How to Get Better as You Scale

💡JC's Newsletter #73

Dear friends, 

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In JC’s Newsletter, I share the articles, documentaries and books that I enjoyed the most in the last week, including a must-read. 

Let’s talk about this together on LinkedIn or on Twitter. Enjoy!

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💡Must-read

👉 Counterintuitive Lessons on How to Get Better as You Scale, From Twilio’s Jeff Lawson (First Round)

Worried It’s Too Soon To Launch A Second Product? Follow Your Customers Off The Beaten Path

• We were willing to follow our customers where they took us, even if it meant launching a brand-new product area when the conventional wisdom would have said that was the wrong thing to do.

• Messaging is now the largest product in Twilio’s suite

• We could have very easily said, ’Look, we have this brand-new product. It is just getting off the ground. We’ve got a lot of work to do before we think about product number two.

I believe it is very important to always think about your portfolio of bets and products you are making as a company and how to have the right balance.

Think In Horizons So You Don’t Focus Too Much On The Core Business — Or Suffer Shiny Object Syndrome.

• None of our engineers were working on the SMS product, even though it was growing like a weed,

• “That was a mistake. We should have said, ’Okay, we got a hit here — we’ve got to double down, we’ve got to invest in it, we have to resource allocate ourselves well. But we didn’t do that.”

• We used a number of frameworks over the years, including the horizons framework. Horizon one is the thing that makes you your dollar tomorrow, horizon two is the thing that’ll make you your dollar in a year from now, and horizon three is the thing that might make you a dollar five years from now,” he says.

• “So if you don’t ring-fence off some amount of resources — conventional wisdom is 5-10% — into investing in the thing that you think might make you money five years from now, then you’re probably running the company for too short-term of an outcome”

We also try to have the right portfolio of time horizons at Alan on what we are building. 

Metrics Are The Least Important Part Of Your Annual Plan.

• Each team creates what Twilio calls a BPM — which stands for big picture, priorities and measures.

• “The big picture is 2-3 sentences about what the team wants to accomplish in the next 5-7 years, aligned to what the leadership team has sketched out in our long-range plan. Below that are the top 5-10 priorities. What do we need to prioritize, in order, over the next 12-18 months in order to get there? And then below that are the measures. The measures just are the markers that tell us if we’re making the progress we want to make towards these priorities

• The thing that I’ve noticed about OKRs is the objectives aren’t prioritized in most companies. At most companies, the energy of OKRs is really around the key results. Everybody gets very focused on the metrics. And I actually think the most important part of our BPM is not the measures, it’s the priorities,”

I agree that OKRs can really be poorly used, and forgets that everything is not measurable. It is also very important to split input metrics with output metrics and define the ones you can act on. 

Strive For Experiments, Not Big Bets, And Fund The Boats, Despite What The Calendar Says. 

• But “the next big bet” is one phrase you won’t hear if you sit in on a meeting at Twilio. “We don’t think about things as the next big bet, because I think that you need to have five or 10 or 20 bets,”

• You need to think that there are many things that could potentially be the next great thing, but we need to run experiments to figure out if indeed customers want those things

• There’s a certain wisdom and discipline in being able to run multiple of those experiments — to be patient and to not expect those things to become giant businesses overnight,” he says. “Treat it as a learning exercise, not yet a business exercise measured in dollars and cents.

• You’ve got to send people out in different boats to explore new ideas, but when you see the signs of success, make sure you’ve got the ability to double down in real-time on the winning boat.

Being patient is very very important in my opinion. 

If Your Exec Team Isn’t Arguing, You’re Not Prioritizing.

• “What I came to realize was that the reason why we didn’t argue is we weren’t prioritizing. One person says, ‘I like idea A,’ and the other person says, ‘I like idea B,’ and you say, ‘Great, put them both down, we’ll do it all!’ And in fact, when you look back on those documents at the end of the year, we rarely got around to very much of anything in those documents,”

• The lesson? Be vigorous not just about what makes the list, but the specific order in which priorities fall. “We realized it’s not just about all the things we could do, but the order of importance — which is first, which is second. Now you get disagreements and a lot of vigorous, healthy debate,” he says.

The importance of radical priorisation. 

Lean On Post-Mortems When Things Go Well — Not Just When You’re Thrown Off Course.

• Usually post-mortems is the word you use to describe analyzing the things that don’t go well, but we do post-mortems when things go well, too

• That is the way in which you continually build this muscle of analyzing the outcome and asking what all of the inputs were that led you there and try to do your best in the moment when everything’s fresh in your head to learn and to capture knowledge

🏯 Building a company

In addition to selected articles, I share one of Alan's leadership principles every week - the same one that I share internally and with our investors every Wednesday.

👉 Alaners dig deeper

• As Jony Ive said “To be truly simple, you have to go really deep." We think we can use data to make better decisions. We look at data sources before making a decision. We challenge the numbers we see before sharing them (do they make sense?).

