Here’s a braindump of some things I’ve learned over the years. Caveat lector: my experiences inform this, and they aren’t representative of all the possibilities, etc. Ignore this if you want; I’ve been meaning to write some notes for Kiwis or Aussies who are joining startups for the first time, and someone just became my excuse.

Maturity

Startups are very immature organisations, unlike a corporate or university – I always describe it as “there’s more work to do than there are people to do it”. So there’s huge opportunity to do stuff you wouldn’t ordinarily do, which is great. There’s also a lot less support, which can be unnerving. There’s nothing preventing you from working super-long hours and burning out, and only your coworkers to notice (HR is almost non-existent in very early stage startups). And even compensation is weird (“stock options”?) and can bite you if you’re not prepared.

There’s an open consultation about to end, on the changes MBIE would like to make to NZ’s R&D incentives. In particular, they’ll phase out the Callaghan Growth Grants and replace them with R&D tax credits. As the FAQ says, There are differences in the definition of eligible expenditure between the Growth Grant and the proposed R&D Tax Incentive (for instance, overseas expenditure on R&D). The proposed R&D Tax Incentive has no R&D intensity threshold, a much higher cap and lower minimum R&D expenditure threshold than the Growth Grant. Some firms may get less money, but others might get more.

I was just catching up on Tim Kong’s excellent blog, when I read this great quote from Dan Carter:

“One thing we talk about over and over with this current All Blacks side is about never focusing on the outcome. We view the outcome as a function of following our processes. That might sound a little dry to some, but looking back at every major loss we’ve had over the years, they mostly started with us thinking too far ahead of the game.”

(Wynyard Group, an NZ tech high-growth company [or, perhaps, not-so-high growth] just entered voluntary administration. On Twitter, a friend was adamant bad luck had nothing to do with it. Instead of a tweetstorm, here’s my response in a vintage retro format known as “a blog post”)

You can always look back at every failure and assign one or more causes, because SOMETHING always kills the startup.  And someone is always responsible for the fatal decisions. That’s “pilot error” for startups.

It’s bloody hard to build something new into the world.  Don’t let anyone tell you it’s easy: there’s a lot of unfunded and unrecognised work that you have to do before you can get to the point where fame and/or fortune arrive.  And once you’ve finished the painful birth of your new service or product into the world, maybe even defining an entirely new product category or unserviced market segment, dozens of unimaginative parasites will appear from nowhere and try to eat your lunch.

[I posted this on a Slack recently, and would like to give it a longer life than Slack’s 10,000 line scrollback. –Nat]

Socially constructed roles like “douche-bro” and “rock star teacher” are generally strongly viewpoint dependent. The rhetoric of continuous improvement is part of self-help, get rich quick, professional development, factory management, military training, science, and more.

What separates these is the outcome they’re working towards, and how we judge those outcomes. So sales bros high-fiving each other in startup land are heroes of their own story, which is about self-improvement and making the world better through optimised supply chains of just-in-time whatever; and at the same time their goals of corporate success and self-aggrandisement makes them villains of our stories where meaningful work is in service of others, where empathy and humility are treasured, and where personal profit is awkward and not to be pre-eminently sought. So if you want more people to shun values you don’t like, teach the values you do like.

Teamwork shares a lot of good practices with parenting.  This lesson was no exception ….  I realised fairly early on in my time as a parent that I had a tendency to fail, bigtime, by blasting my kids for something they hadn’t done.  The pattern became evident: I see something, I conclude they are rogues and bad actors, I give them both barrels, then after the tears are mopped up it becomes clear that I didn’t see what I thought I saw, or they were actually doing the right thing when they did it.

When I was recruiting the fabulous Chris McDowall for a job, he asked me “why do YOU work here?”  I replied that I was learning lots.  He then said the most important thing anyone has said to me this decade: “what are you learning?”

I goldfished for a few seconds and then had to say, “I can’t remember right now, but it’s all GOOD STUFF.”  See, I was learning but I wasn’t paying the right amount of attention what I was learning, so it wasn’t sticking.  This matches good educational practice too: after you do something, take time to reflect on what worked well and what didn’t so you can be more deliberate in improving the next time you tackle it.

I was asked for comment by Bill Bennet from the NZ Herald, for a piece on Kiwi startups moving to Silicon Valley.  He built a nice little article, in which “Torkington says” features heavily.  My policy is that if I email journalists, I’ll blog my side of the conversation for transparency’s sake.

I had two more comments responding to ideas he’d thrown in email, but I’ll wait to see if they make it to print before blogging them (don’t want to steal his thunder–I know there are millions poised on my every word and I’d hate to deny him traffic *wink*).

In this internal 1972 DEC memo (PDF) about the PDP-16 re-release, modern tech companies should find plenty of familiar territory:

While the PDP-16 has been marginally successful to date,
some problems have been noted.
1. Since the product, in its present form, is relatively
   complex, it is difficult to train salesmen.
2. Since the product is currently offered as a set of options
   uniquely configured for each situation, the salesman does
   not have the feeling of security of a predefined box that
   he can see and feel.
3. Although the PDP-16 has been well received by computernicks,
   it is still somewhat of a mystery to neophytes.
All of these hang-ups can be traced to a single source,
namely, inadequate product identification.

There’s also a chart that goes up and to the right, hand-drawn grids that would eventually be spreadsheets, and an org-chart.  Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.