ideas graveyard

Many company founders are creative and love the energy and excitement of new ideas. Steve Belsky in his brilliant book “Making Ideas Happen” writes about how when people first work on new ideas they have loads of energy and excitement – working late into the night. But, as the work of making a business work starts to become real – the energy and excitement starts to dip. At this point, most people start to think about new ideas, giving up on their former idea. This cycle repeats, creating a graveyard of started ideas that never quite get to done. 

Idea Curve from the book Making Ideas Happen by Steve Belsky

Choosing which idea you work on carefully and then focusing on that idea with perseverance is so so important to heighten your chances of success. After a lot of hard work (and maybe a few pivots) ideas will start to become successful and success and money brings the excitement back. An apparent correlation between your work and the success of your startup is a great motivator. 

Ben Horowitz in his book The Hard Things About Hard Things describes how the difference between mediocre CEOs and brilliant CEOs is perseverance (I think he calls it “never giving up” – but he means the same thing).

Hard times are good for making you lean and focused

Paul Graham of YCombinator designed a chart he called The Startup Curve which has been widely shared around Silicon Valley. Fred Wilson, a VC from San Francisco wrote “Many people think startups are up and to the right all the time. But more services exhibit this "startup curve" than any other growth pattern. Of course, some never get past the trough of sorrow. But many do. Mostly by staying focused on the problem they are trying to solve and working diligently to get to the promised land.”

It’s entirely worth it

Tech startups are hard, but once you start to become successful it's an incredible feeling. As I said in startups.co.uk, the real attractive thing about tech startups is the fast growth once you crack the model. 

Resources:

Audio (free): Econ Talk with Nathan Blechard, CEO of AirBNB: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2014/09/nathan_blecharc.html

Amazon: Making It Happen by Steve Belksy: http://www.amazon.com/Making-Ideas-Happen-Overcoming-Obstacles/dp/1591844118

Amazon: The Hard Things about Hard Things by Ben Horowitz http://www.amazon.com/The-Hard-Thing-About-Things/dp/0062273205

Paul Graham - Startup = Growth: http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html

Large marketing budgets only makes sense when Product Market fit has been achieved

In his presentation titled “Zero to Product Market fit”, Andrew Chen talks about the post Product Market Fit stage. His view is “Traction is everything, but it’s a reflection of getting product/market fit”. Product market fit is when people know they want your product and are happy with it. You should be seeing 100's of organic signups each day, regular usage by consumers, active customer rates the day after signup of at least 30% and have a clear path to 100,000's of users.

Test your marketing channels early

There are two reasons to test various marketing channels early. Firstly, you need users to regularly test the latest version of the product (assuming you iterate quickly, which you should be doing). With each cohort of users you should be tracking how close to Product Market fit you think you are, and ideally get some points as to what you need to improve on to get there. It’s important to start collecting data on how effective each marketing channel is so that when you come around to wanting to scale the platform, you have experience to guide you.

  Pre Product-Market fit marketing

Pre Product-Market fit marketing should be low-cost. My personal favourite to focus on is PR (Public Relations). It’s relatively easy for startups to get coverage in the media and it can generate really good sign-up numbers and awareness. I also totally recommend building B2B partnerships, where a larger, more established company with a large user base can promote your product in return for benefiting from your service. Whisk.com has benefited hugely from both the above channels. 

Further resources on this subject: