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Figma: A Random Walk in Palo Alto

/ Adam Nash / 1 Comment
Figma’s first conference, Config 2020.

On June 25, 2013, Dylan Field, one of my favorite interns from LinkedIn dropped by Wealthfront headquarters in Palo Alto to catch up and get some advice about his new startup, Figma.

At the time, I was up to ears with work as the new CEO, trying to sell the crazy idea that someday millions of people would let computers, rather than humans, manage their money.

But I always take time for people, particularly students just coming out of college and embarking on a career in Silicon Valley. So I met with Dylan for an hour, and we walked around the City Center in Palo Alto talking about his new company. The next day, I sent him a note asking if there was any more room in his seed round, offering to help him with product, growth, and recruiting.

Yesterday, that company (Figma) was acquired by Adobe for $20 Billion.

From Intern to Founder

In 2010, Dylan was an intern at LinkedIn, on the data science team overseen by my friend DJ Patil. However, search & data science were closely intertwined at LinkedIn, and since search was an area that I was responsible for, I spent a lot of time with team brainstorming new ideas and working through product problems. For some reason, I distinctly remember that Dylan was the first intern to ever make me feel old, based on one offhand comment about how he was too young to see the Star Wars prequels when they came out. 🤦‍♂️

Regardless, Dylan was brilliant and delight to talk to about almost any topic, and we kept in touch loosely through social media when he went back to school. He ended up interning at Flipboard, a company that happened to be founded by an engineer from Apple who co-taught CS 196P at Stanford with me, their first class on iPhone development. Dylan stayed close to the data science team at LinkedIn, and so we ended up with more than a few reasons to stay connected. I had left LinkedIn to take an EIR role at Greylock, so was just starting to become an active angel investor.

All of this led to that one walk around Palo Alto.

The Figma Pitch

There was no deck involved, and the meeting was not about fund raising. As it turned out, Dylan had already largely raised his seed round. In fact, a TechCrunch article came out about it that day. Going into the meeting, I had absolutely no idea what Dylan was working on, and knowing Dylan, it literally could have been anything and it wouldn’t have surprised me.

Instead, Dylan & I talked about the transition from Desktop to Web 2.0, and whether now was the right time to bring graphic design to the cloud. John Lilly & I had discussed a hypothesis about this while I was at Greylock, and it was one where I had come to have conviction. The basic premise was that the combination of Web 2.0, Social, and Mobile had finally created the possibility of building truly useful and user-friendly collaborative software in the cloud that was an order of magnitude better than desktop software and would finally drive the migration of professionals to web applications. More importantly, we believed that the history of desktop software contained clues to which types of software would be converted first: productivity applications (late 70s/early 80s), then enterprise applications, graphic design & desktop publishing, and finally personal finance. In fact, this theory is part of the reason I spent 2012 exploring the idea of bringing financial software to the cloud, eventually leading me to the sector now called “fintech” and my role at Wealthfront.

As we talked about this theory, Dylan then shared with me one of those simple insights that seems so obvious in hindsight, but was anything but obvious at the time. He told me that with WebGL in the browser, he thought now was the time to move graphic design to the cloud. As someone who had spent significant time in grad school on computer graphics, my initial reaction was very negative. In my mind, graphic design was incredibly compute intensive, to the point where professionals used highly optimized $10K workstations, multiple GPUs, and optimized data storage to get the local performance they desired.

Dylan was not deterred. He explained that the heavy compute was the exact reason why moving to the cloud made sense. By providing high powered machines in the cloud, anyone could get access to an almost arbitrary amount of power without spending $10K, and latency & bandwidth had progressed to the point where shipping the UI bits to the client was a solved problem.

He was right.

It was a simple moment, but I had to admit that multiplayer gaming had already solved problems of low latency, collaborative UI, and that it might be possible to extend that to the web now. Graphic design wasn’t just going to move to the web – eventually it was going to be better, faster, and cheaper online. On top of that, collaboration would be the killer feature that desktop couldn’t match.

The initial product idea, a photo editor in the cloud, turned out to not be the right way to ride this wave. But in the end, Dylan & team were intelligent and flexible enough to clearly iterate to a product that not only is riding that wave, but is also defining it.

Silicon Valley is about People

When I graduated from business school, my first job was as an Associate at a venture capital firm in Menlo Park. 2001 was a rough time to start in venture capital, but I was excited because I loved the idea of investing capital with founders when everyone else had pulled back. Our office, however, was too large, built out for a boom that had been cut short in 2000. As a result, they gave me a choice of offices.

I picked the one no one wanted, adjacent to the reception area. People thought it was too noisy, but I always left the door open. The reason was quite simple: when founders came in, I wanted to overhear how they treated our receptionist. You can learn a lot about a person based on how they treat people with less power when no one else is around.

Success in Silicon Valley is a dizzying combination of skill and luck, execution, and timing. But first and foremost, it is about people. One of the reasons that the most successful software cultures struggle to avoid hierarchy, is that the rapid change in platform capabilities means that the half-life of experience is brutal. The best solution for a problem five years ago may not be the the best solution today, and it very likely won’t be the best solution five years from now. As a result, young engineers approaching problems for the first time can sometimes see opportunities that the most experienced can’t. Other times, a “new” problem can actually just be a rehash of a problem that was common decades ago. The key is always to work the problem, and always work to avoid the destructive HiPPO anti-pattern. (HiPPO = the highest paid person’s opinion)

These days, online discussion is filled with debates about impressing your boss, impressing your CEO, impressing the company. To me, this misses the real opportunity. For most people, their best opportunities are likely ahead of them, and the connection to that opportunity will mostly come from a co-worker, a “weak connection,” and likely someone who isn’t above you in power and hierarchy.

Dylan was an intern, and not even an intern on my team. There was no obvious reason for me to spend time with him, other than that he is an amazing human being. Very intelligent, and also very kind. A long term, first principles thinker, but also someone who gets his hands dirty building. Ambitious, not to be a billionaire, but ambitious to make a difference and have an impact.

As an angel investor, I tend to look for a strong, authentic connection between a founder and the product they are building. For me to invest, I have to believe the founder is not only tackling a problem big enough to generate venture returns, but also is someone who is intelligent, trustworthy, and ambitious.

Dylan might have been an intern, but even as a teenager, he was all three.

A True Silicon Valley Story

Our careers are built based on the overlay of networks that we build. Every school, every job, every company is an opportunity to connect with people. It will only be obvious with hindsight which connections will generate the most value in your career, but try to remember that everyone may have something you can learn from.

There were quite a few executives at LinkedIn, and more than a few interns. There was no way to predict this type of outcome. Nine years ago, I became an investor in Figma, and two years ago Dylan became an investor in my new startup, Daffy. Roles change fairly quickly, but relationships with good people last decades.

