TheLadders Blog

Last Tuesday, I was a keynote speaker at the Digital East 2012 conference, where I presented “CEO or Ironman: Driving Success at the Bottom Line and Finish line.”

Here are my 7 Rules for Successful Entrepreneurship:

1. Fear: The odds are against you; most start-ups will fail. However, passion will prevail. Pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional. If you are passionate about your endeavors, you are more likely to succeed.

2. Dream: Dreams become goals; goals become projects. If you don’t first have a vision, your plans are less likely to succeed.

3. Commit: Commit first plan second. Quit your day job now!

4. Resilience: Decide to finish what you start. Stick with it. Get up again…and again. Expect that things will go wrong, but persevere in the face of adversity.

5. Aim High: If you aim low, you’ll land low. Aiming high will not guarantee your success, but it increases its likelihood.

6. Hours: Expect to put in the time to succeed. If you want to work a 40-hour week, being an entrepreneur may not be for you.

7. Leadership: The vision — the idea — is yours. Only you can convince others to join your effort, and only your vision and leadership will attract top talent to your cause. Colin Powell said, “Leadership is the art of accomplishing more than the science of management says is possible.”

Either/Or versus And: The Either/Or paradigm involves the mindset of “constraints” – time, funding, workforce, etc. How do you manage to find 20 additional hours per week to train for the Ironman when you are a husband, father, and business executive? Learn to say the most powerful word in the world: AND.

Ironman and Entrepreneurship reveal your DNA. After completing my first Ironman competition, I understood that I really can do anything. Going from “Either/Or” to “And” involves a mind-shift. As I said in the presentation, I am Alex Douzet. I am a husband, and a father, and a COO, and an entrepreneur…and an Ironman.

 Alex Douzet is Co-Founder and COO of TheLadders. In this role, Alex is responsible for the company strategy, global business operations, and product development.

Last Friday, as I read The Wall Street Journal article, “Apple Makes a Wrong Turn as Users Blast Map Switch,” I could not help asking myself: Is this really a major strategic error by the world’s most valuable company or is it simply an execution blunder in a highly visible case of a prisoner’s dilemma?

To answer the question, I went back and read a post from Bill Gurley, one of technology’s top dealmakers, to better understand why Apple introduced its own turn-by-turn navigation app. Then I read this paragraph:

“Here was the big punch line – because Google will give you ad splits on search if you use that version! That’s right; Google will pay you to use their mobile OS. I like to call this the ‘less than free’ business model. This is a remarkable card to play. Because of its dominance in search, Google has ad rates that blow away the competition. To compete at an equally ‘less than free’ price point, Symbian or Windows Mobile would need to subsidize.”

Double ouch!

The “less than free” business model that Gurley describes is a truly disruptive innovation.

I am big fan of game theory and its application. Bruce Bueno de Mesquita’s book, “The Predictioneer’s Game” defines game theory as a “fancy label for a pretty simple idea: that people do what they believe is in their best interest.”

So, here is the answer: it is in Apple’s best interest to introduce its own version of the turn-by-turn navigation app.

But why? Google Maps is a superior product, and it is free. Similar to a prisoner’s dilemma, Apple’s hand was forced by Google to introduce its own turn-by-turn mapping system. Otherwise, the company was at risk to be left out of the game or compromise on its own margin with the iPhone and iPad devices. How great would the iPhone5 be compared to the Android-based Galaxy S3 without a map application? What are the chances that Google would have pulled the plug on iPhone the way it disconnected NAVTEQ and Tele Atlas?

However, Apple overlooked the fact that the product execution needs to be good (in Apple’s case, great). Supporting my claim, Gurley states, “Naysayers of these assertions will likely have the same retort – quality is key. They will argue that Google’s turn-by-turn apps are inferior to their well-honed, market-leading products. With regard to Android, Google will lack the user interface or embedded software expertise necessary and will deliver a subpar product. Plus, because the Android OS will be so splintered, QA testing will be difficult and incompatibility issues will abound. In the short run, these issues will exist.”

Today, we are seeing that Apple had the right strategy, but failed in execution. However, it may not hurt the iPhone 5 sales because when a product is completely free, consumer expectations are low, and consumer patience is high.”

The good news for Apple is that their loyal customers will be patient and wait for superior subsequent versions of the mapping system app.

The key takeaway is that a free or “Less Than Free” business model can really be an industry game-changer. Let’s analyze how Facebook did it in the social media industry.

For Facebook, Zuckerberg’s brilliance was to bypass Harvard, MIT, and Stanford, all by using the free model. Gurley states, “We noted in our take on the free business model, if a disruptive competitor can offer a product or service similar to yours for free, and if they can make enough money to keep the lights on, then you likely have a problem.”

Borrowing the words from my co-founder Marc Cenedella, “The key point with Zuckerberg’s success is even more profound. Free allowed him to ‘outsell’ the competition. Free freed him from the wrong customer requirements. My claim is: free made the product features better by eliminating customer requirements and that’s because pricing put the focus on the wrong customer.”