• We start with simple models and complexify over time (and not models that are too complex at the beginning)

👉 Comparison between Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg (Dan Rose)

• People often ask me to compare working for Bezos vs Zuck. I worked with Mark much more closely for much longer, but I did work directly with Jeff in my last 2 years at Amazon incubating the Kindle. Here are some thoughts on similarities that make them both generational leaders:

• They both lived in the future and saw around corners, always thinking years/decades ahead. And at the same time, they were both obsessive over the tiniest product and design details. They could go from 30,000 feet to 3 feet in a split second.

• In the best tech companies, product defines strategy and culture. Jeff and Mark were both product CEOs first and foremost (though Jeff is arguably more commercial). Amazon and Facebook’s products are also an embodiment of Jeff and Mark’s individual personalities and values.

• Neither of them would ever dwell on success. Every time I took a hill and looked up to celebrate, Jeff or Mark had already moved on to the next hill. They set unrealistic goals and were insanely intense, disciplined, hard working and hard driving.

• At the same time, they each had a great sense of humor (albeit with very different styles). When you're working tirelessly and driving people really hard, it's important to break it up with occasional bouts of levity. I laughed a lot around them.

• Both of them engendered profound loyalty from their teams. The senior folks at Amazon & Facebook have been there for a very long time, mostly because they couldn't imagine working for anyone else. When you get to learn from one of the greatest, it's hard to leave.

• They were both incredibly deep thinkers and read voraciously. I've participated in small group conversations with each of them (eg on airplanes) lasting hours where they would ask endless questions and have more stamina than anyone else. Great leaders have deep-seated curiosity.

• The skill set required to start a company is insanely different than being CEO of a mega corporation. Scaling of this magnitude requires tireless commitment, crazy focus, thick skin, unbridled ambition. You have to be a learning machine, constantly growing and pushing yourself.

• Their personalities are obviously quite different. Jeff is gregarious with his big laugh and well-honed stories. Mark is more quiet, gracious, kind; sometimes a bit awkward but always authentic. When Jeff is unhappy he will throw you out of the room; Mark simply ends the meeting.

• The cultures they built are also very different. Amzn is more siloed/secretive, while FB is radically open/transparent. There are pros and cons to each (which I will cover in a future post), but culture at both companies runs deep and is rooted in the values of the founder.

👉 The importance of the long-term focus on organic marketing (David Perrell)

• Organic vs. paid marketing is a false dichotomy.

• Organic marketing channels are expensive because you either have to spend time building them or hire people to do it for you.

• But organic marketing compounds in value more than paid marketing — that’s the real difference.

• Both forms of marketing are paid, so you should be asking: “How much will my efforts compound and how fast do I need cash?”

• Organic distribution starts slowly but collects steam over time. Paid marketing gets money in the door immediately, with much less long-term upside.

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🗞In the news

📱Technology

👉 WeChat Advertising 101: All You Need To Know (Dragon social)

• Each user will only receive 2 WeChat advertisements at most per day.

• The ad will automatically disappear on the users’ side if they don’t comment, like, or interact with the ad within 6 hours.

• The user experience is so well maintained that WeChat even has a “not interested” button on each advertising post so users can opt to have the ad disappear once and for all.

• The huge trade-off behind these restrictions is the unparalleled engagement for WeChat advertising. You rarely see friends in your own social circle commenting and interacting on an advertisement for fun anywhere else but on WeChat.

• Some figures on Wechat: 1 billion MAU and over 45 billion messages are sent through the platform every day. As of the latest report in Q2 2019, WeChat had 1.132 billion monthly active users!

👉 Chrome auto-translate and caption (Ben-evans)

• Chrome can now caption and translate video and audio automatically. We take all this for granted. Chrome auto-captions

🏥 Healthcare

👉Google My Business: Une décision de justice souligne l’importance des avis patients (Merci Docteur)

• En septembre 2017, un chirurgien-dentiste a adressé à Google une demande de suppression de sa fiche Google My Business.

• Le tribunal de grande instance de Paris a de nouveau rejeté une telle demande, celle du chirurgien-dentiste

• Le tribunal estime que les données en question ne sont pas relatives à la sphère privée, mais qu’elles contiennent des aspects “élémentaires” concernant l’activité professionnelle du chirurgien-dentiste. 

• L’importance de la liberté d’expression et d’informations pour les internautes, qui se doit d’être garantie.

• Un forum important pour ses patients désirant partager leur expérience. Le tribunal relève alors que la publication d’avis en ligne possède une finalité légitime pour le consommateur, et doit donc être maintenue.

• Cette jurisprudence se veut alors rassurante vis à vis du caractère déontologique de cette pratique. Cela montre que la publication d’avis sur Google est aujourd’hui rentré dans les mœurs et devient une pratique courante.

👉 The new clinic buildouts (Out-of-pocket)

• As more physicians with individual brands on social media rise to prominence. 

Who are the doctors you follow on social media?

• But if a Kare Mobile dental clinic or a VSP eye care clinic shows up to the office for a single day I’d probably sign up since it was convenient and only happening for a short period of time. Flu vaccinations at offices seem to get uptake with this principle.

Do you have good examples of mobile clinics in France? Spain or Belgium?

💚 Alan

👉🇫🇷 “Le portrait — Jean-Charles Samuelian, à l'horizontale” (Libération)

• Very happy and humble to appear in Libération.

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