Congratulations to Dylan, Evan, and the whole Figma team. This acquisition is just one more step in the fulfillment of a broad vision to elevate design in every organization. 🎉

It’s a true Silicon Valley story, and one we should all be rooting for.

It’s Time to Build… in Public

/ Adam Nash

In 2020, I set off to build a new company. At the time, I never would have imagined that we’d end up building one during the largest pandemic in a century.

Lao Tzu said that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, and I count myself fortunate to have made the best first step possible in finding a truly world-class co-founder. Alejandro is one of those rare talents that makes Silicon Valley special, a true builder and an inspiration. Together we set off on a journey to turn an audacious mission and vision into a reality.

We have been very fortunate. Despite building this company during the COVID-19 pandemic, we have been joined by an incredibly talented team. Each member of our founding team has taken a leap of faith that together we’ll be able to build something out of nothing. So many investors have also been willing to take that leap with us and fund our early efforts.

Today is the day. Not an ending, but a beginning. We’re coming out of stealth, and we’re ready to start building in public. It’s hard to explain how exciting and terrifying this moment is.

Introducing Daffy

Daffy is a community and platform built around people willing to make a simple commitment to regularly put money aside for those less fortunate than themselves. At its heart beats a fintech core: a new modern donor-advised fund built from the ground up for this purpose.

Daffy is the Donor Advised Fund for You™.

Unlike most financial products, giving is inherently social, and we see immense opportunity to bring people together around the causes and organizations that they support.

You can read more about Daffy here, learn more about our team here, and get a quick walkthrough of the product here.

Who Taught You To Be Good?

Alejandro & I are big believers in talking to customers, and so we spent a lot of time talking to people about how they think about giving to charity. Through the course of that research, we came to two important insights:

  1. Moral Compass. Almost everyone has a person in their life — a parent, a relative, a teacher, a priest — who instilled in them a strong sense of what it means to be a good person. Some people even say that they can still hear that person’s voice when they decide to do the right thing. Invariably, that person taught them the importance of giving to those less fortunate than themselves.
  2. Guilt. Almost everyone has an idea of what they believe they should be giving to charity every year. Interestingly, there is very little agreement on what that amount is, but for almost every person we spoke to, there is a number. Unfortunately, very few people live up to that ideal. Our lives are too busy, and giving often falls off people’s immediate to-do lists. The can gets kicked down the road. As a result, people are not able to be the type of person they want to be. The person that their moral compass would be proud of.

Technology Can Help

We believe that technology has a role to play in solving this problem. Why can’t we use the same techniques that we have used to help people shop and save to help people give?

By automating giving, we believe that technology can help people be more generous, more often. We can help people be the good people that they want to be.

In some ways, it is not surprising that a company born during the pandemic would focus its efforts on one of the biggest problems caused by the pandemic. There are millions of people struggling, and we believe that there are millions of people who want to do something to help. We believe that there are millions of people who want to take action, who want to support the causes and organizations that will help build a better world.

We believe that there are millions of people who are willing to make a commitment to give.

Come join us.

The Future of Drone Safety

/ Adam Nash

Every time I go to the CODE Conference, I learn something new. There is something about watching some of the most prominent technology executives and founders responding to questions from talented journalists that gets me thinking.

Four years ago, I wrote about the transition technology CEOs needed to make from economics to politics. Coming back from this year’s gathering, there  is no question in my mind that this insight turned out to be true. Responsibility was a significant theme this year. As the technology industry continues to grow and mature,  more and more people are looking to investors and technology leaders to think ahead about potential issues that will happen when their creations become ubiquitous.

It got me thinking about drones.

The Problem with Drones

The FAA projects that the number of drones will reach 7 million in just the US alone by 2020. The growth rates for both consumer and commercial drones continue to grow at a rapid rate. The FAA estimates that there will be over 3.5 million hobbyist drones in the US by 2012.

Over the past few years, I’ve made a few investments in startups in the drone space. But until last year, I hadn’t given significant consideration to all of the safety issues around drones, particularly as they fly over large crowds or critical infrastructure.

The problem is fairly simple. Large venues, like sports stadiums, and critical infrastructure are largely defenseless against drones. Whether it’s a music festival, a weekend football game or anything of that sort, most people don’t realize that event managers really have no solution to protect a crowd. Whether accidental or intentional, there is a real risk that a malfunction or crash could harm people.

The Need for Active Measures

Long term, of course, we can imagine a world where drones can be programmed to avoid these spaces, (Airmap is a great example of a company making this happen). However, We can’t just assume or depend on this to be universally true – that risks the mistake of being overly idealistic. There needs to be an active solution to protect critical areas.

There are a number of companies working on solutions that involve intercepting and disabling drones that enter space that needs to be protected. In fact, there are solutions like drone on drone capture (with nets) 🕷, projectile solutions (shoot it down) 🔫, even flamethrowers! 🔥

Unfortunately, these kinetic measures make little sense in cases where the drones are flying over areas that need protection. If the concern is a drone crashing into a crowd or important infrastructure, these solutions run significant additional risk of the drone or pieces of the drone causing damage on impact. While there is definitely a market for kinetic solutions in the military and related markets, but it seems like a bad fit for the majority of the simple but real threats out there.

A Software-Based Solution for Drone Protection

Last year, as the co-chairman of ICON, I had the good fortune to meet Gilad Sahar, the co-founder and CEO of Convexum. With the unique insight that comes from military experience with both the costs & benefits of active solutions, they have developed a non-violent, software-based active measure to help automate perimeter protection from drones.

The concept is fairly simple.

Convexum has developed a device that allows companies & governments to detect when a drone is entering a restricted space, take control of the drone, and land it safely. A cloud-based service ensures that all Convexum devices have up-to-date signatures for known drones.

Initially, they are seeing significant demand for this solution around critical infrastructure, like energy development, and sporting venues. Long term, I can easily imagine a future where a non-violent solution for drone protection would be highly desirable anywhere we don’t want to bear the safety risk (like schools).

Working with Government

Europe has already provided a clear path for companies and government entities to receive the permits & exemptions needed to deploy this type of solution. (In fact, Enel has already deployed a solution to protect power plants.) Congress & Senate debating this now in the US, but seems to be one of the few remaining areas of true bi-partisan alignment.

I’ve personally been so impressed with Gilad & Convexum, I’ve decided to help them by becoming an advisor to the company.

Let’s hope this is part of an increasing pattern of entrepreneurs and investors thinking ahead about safety and regulation, and supporting technologies early that can help solve these eventual problems.