Harvard had Facebook before Zuckerberg came along. In the late 90s, graduates of Harvard Business School tried to sell the university their own version of Facebook. For Facebook, the university was the wrong customer. Building university requirements into a product and having a long sales cycle would never have allowed Facebook to exist. Bypassing them entirely was an ingenious move.

So, a subsidiary claim would be: pricing forces you to choose a customer. Choose well, and you have a fantastic product. Choose wrong, and you get stuck.

Have you chosen your customer carefully? Can you leverage a free or “less than free” business model to change the game on your competition? One of the most successful ways for small private companies to gain the upper hand over large incumbents is to change the rules of the game.

Alex Douzet is Co-Founder and COO of TheLadders. In this role, Alex is responsible for the company strategy, global business operations, and product development.

At TheLadders, we have been a pioneering, lean UX Agile shop for a few years. As we continue to optimize the job seeker’s online experience by ramping up our mobile efforts, my team and I recently completed a comprehensive review of our product performance. I seized this opportunity to re-read the insights from thought leaders of the Agile Lean UX community…and then it hit me: there is an Achilles’ heel to the Lean Agile UX methodology.

Before I go on, please don’t misunderstand my epiphany. I am not dropping the axe on the entire methodology nor start a holy war on the UX community. Rather, my goal is to share my experience and learnings with other CEOs, entrepreneurs, heads of engineering, design and product development, so that they can extract the best value from Agile.

Here is an abbreviated list of my recommended reading:

• slideshare.net/pathf/lean-ux-agile-putting-it-all-together
• andersramsay.com/2012/04/24/agile-ux-vs-lean-ux
• jeffgothelf.com/blog/
• theleanstartup.com/
• slideshare.net/venturehacks/the-lean-startup-2

What becomes apparent is the absence of the following principles:

• Goal-setting
• Commitment
• Leadership

Even in this presentation, unfortunately, there is only slight attention devoted to these principles.

You may argue that these presentations simply attempt to educate the community about the process and you may say, “Of course you need goal-setting, commitment and strong leadership. That is obvious, so there is no need to mention it.” However, I would counter-argue that if one really understands goal-setting, commitment and leadership, that it is imperative to include these principles in any presentation.

For example, I recently read a great conversation on Quora about what makes a good engineering culture. Lau hits the nail on the head when he discusses optimizing interaction speed:

“Team-wise, fast iteration speed means having a set of strong leaders to help coordinate and drive team efforts. Key stakeholders in a decision need to decide effectively and commit to their choices. To borrow a phrase from Bill Walsh, a leader who coached the 49ers to three Super Bowls, strong leaders need to ‘commit, explode, recover,’ which means committing to a plan of attack, executing it, and then reacting to the results. A team crippled with indecisiveness will just cause individual efforts to flounder.”

In one paragraph, he covered all three principles.

As Colin Powell said, “Leadership is the art of accomplishing more than the science of management says is possible.”

Without strong leadership, how did a team of 11 at Instagram take on the mighty Facebook and its 5,000 employees in the mobile photo war?

In my recent post on TheLadders Blog, Chief Executive or Ironman?, I explain how to build a successful start-up and convert it into a lasting enterprise.

My friend Dave Carvajal, CEO & founder of Dave Partners, a premier executive search and advisory firm, has hired the best in New York City, and is a three-time successful entrepreneur and a two-time Ironman. He also talks about these principles in a recent blog post:

Goal Setting, Discipline, Performance Metrics, and Achievement:

Peter Drucker said, “What gets measured gets managed.” We need goals in life, big and small, to move forward. Measuring and training in specific heart-rate zones is the fastest way to athletically increase your VO2 max and lactate threshold. Both in business and athletics, being data-driven in your goals and execution is the best way to measure your progress and increase performance. The most successful entrepreneurs and athletes are masterful at setting and achieving performance metrics.

Last month, I was at a gallery opening in New York City, the first for the featured artist. Twenty beautiful landscape oil paintings were displayed, most of which sold by the end of the evening. You can imagine my surprise when I heard the artist’s husband say something that made me think about the Agile UX process. He asked, “Can you believe that she created most of the 20 paintings during the two weeks leading up to the show?”

Deadlines create urgency, as well as provide a map. I designed my 30-week training program for Ironman knowing that the deadline was August 11, 2012. It was an Agile process, not a waterfall.

If you allow your scrum team to perform staggered, two-week sprints without a map or a deadline, where do you land? Without proper leadership how do you ensure that you won’t end up with an aggregation of half-baked features?

What applies to artists, entrepreneurs, and athletes also applies to engineering, Agile, and Lean UX.

Applying the above principles of the Agile Lean UX methodology will avoid process for the sake of a process, while maximizing ROI.

Alex Douzet is Co-Founder and COO of TheLadders. In this role, Alex is responsible for the company strategy, global business operations, and product development.