Category: Learnings

Expanding? Questions to ask yourself.

5/5/2019

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Am I ready?
How much do I know about the market I'm going to/into?
Do I have sufficient resources? (capital and team and plan?)
Who has done this before that I might be able to talk to?
Are there any conferences in this space that I could attend?
Where do I focus?
Have I learnt enough from my recon trips?
What don’t i know?
Do I have a market map? Eg: who invests in my space? Partners? Competitors?
What do I want from the Kiwi Landing Pad?

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Q: What were some of the scaling and operational mistakes you made (at the time of adding 20 employees a week)?

8/9/2017

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Victoria Ransom
CoFounder @ Wildfire
(acquired by Google in 2012)

A: There were so many. In particular, our desire to stay ‘flat’. We hated anything that had any slight smell of bureaucracy or ‘large company-ness’. But [we learnt] when you’re growing at that rate you need leadership. We kept the organisation too flat. When we did need leaders we promoted people, leaving capability gaps.

Our sales organisation was a good example of this. We needed managers to support our sales people, so we promoted some of our best salespeople. This worked well for the most part. Except we lacked the depth for active salespeople to move into managerial roles. We saw a drop in sales for a few months until we got a handle on that.

The other learning was around the things that you think suck. Your employees want performance management and to get regular reviews. You think they suck, but they matter to your employees. [We made mistakes with] the some of the things that relate to hiring and developing your employees. Along with firing them at the right time!

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Q: How did you figure this all out? The lifetime of the business was four years. You were busy scaling the business, getting customers and hiring four hundred people. It doesn’t leave you that much time to learn. What did you do as a founder to figure

8/9/2017

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Victoria Ransom
CoFounder @ Wildfire

A: We did a lot of 'on the fly' learning. I remember the first day back at work each year. I'd say ‘okay, my new year's resolution is to spend more time reading in the business’. I’d spend the first week while it was still kind of quiet doing lots of reading, and it felt amazing. Then week two rolled around, and everything was chaos again. You're making decisions on the go and all that flies out the window. So, the truth is I didn’t spend a whole lot of time reading management books or blogs. And I also - to my detriment - didn’t spend an awful lot of time cultivating mentors. I didn’t feel like I had the time for it. I wouldn't advise that, it was just me.

We did work well as a team. There was a lot of smart people in the room. When challenges came along we had the kind of culture where we’d sit down and hash them out. If you have a few smart people in the room and you’re willing to listen to each other it’s amazing what you can figure out. We also made lots of mistakes along the way; you have to when you’re moving that fast. We made mistakes, reacted, fixed them and learnt from them.

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Q: What’s some advice for founders and teams who don’t know what they don’t know? What should they focus on to get ahead of the curve?

5/24/2017

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Rod Drury
CEO & Founder
Xero

A: Building a mental model of your industry. How things work. Who the key people are. How you get to see them. With Aftermail, we knew getting on the Gartner magic quadrant and having the analysts understand what we are doing was really important. So who are the analysts? Ring them up. Are they speaking at a conference? Can you meet them face to face? Can you ask them out to lunch?

I was pretty ruthless at that networking. I remember going to the angel investment conference before we raised any money. I was thinking where’s all the money? Oh, all those people are together, they have a conference. They had an event at Black Barn and when I got up to speak I said I’m so disappointed there’s no cheeky founders here. Any cheeky founder would have done the mapping and worked out that all the money was going to be at an event in Hawkes Bay for two or three days, that’s where you want to be to build that relationship. The money you want to raise in New Zealand will come from people in that room. So working out how to get in there.

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Q: How do you handle the movement of people who are only suited at certain stages of growth and maturity at Xero?

5/24/2017

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Rod Drury
CEO & Founder
Xero

A: If you’re a public company and your results go out every 6 months then you’ve got to make moves. One of the interesting - and hard - parts about Xero is that we’re growing so quickly that people who’re great at certain level might not be right for the next. We tend to have those conversations pretty early. For people who haven’t been right, they’re usually valued inside our network so we help them to get their next job and keep their career moving. We care about all of our family. But there are a few people where we’re at just might not be the right place for them. They may be halfway to where they need to be but if we replace them it’s going to get rid of the job they had. We try to be very human about that, make sure they’re not financially effected too much. We’re very positive and proactive about getting them into their next opportunity, and it’s exciting to see how they flourish.

We also sometimes get people to change careers inside the business. Quite a few people bounce around inside the business until they find their thing, and then they’re off and running. We also occasionally hire over the top. While that can be traumatic, 9 times out of 10 the feedback a few months later is that they’re enjoying work much more learning from someone. All those dynamics are things we care about and are working on all the time.

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Q: What were the biggest learnings from the failures that you took into Kami?

10/5/2016

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Alliv Samson
COO & CoFounder
Kami

A: Assess the failures earlier, I must say. Looking back at our pivot from Notable [the first version of Kami] I think we should have pivoted earlier. We were too afraid to let go and move on, to accept the fact that we were growing as fast as we possibly could. We’re trying to push it hard, and didn’t stop to think that maybe something else was wrong; we didn’t look at the bigger picture. I wish we pivoted earlier, I wish we were more courageous and open to assessing what needs to be changed. At the time of our second pivot to focusing on education we were growing really well with Kami, but we were doing too much. We were trying to focus on too many markets. We thought that we could do it. We thought, ‘they love our product, it’s got to work’. But the truth was there is only four of us, and we can’t do all of those things. We should have focused on education probably mid last year, when we started going to conferences. We were getting all that feedback and receiving these suggestions from our education users, so we should have had a lightbulb moment where we thought let’s focus on education. But we didn’t and kept trying to do as much as we could for too long. It didn’t end up well on our end, because we were so resource constrained. That’s one of the biggest lessons I took, that we should have pivoted as fast as possible, and actually assessed our difficulties earlier.

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Expanding? Questions to ask yourself.

Q: What were some of the scaling and operational mistakes you made (at the time of adding 20 employees a week)?

Q: How did you figure this all out? The lifetime of the business was four years. You were busy scaling the business, getting customers and hiring four hundred people. It doesn’t leave you that much time to learn. What did you do as a founder to figure

Q: What’s some advice for founders and teams who don’t know what they don’t know? What should they focus on to get ahead of the curve?

Q: How do you handle the movement of people who are only suited at certain stages of growth and maturity at Xero?

Q: What were the biggest learnings from the failures that you took into Kami?

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