 

 

Solve the Product Maze Backwards

/ Adam Nash / 3 Comments

As the father of young children, I can tell you that there is a special place in my heart for restaurants that provide puzzles and crayons for small children to pass the time.

On a recent trip out to The Counter in Mountain View, Jordan (who is 8)  was really struggling with a large maze puzzle on one of these activity sheets. It was a fairly large maze, and he was frustrated by his inability to see the dead ends ahead, forcing him to retrace his somewhat tortured crayon path.

I told him to try to solve the maze backwards.

As you can probably guess, he began at the end, and was able  to find a path back to the beginning in just a few seconds . He was delighted, and a bit surprised, to see how simple the puzzle looked like from a different perspective.

Surprisingly, I find that both entrepreneurs & product leaders miss this important lesson when evaluating ideas for either their company or their products.

Three Questions in Product Prioritization

In my experience, there are three common questions that often come up when product features are being debated:

  1. Should we build this?
  2. When should we build this?
  3. How should should we build this?

Unfortunately, even highly talented teams can become  get bogged down in debate and uncertainty when all of these questions become entangled. As engineers & designers are professionally trained to answer the question of “How,” the worst debates tend to happen around the questions of  “Should” and “When.”

Too often, when debating what feature to work on next, debates around timing quickly devolve into debates about whether the feature is needed at all.

Solving the maze backwards does a fantastic job of disentangling these two questions. Simply asking the question of “If we are successful, will we have this feature in 3 years?” tends to illuminate whether the debate is about “Should” or “When.”

If the answer is yes, you will have that feature, then the question is simple. You are just debating priority.

Avoid the Local Maximum

One of the well known issues with iterative processes for delivering product features is the “local maximum” problem.

The assumption is that where ever you start with your product, your team keeps working on improvements. Each improvement is measured to ensure it is “better” than the product before the change. However, you can reach a point where every change you make hurts the metrics that you measure. The fear is that there is a better version of your product (the absolute maximum), but it requires a change bigger than you can get to from the current design.

It’s called a local maximum problem because of the similarity to the concept in mathematics when you are traveling along the curve. From the local maximum, every move is down, even though the curve ends up higher eventually.

Solving the maze backwards can help.

By asking the simple question about whether or not your product in the far future has a given capability, it can unblock your thinking about what leaps and changes will be necessary. Whether the limitations are in technical architecture or product design, clarity on your long term vision can help your team visualize a future not trapped by their current constraints.

Too often, the real limitation is not related to either technical or design constraints, but rather a lack of clarity and imagination about what might be possible. Just like a maze, it is easy to get lost in the middle. Thinking backwards from the end goal can help the team escape a Zeno’s paradox of minor feature improvements.

Founders Can Solve the Maze Backwards, Too

It may seem hard to believe, but in early 2009 when I took over LinkedIn’s mobile efforts, there was still active debate within the company about whether to dedicate significant effort to mobile. Why? Well, back in 2009, the Blackberry was still hitting record sales, the  app store was a year old, and from a web metrics point of view, mobile views represented less than 1% of LinkedIn’s traffic. Like every hypergrowth startup, LinkedIn had a huge number of initiatives it wanted to pursue around growth, engagement & revenue, and it wasn’t obvious that mobile would move any of these needles for the company in the next few years.

Solving the maze backwards helped.

What was fairly obvious in 2009 was that the growth rate of mobile engagement was compounding at a phenomenal rate. LinkedIn, as a professional use case, might have been slightly behind social use cases for mobile adoption, but it was fairly clear that within 5 years (by 2014), mobile should represent a majority (over 50%) of all visits to LinkedIn.

Thinking backwards helped give us the confidence to invest in both talent and technology that had little short term payoff, but would become essential to engagement over the next five years as those predictions came true.

Fast forward to 2017. I was recently meeting with a founder who was debating whether they should hire a Vice President of Marketing. As he walked me through his thinking, the argument wandered, and became more focused on whether or not the company “needed” marketing.

I asked him if there was any way, if the company hit their numbers over the next three years, that the company would not need marketing, or an experienced marketing leader?

The CEO quickly responded that marketing would be essential to hit the numbers they were looking for in three years. All of a sudden, the conversation changed. The question wasn’t whether or not to invest in marketing, but more a question of when they need to.  Was this a 2017 or a 2018 problem? Is this something they would need to hit the milestones to raise their next round of funding, or something that they would invest in during the next cycle?

It was now a question of when.

Questions of “Should” vs. Questions of “When”

“The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.” — Michael Porter

Being clear about what your product will and won’t do is a critical element of product strategy. However, because it is so important, even well-meaning teams can turn almost any feature into an existential debate.

Thinking backwards can help differentiate questions of “should” from questions of “when,” and that can be incredibly productive in moving the discussion to prioritization.

This is not intended to be dismissive of questions of prioritization. Phasing decisions are some of the most important decisions start ups make. Financing for startups is phased. Small teams can only work on a few projects at a time. Customers can only absorb so many new features at once. As a result, prioritization decisions are incredibly difficult to make.

Greedy algorithms are very good, but can be traps if you are working against competitors and an ecosystem that is willing to make bets that lie across the gap from your product’s current local maximum. Thinking backwards can help illuminate long term goals that are across the gap.

When you are building a product roadmap, and get stuck on debates about a short term feature that doesn’t move the numbers, I encourage founders to take a moment and try to solve the maze backwards.

It worked for Jordan, right?

Challenges of Being an Executive in Residence (EIR)

/ Adam Nash / 3 Comments

This is the fourth post of a multi-part series on being an Executive in Residence (EIR). The initial post outlining the full series can be found here. The previous post was “How do you get an Executive in Residence (EIR) role?“

If you’ve made it this far in my Executive in Residence series, you might be thinking, “This job sounds like a dream come true.  What could be better than a role where I’m working with intelligent people, meeting brilliant entrepreneurs and given time to think carefully about my next company?”

I’m a big fan of the Executive in Residence (EIR) role, when it’s taken for the right reasons and with the right firm.  That being said, the EIR role is one of the more unstructured positions out there, and can easily lead to an unproductive outcome for both the executive and the venture firm without the right perspective and motivation.

Time Management

There is no question.  The biggest lurking challenge around being an Executive in Residence is time management.

For an operating executive or CEO, you likely have gotten used to the implicit structure imposed by running an operating business.  There are people and teams who report to you, guidance you give regularly on talent and strategic decisions, key results you are responsible for.  If you’ve worked for a company of any scale, your biggest issue previously was likely paring your calendar back regularly to give yourself time to think.

You know what greets you as an EIR on your first day?  A calendar full of empty.  More importantly, while there are meetings all the time, you aren’t actually required for any of them.

As a product manager, it’s second nature to think backwards from your goal, and create a set of milestones and checkpoints.  As an EIR, I’d recommend thinking about the following milestones, within a rough timeline of one year:

  • What’s your investment thesis / area of focus?
  • Are you going to be an investor or an executive?
  • Are you going to start something or join something?
  • Are you going to look at companies outside your firm’s portfolio?
  • What stage of company and role are you looking for?

Investment Thesis & Focus

The first thing that happens when you join a venture capital firm is that you realize the world of successful startups is much broader and more diverse than you thought.  This goes beyond simple descriptors of “consumer” and “enterprise”.  Given your unique experience and skills, you may find yourself fascinated with marketplaces, collaborative sharing, mobile communication, next generation CRM, big data infrastructure.

The problem is, no one can be deep on everything.  It’s all too easy to find yourself broadly exploring an ever increasing number of sub-segments, business models and industries.  In a partnership, you’ll find that every partner has levels of expertise and exposure on multiple domains.  As an EIR, you could potential spend time digging into any one of them.

Some of this is good, to be sure.  One of the perks of the EIR role is the time and access to broaden your horizons.  However, the challenge for an EIR is that, in a limited time frame, you have weeks and months to explore, not years.  Most successful EIRs come to an opinion fairly quickly (within 6-8 weeks) of the rough dimensions of the currently exciting areas of innovation to focus on.

Investor vs. Executive

Being at a great venture capital firm inevitably forces even stalwart operators to ask the question of whether or not they want to be an investor.  Most likely at this stage in your career, you’ve already started to take advisory roles or participated in seed rounds as an angel investor.

EIRs rarely transition to investing partners, but it happens more often than you might think.  (Most recently, Simon Rothman transitioned from an EIR role to a general partner at Greylock).

The real issue is one of time frame and priorities.  In the end, the process that investors go through to evaluate companies and opportunities has very different dynamics than finding a good fit for a CEO role.  While most EIRs have this internal debate at some point, the sooner you can resolve the issue with confidence internally, the sooner you can optimize your efforts towards a successful outcome.

Let’s face it: defining success is a big part of achieving it.

Entrepreneur vs. Executive

Alright.  You’ve figured out your investment thesis and areas of focus, and you’ve got confidence now that while you respect venture capital quite a bit, you’re an operator.  The next challenge that rears its head: are you sure you don’t want to start something yourself?

Meeting with successful, passionate entrepreneurs day-in and day-out does a funny thing to you.  It’s addictive.  Their energy is tangible.  And when you work with a great firm, more often than not, you meet superlative entrepreneurs, many at later stages of company development, proving that not only can it happen, it actually happens more often than you thought.

In my first post, I tried to explain the differences between an entrepreneur-in-residence and an executive-in-residence.  As it turns out, however, at most firms, there is a lot of flexibility around this issue.  At least in Silicon Valley, no one is going to talk you out of building something from scratch if you get set on doing it.

I hate to be cynical, but watching a number of colleagues go through this, the pattern is fairly predictable.  The reality is, most people actually have the answer to this question before they start their role as an EIR.  What actually happens is that EIRs tend to forget this fact quickly, spend some time debating it internally, and then realize that their initial assessment was correct all along.

Navigating Firm Bias

Another challenge that confronts EIRs is firm bias.  By taking a role with a specific venture capital firm, a number of questions are raised:

  • Will you only look at companies that fit the firms / partners current investment thesis?
  • Will you only look at companies that the firm has invested in?
  • Will you engage with recruiting partners from other firms or third parties?

Underlying these questions is an implicit misalignment between the EIR and the firm.  The firm is investing time (it’s most precious resource), reputation and knowledge with you.  At the same time, as an EIR, finding the right fit of company, stage, product, team & timing for a CEO role is exceptionally difficult.  Spreading the net as far as possible definitely can increase chances for a successful fit in a given time frame.

For most EIR roles, the answer to these questions is best resolved directly, with the firm, before joining.  Personally, I was fortunate enough to be an EIR at Greylock Partners, where the firm’s perspective was that any area or company that was interesting enough for me to engage with was by itself a strong vote of confidence.  Greylock is one of the oldest and most successful early stage venture capital firms, and sees its network as extending, through people, more broadly than just to the specific companies where they are currently invested.

By the way, for this reason, it’s not unusual to see EIRs split their role between two firms, just to signal strongly to both the firms and the outside world that they are not committed to a single firm.  While I don’t believe this is necessary for a successful EIR role, I do personally recommend that EIRs broaden their network to companies and opportunities beyond a single firm.

Company Stage & Role

This might be one of the biggest challenges an EIR faces in their search.  What are you actually looking for?

  • Are you interested in a startup that is pre-product/market fit?  Or do you operated best when product/market fit has been established?
  • Do you add the most value at a 20-person company going to 100+, or a 300 person company going to 1000+?
  • Are you willing to consider a COO role, or only a CEO role?
  • Will you consider GM roles or functional leadership roles at larger companies?

To some extent, you have time to entertain and consider a wide variety of roles.  There is significant learning, both about the company and yourself that takes place when you engage on a potential role.  That being said, spending time on roles you are not inclined to actually take is expensive, for both you and the company.

Tell Us Your Story

In the previous four posts, I’ve tried to remain objective and incorporate lessons from other EIRs that I’ve had the opportunity to both know and work with.  Due to popular demand, however, my final post in this series, Did you like being an Executive in Residence (EIR)?, is coming up next.

How Do You Get an Executive in Residence (EIR) role?

/ Adam Nash / 3 Comments

This is the third post of a multi-part series on being an Executive in Residence (EIR). The initial post outlining the full series can be found here. The previous post was “Should I be an Executive in Residence (EIR)?“

One of the most mysterious aspects of the Executive in Residence role is the relative obscurity about how these roles come into being in the first place.  After all, you’ll never find a job posting on LinkedIn for an EIR, and as a result there is no obvious description of the requirements or the process to get one of these roles.

However, a simple search on TechCrunch or Pando Daily reveals a fairly regular stream of people joining top tier venture capital firms as Executives in Residence.  How did they get that role?

Relationships Matter

Venture capital partnerships value relationships, and so it’s rare that you’ll find an Executive in Residence that doesn’t have some direct relationship to the firm that brings them onboard.  The three most typical ways executives form these relationships are:

  • They were an executive or founder at a company backed by that venture capital firm.
  • They worked with one of the partners at the venture capital firm in a previous operating role.
  • They sat on the board of directors of a company with a partner from that venture capital firm.

There are of course exceptions to these examples, but in most cases the most likely way to get an Executive in Residence role will be from one of the venture capital firms that you’ve personally worked with in the past, where they have a high opinion of your capabilities as an executive, your relationships in the entrepreneurial community, and your expertise in an area that the firm has prioritized.

Situations Matter

The Executive in Residence role is typically opportunistic in relation to timing.   There is some event, some inflection point where a talented executive ends up potentially free from an existing role, and yet will be looking for time to assess the market and decide on their next operating role.

The most common events that lead to this situation are:

  • Acquisition of a company. During acquisitions, executives either leave on completion of the acquisition or after some reasonable transition period.
  • Reorganization of a company.  As companies grow, they periodically will hit strategic shifts or management inflection points where it makes sense for some executives to leave the company.
  • Long tenure / Company size.  Sometimes as companies grow, executives who prefer earlier stages of company culture and growth will decide they want to pursue a role a new startup, but don’t necessarily have visibility into the full field of opportunities.

Once again, while there are exceptions to the above, you’ll find that almost all Executives in Residence come from a situation that generates a need to leave their current role, without sufficient time for the research and match-making process involved in placing a CxO.  These situations can also generate the catalyst for a venture capital firm to take the opportunity to deepen their relationship with a talented executive.

Reputations Matter

In the end, venture capital firms bring on Executives in Residence in order to bolster both their access to talent as well as their relationships in the startup community.  As a result, the reputation of the executive matters quite a bit in terms of getting an offer to join a firm as an EIR.  Common attributes are:

  • An executive with a well known reputation, or strong ties to a recent, well-known successful venture-backed company
  • An executive whose reputation will be compatible and additive to the brand of the venture capital firm
  • An executive whose existing relationships in the technology community will be compatible and additive to the venture capital firm.
  • An executive with expertise in an specific market or technology sub-sector that the venture capital firm is strategically interested in going forward.

You Don’t Ask, You’re Offered

The Executive in Residence role is, by its nature, a fairly opportunistic hire on the part of the venture capital firm.  If you are a founder or executive at a venture backed company, and one of the situations described fits your condition, make sure you are investing some of your time in relationships and being “top of mind” with venture capitalists you’ve worked with.

My next post in the EIR series will attempt to answer the question: “Challenges of being an Executive in Residence (EIR)“

EIR Series: Should I be an Executive in Residence (EIR)?

/ Adam Nash / 4 Comments

This is the second post of a multi-part series on being an Executive in Residence (EIR). The initial post outlining the full series can be found here.  The previous post was What is an Executive in Residence (EIR).

The most common question in relation to the Executive in Residence role has been a simple one:

Should I be an Executive in Residence?

The truth is, when people ask me this question, they are very often asking two similar, but different questions:

  1. Is the Executive in Residence Role a good opportunity?
  2. Is the Executive in Residence Role something I should pursue?

The answer to the first question is fairly simple, but it has an over-arching caveat.  Like most things relating to venture capital, the quality of the partnership that you’ll be working with and the expectations of that partnership around the role are paramount.  As long as there is strong alignment of expectations between the partnership and the executive about the expectations for the role, the Executive in Residence role can be a unique and fantastic opportunity.

The second question, however, is much more complicated.  And that’s because it implicitly brings up some of the most difficult career questions we have to ask ourselves.

What Do You Want From an EIR Role? 

Last year, John Lilly wrote a simple blog post about leadership and the key questions to ask when you’re asked for advice.  If you are at the point in your career where you are qualified to be a CEO, then the question of what you want from your career becomes increasingly dominant.

What are you optimizing for?  Is it passion for the product you’re building, particular technology or a target market?  Are you looking for a particular business model, corporate culture or lifestyle? Are you looking to join the ranks of the Forbes 400?  Are you looking for power & influence and if so, in what industry / sector?

These questions can become increasingly difficult as you progress in your career because to be uniquely qualified to lead a company, there needs to be incredible alignment between your values and goals, and the goals of the company you want to lead.  Put another way, matchmaking for the right company actually requires a deep understanding of your own motivations, values & priorities.

Benefits of the EIR Position

The Executive in Residence role offers a lot of unique benefits.  These include:

  • Create, Build & Grow Relationships.  It’s an incredible opportunity to make new relationships, re-establish dormant relationships, and deepen existing ones.
  • Broaden & Deepen Your Knowledge of the Market. When you are in an operational role, you tend to become extremely deep on the companies related to your market and space, and tunnel vision sets in.  The EIR role gives you the opportunity to explore a much wider range of product categories and sub-sectors, and learn more deeply what strategies and tactics have been successful outside your specific niche.
  • Learn about New Companies.  We all like to think that we’re in the flow of knowing the important, successful private companies being built in Silicon Valley.  The truth is, there are a shockingly large number of amazing private companies that you haven’t heard of.  The EIR role gets you fantastic exposure to a large number of companies you haven’t heard of.
  • Platform for Thought Leadership.  Top tier venture firms have great reputations, and EIR roles offer a unique opportunity for you to nurture, develop & grow your own reputation around specific topics and issues.  The venture firm benefits from its association with thought leadership, and the EIR benefits from its association with the firm.  The end result can be magnified opportunities for both parties.
  • Try Before You Buy.  The EIR role gives you an exceptional ability to spend time with portfolio companies.  They are usually extremely happy to get additional help, and the time spent can help both parties figure out if it’s a potential good fit or not.  The best part about the role is that if it isn’t a good fit, the time spent was without firm commitment, and can be easily ended at any time without few (if any) negative relationship or reputation effects.
  • Self Discovery.  The EIR role is structured to give you time to ask the hard questions about what you are looking for in a company, a product, a market, a culture.  It’s structured enough to provide stimulus and ideas, but unstructured enough to give you gaps to ask (and answer) the hard questions.

Problems with the EIR Position

While I’m extremely positive about my experience as an EIR at Greylock Partners, I’m one of the first to caution people who ask me about the role that there are real issues to consider.

  • Firm Lock In.  When you are immersed in the people & culture of a particular firm, it’s very easy to de-prioritize networking and intellectual debate outside the firm.  Venture firms tend to discuss their own successes and failures, and the burden is really on the EIR to ensure they broaden & deepen their relationships outside the firm.  This is why, for example, some successful executives will take EIR roles at two different firms.
  • Paradox of Choice.  We are all human, and humans don’t do well with a massively expanded selection set.  The more companies, industries, products & concepts you are exposed to, the harder it can be to assertively make a choice to pursue a single company.  This is why, for example, successful EIRs will often frame their time in waves – spending weeks or months on a particular area or topic, and then shifting to another, rather than trying to explore and pursue everything at once.
  • Portfolio Work vs. Discovery.  Working with portfolio companies takes a certain amount of time and effort to be effective.  If you are going to spend 1-2 days a week with a company, you’ll quickly run out of days of the week.  As a result, it’s important for EIRs to find a system that allows them to balance networking & discovery time with active engagement with companies.  6-12 months can pass unbelievably quickly, and in the end, your goal is to find that next great role.
  • Operating Skills / Credibility.  Technology moves incredibly quickly, and it’s amazing how even in a matter of months the landscape of ideas and tactics can change.  Venture capital firms tend to be comfortable places, but never forget that you always need to be learning & growing, most likely by engaging and helping entrepreneurs with real challenges they have today.  The lessons from 2012 are interesting and useful in 2013, but the half life of those lessons can be shorter than you might think.

So, Should You Do It?

I’m colored by own personal experience, which was with a great firm and a great outcome (I’m exceptionally happy with my role at Wealthfront).

If you are looking for either your first CEO role, or your next CEO role, and you have the opportunity to be an EIR with a great firm, I believe the Executive in Residence role can be a unique & excellent opportunity.  Going into it, however, you need to do two things to be successful: be prepared to take advantage of the unique opportunities of the role, and be extremely cognizant of the potential pitfalls and issues inherent with the position.

Going forward in this series, I’ll be focusing on the Executive in Residence role. My next post will attempt to answer the question: “How Do You Get an Executive in Residence Role (EIR)?“

EIR Series: What is an Executive in Residence (EIR)?

/ Adam Nash / 5 Comments

This is the first post of a multi-part series on being an Executive in Residence (EIR). The initial post outlining the full series can be found here.

One of the first things I learned when I accepted the role of Executive in Residence at Greylock Partners was that almost no one actually knows what that means. (I can hear my father asking me now, “You’re a resident now? Like a doctor?”)

In fairness, the role is rare enough that, outside of the Silicon Valley venture community, you might never run into it. It’s almost pathologically designed to be cryptic. Not only is it rare, but it’s also designed as a short term role, not a permanent one. If that wasn’t tricky enough, it turns out that there are a few flavors of “EIR” just to add a good dose of acronym confusion to the mix.

So before discussing the details of the Executive in Residence role, let me clarify the three different types of EIR you may come in contact with. (As a side note, the following definitions and examples are certainly biased towards my recent experience at Greylock Partners.)

  • Entrepreneur in Residence. The original EIR role, the Entrepreneur in Residence role is designed for entrepreneurs who are actively working on both the conception & execution of their next company. These roles are generally structured as 3-6 month engagements without compensation, but the entrepreneur is given resources & a place to work, and significant time & exposure to the investment team at the venture capital firm. The entrepreneur benefits from the constant challenge & framing of world-class investors, and a higher than average likelihood of funding from the venture capital firm. The firm, on the other hand, gets a significant degree of proprietary access and influence over the new company.

    Notable recent examples: Nir Zuk, co-founder of Palo Alto Networks (PANW, $3B+), Josh McFarland, founder of TellApart.

  • Executive in Residence. Sometimes referred to as an XIR, the Executive in Residence role is designed for executives, typically CEOs, who are in between companies. These roles are typically structured as 6-12 month engagements with limited compensation (well below typical executive salaries). The executive is given an office, with an expectation that they will split their time between working with portfolio companies, helping with due diligence on potential investments, and completing their own search efforts for their next role. The executive gets a platform for broadening their strategic thinking, networking and inside access to a number of extremely promising companies, while the firm gets inexpensive support for their portfolio companies and disproportionate access to top executive talent.

    Notable recent example: Jeff Weiner, CEO of LinkedIn (LNKD, $20B+)

  • “Something Else” in Residence. Behold, the age of the SEIR. In recent years, there have been a few top venture capital firms experimenting with other “in residence” roles. There have been designers, engineers, data scientists and even growth strategists in residence. The basic proposition for this role is similar to the traditional executive in residence role, with a notable tilt towards work with portfolio companies and PR to help build the reputation of the individual and the firm.

    Notable recent examples: DJ Patil, Data Scientist in Residence, Andy Johns, Growth Strategist in Residence.

There have been quite a few good blog posts on the pros & cons of the Entrepreneur in Residence role. On the other end of the spectrum, it’s probably too early to talk categorically about the plethora of new “in residence” variants as a class.

Going forward in this series, I’ll be focusing on the Executive in Residence role. My next post will attempt to answer the question: “Should I be an Executive in Residence (EIR)?“

The Executive in Residence (EIR) Series

/ Adam Nash / 11 Comments

It’s hard to believe, but it is now exactly six months since I left my role as an Executive in Residence at Greylock Partners, and joined Weathfront as COO.

Diving into a startup is all encompassing, but over the past few months quite a few people have asked me questions about the Executive in Residence (EIR) role.  Some of these people have had offers to become EIRs, others are curious about the role and whether they should pursue it as a career option.  For most, however, it’s just genuine curiosity  the EIR role is largely a low volume, undocumented role that is very unique to the private equity & venture capital ecosystems.

One of the guide posts for this blog has been a dedicated effort to take the questions that I receive regularly, and translate them into thoughtful and useful content to be broadly shared.  So before my experiences of 2012 fade into the shrouds of history, I’ve decided to write a quick series about my experience as an EIR, and the most common questions I’ve received.

The series will cover the following questions:

  1. What is an Executive in Residence (EIR)?
  2. Should I be an Executive in Residence (EIR)?
  3. How do you get an Executive in Residence (EIR) role?
  4. Challenges of being an Executive in Residence (EIR)
  5. Did you like being an Executive in Residence (EIR)?

As always, I’m hopeful that the information will be both interesting and even useful.

Joining Wealthfront

/ Adam Nash / 9 Comments

It’s official. As per the announcement on the Wealthfront Blog today, I have officially accepted the role of Chief Operating Officer at Wealthfront. I feel incredibly fortunate to be joining such an amazing team, with an opportunity to help build an extremely important company.

WF Logo New

From Human Capital to Financial Capital

One way to imagine your professional life is overlay of two types of capital: the building and growing of your human capital, and the transformation of that human capital into financial capital.

It feels like just yesterday that I was writing a blog post here about my first day at LinkedIn. At its heart, LinkedIn is building, growing & leveraging human capital throughout your career.  Wealthfront provides an answer to the second part of that equation – how to grow and leverage the financial capital that you accumulate throughout your career.

As Marc Andreessen put it, software is eating the world, and it is providing us a platform to bring the features and sophistication previously only available to the ultra-rich, and making it available to anyone who wants to protect & grow their savings.

Too many good, hard-working individuals today lack access to many of the basic advantages accorded to people with extremely high net worth.  With software, Wealthfront can bring features and capabilities normally available only to those with multi-million dollar accounts to everyone, and at a fraction of the cost.

Personal Finance as a Passion

For regular readers of this blog, the fact that personal finance has been a long standing passion of mine comes as no surprise.  What many don’t know is that this passion dates all the way to back to my time at Stanford, where despite one of the best formal educations in the world, there was really no fundamental instruction on personal finance.

In fact, upon graduation, I joined with about a dozen friends from Stanford (mostly from engineering backgrounds) to form an investment club to help learn about equity markets and investing together.  (In retrospect, the members of that club have been incredibly successful, including technology leaders like Mike Schroepfer, Amy Chang, Mike Hanson and Scott Kleper among others.)

A Theme of Empowerment

As I look across the products and services that I’ve dedicated my professional life to building, I’m starting to realize how important empowerment is to me.  At eBay, I drew continued inspiration from the fact that millions of people worldwide were earning income or even a living selling on eBay, many people use https://www.shiply.com now a days, as a delivering system which makes it easier to have a business through eBay.  At LinkedIn, it was the idea of empowering millions of professionals with the ability to build their professional reputations & relationships.

With Wealthfront, I find myself genuinely excited about the prospect of helping millions of people protect and grow the product of their life’s work.

We’ve learned a lot in the past thirty years about what drives both good and bad behaviors around investing, and we’ve also learned a lot about how to design software that engages and even delights its customers.  The time is right to build a service that marries the two and helps people with one of the most important (and challenging) areas of their adult lives.

A Special Thank You

I want to take a moment here to voice my utmost thanks to the team at Greylock Partners.  My year at the firm has given me the opportunity to learn deeply from some of the best entrepreneurs, technology leaders and venture capitalists in the world.  The quality of the entrepreneurs and investors at Greylock forces you to think bigger about what is possible.  Fortunately, Greylock is also a partnership of operators, so they understand the never-ending itch to go build great products and great companies.

… And Lastly, A Couple of Requests

Since this is a personal blog, I don’t mind making a couple of simple requests.  First, if you have a long term investment account, whether taxable or for retirement, I would encourage you to take a look at Wealthfront.  I’d appreciate hearing what you think about the service and how we can make it better.

Second, and perhaps most importantly, we are hiring.  So let me know if you are interested in joining the team.

User Acquisition: Mobile Applications and the Mobile Web

/ Adam Nash / 8 Comments

This is the third post in a three post series on user acquisition.

In the first two posts in this series, we covered the basics of the five sources of traffic to a web-based product and the fundamentals of viral factors.  This final post covers applying these insights to the current edge of product innovation: mobile applications and the mobile web.

Bar Fight: Native Apps vs. Mobile Web

For the last few years, the debate between building native applications vs. mobile web sites has raged.  (In Silicon Valley, bar fights break out over things like this.) Developers love the web as a platform.  As a community, we have spent the last fifteen years on standards, technologies, environments and processes to produce great web-based software.  A vast majority of developers don’t want to go back to the days of desktop application development.

Makes you wonder why we have more than a million native applications out there across platforms.

Native Apps Work

If you are religious about the web as a platform, the most upsetting thing about native applications is that they work.  The fact is, in almost every case, the product manager who pushes to launch a native application is rewarded with metrics that go up and to the right.  As long as that fact is true, we’re going to continue to see a growing number of native applications.

But why do they work?

There are actually quite a few aspects to the native application ecoystem that make it explosively more effective than the desktop application ecosystem of the 1990s.  Covering them all would be a blog post in itself.  But in the context of user acquisition, I’ll posit a dominant, simple insight:

Native applications generate organic traffic, at scale.

Yes, I know this sounds like a contradiction.  In my first blog post on the five sources of traffic, I wrote:

The problem with organic traffic is that no one really knows how to generate more of it.  Put a product manager in charge of “moving organic traffic up” and you’ll see the fear in their eyes.

That was true… until recently.  On the web, no one knows how to grow organic traffic in an effective, measurable way.  However, launch a native application, and suddenly you start seeing a large number of organic visits.  Organic traffic is often the most engaged traffic.  Organic traffic has strong intent.  On the web, they typed in your domain for a reason.  They want you to give them something to do.  They are open to suggestions.  They care about your service enough to engage voluntarily.  It’s not completely apples-to-apples, but from a metrics standpoint, the usage you get when someone taps your application icon behaves like organic traffic.

Giving a great product designer organic traffic on tap is like giving a hamster a little pedal that delivers pure bliss.  And the metrics don’t lie.

Revenge of the Web: Viral Distribution

OK. So despite fifteen years of innovation, we as a greater web community failed to deliver a mechanism that reliably generates the most engaged and valuable source of traffic to an application.  No need to despair and pack up quite yet, because the web community has delivered on something equally (if not more) valuable.

Viral distribution favors the web.

Web pages can be optimized across all screens – desktop, tablet, phone.  When there are viral loops that include the television, you can bet the web will work there too.

We describe content using URLs, and universally, when you open a URL they go to the web.  We know how to carry metadata in links, allowing experiences to be optimized based on the content, the mechanism that it was shared, who shared it, and who received it.  We can multivariate test it in ways that border on the supernatural.

To be honest, after years of conversations with different mobile platform providers, I’m still somewhat shocked that in 2012 the user experience for designing a seamless way for URLs to appropriately resolve to either the web or a native application are as poor as they are.  (Ironically, Apple solved this issue in 2007 for Youtube and Google Maps, and yet for some reason has failed to open up that registry of domains to the developer community.)  Facebook is taking the best crack at solving this problem today, but it’s limited to their channel.

The simple truth is that the people out there that you need to grow do not have your application.  They have the web.  That’s how you’re going to reach them at scale.

Focus on Experience, Not Technology

In the last blog post on viral factors, I pointed out that growth is based on features that let a user of your product reach out and connect with a non-user.

In the mobile world of 2012, that may largely look like highly engaged organic users (app) pushing content out that leads to a mobile web experience (links).

As a product designer, you need to think carefully about the end-to-end experience across your native application and the mobile web.  Most likely, a potential user’s first experience with your product or service will be a transactional web page, delivered through a viral channel.  They may open that URL on a desktop computer, a tablet, or a phone.  That will be your opportunity not only to convert them over to an engaged user, in many cases by encouraging them to download your native application.

You need to design a delightful and optimized experience across that entire flow if you want to see maximized self-distribution of your product and service.

Think carefully about how Instagram exploded in such a short time period, and you can see the power of even just one optimized experience that cuts across a native application and a web-based vector.

Now go build a billion dollar company.

Joining Greylock

/ Adam Nash / 5 Comments

Today, John Lilly put up a really nice note on the Greylock Partners blog officially welcoming me to the firm.  Needless to say, I’m both honored and excited to be joining such a great team.

We’re fortunate to be witnessing the explosive growth of not one but two incredible new platforms for consumer products and services: social and mobile.  Both are literally changing the fundamental ways that consumers interact with devices, and are rapidly changing the dynamics for building successful new products and services.  After spending the past four years helping to build out social and mobile platforms, I can’t wait to partner with entrepreneurs to help them build out the next generation of products and companies over them.

Over the past few years, I’ve shared a number of insights here on this blog about building great products and companies.  Here are a few that are worth reading if you are curious about how I think:

And of course, the most appropriate for this announcement:

For now, I just want to say thank you to Reid, David, John and the entire Greylock team.  I can’t wait to get started.

Observations: The Paradox of Being a “Smart” Venture Capitalist

/ Adam Nash / 1 Comment

My last post, and observation of business & government students, was popular enough that I think I’ll share a second one here.   This is an observation that I’ve shared with a large number of people in the past seven years, as part of my greater set of take-aways on working in venture capital.

I worked for Atlas Venture from 2001-2002 as an Associate, and during that time I had the chance to observe quite a the interesting paradoxes that make up success in early-stage venture capital.  This particular observation is about the paradox surrounding being seen as “smart”.

In the short term, venture capitalists often look smart by saying “No”.  But in the long term, venture capitalists can only look smart by saying “Yes”.

This applies generally to new people joining the industry, regardless of level.  New associate, venture partner, general partner.  Venture capitalists deal with exceptionally long cycles.  It takes the better part of a decade to build most businesses, and it can take that long to really determine who in venture capital is doing the job, and who is just playing the part.

In the long term, the metric is simple: how many successful entrepreneurs & companies did the venture capitalist fund & help build to extraordinary outcomes.

In the short term, people are desperate for any tangible signal that will predict the long term.   Unfortunately, in many cases, the short hand for this becomes evaluating their critical thinking about risks and issues on every pitch.

As a product leader, I see this behavior play out on a regular basis outside of venture capital as well.  More experienced product managers will review the work of junior product managers, and will prove their capabilities by highlighting problems.

They don’t realize that they will never be great by pointing out flaws.  They will be great by translating that knowledge into solutions for other people’s products, as well as leading their own innovative initiatives.

I could always tell when a general partner, whether at Atlas or another firm, was “ready to fund”.  You would see their posture in meeting shift radically from finding ways to say no to finding ways to say yes.

Not surprisingly, my fondest memories of venture capital surround the start-ups where I said yes.

Startups, Technology Companies & Giambattista Vico

/ Adam Nash / 4 Comments

I had one of those “delightful” newspaper moments today.  I was going through my Sunday morning ritual, page-by-page through the Sunday New York Times, when I happened upon an interesting editorial in the Week in Review.

The article itself was interesting, but likely one I would have ignored in the online version.  (It’s still one of the virtues of print that I put myself in the hands of the editor, and read the Week in Review from beginning to end.)  What was delightful about it was its philosophical reference to Giambattista Vico.

You see, until today, I had no idea who Giambattista Vico was.  However, it turns out that this 18th century Italian philosopher published a theory of societies that happens to match, almost exactly, my recent theory about start-up technology companies and their development into large, successful enterprises.   Here is a summary from the Stanford Philosophy website:

Nations need not develop at the same pace-less developed ones can and do coexist with those in a more advanced phase-but they all pass through the same distinct stages (cursi): the ages of gods, heroes, and men. Nations “develop in conformity to this division,” Vico says, “by a constant and uninterrupted order of causes and effects present in every nation” (“The Course the Nations Run,” §915, p.335). Each stage, and thus the history of any nation, is characterized by the manifestation of natural law peculiar to it, and the distinct languages (signs, metaphors, and words), governments (divine, aristocratic commonwealths, and popular commonwealths and monarchies), as well as systems of jurisprudence (mystic theology, heroic jurisprudence, and the natural equity of free commonwealths) that define them.

In other words, Vico outlines three distinct phases for societies:

  • An age of gods, when man and immortal walk amongst each other
  • An age of heroes, when the gods have departed, but their children or disciples perform wonders with their power
  • An age of men, when their is equality and democracy among men, and a lack of the supernatural

(Yes, I’m grotesquely paraphrasing.  Bear with me on this one for a moment).

When I left eBay in 2007 to join LinkedIn, many people asked me why I was interested in joining a startup at that time.  Being an avid fan of Greek Mythology, I told friends that there were three phases to the tech company lifecycle in Silicon Valley:

  • The golden age, when gods (aka founders and first employees) walk the floors.  This is a time of incredible vision, passion, and risk.   The events and people of this era become myth and legend rapidly.  The company typically at this time has a product/concept, but no proven business model or engagement with customers.  The company is usually measured in tens of employees.
  • The bronze age, when the gods give way to the heroes, the first wave of executives who help grow and scale the company and fulfill its destiny.  Usually this is a time when the business model has proven out, and the larger risk to the company is its ability to manage growth and scale the organization in both talent and execution.  This is still a time of passionate debate and eccentricity, but now at a larger scale as the organization and business broadens.  This is when the company goes from tens of employees to thousands.
  • The iron age, when the gods and heroes have fled, and the company is managed as a large, public technology company.  At this point, the company is typically measured in tens of thousands.

Amazing similarity… no doubt both Vico & I were both fans of the classics.

When I joined eBay in 2003, it turns out that I joined the company well into its bronze age.  Many of the early employees (and a founder) had left, but most of the original heroes who worked under them and with them remained.   There was no separate corporate entity, and the PayPal acquisition had just happened.  In 2003, a product manager would still present a product strategy directly to Meg at times.  But by the time 2007 rolled around, as many of the heroes  departed, it was clear that eBay had entered its iron age.

Obviously, there are later phases for technology companies that can be interesting.  (Believe me, as someone who joined Apple in the mid-1990s.)  And there are always outliers (Google has stayed in its bronze age longer than most.)  But these phases do a fair job of describing the cultural dynamics of those first few phases of a technology company.

For companies, there are no clear delineations between the ages.  The transitions tend to be gradual, and as often as not tend to reflect the four-year pattern for stock option vesting schedules.  In the last few years, however, I’ve found this framework fairly effective in describing how company cultures evolve, and how that influences the enjoyment and job satisfaction of employees who prefer one phase over another.

Maybe the reason this analogy has been useful for me personally is because, as Vico supposed, it reflects a more general description of how groups of people evolve socially when they dedicate themselves to a single social contract.  For Vico, that was a nation.  For Silicon Valley, it’s a start-up.  It’s interesting to consider that the venture capital financing model and stock option vesting model tends to encourage this type of phasing almost naturally over the growth of a new technology venture.

Something to think about, of course.