Heidi Rozen gave a great talk at the DMGT Technology Summer School simply titled “Failure”. A Silicon Valley Alumni she has started companies, worked for Apple under Steve Jobs and now is involved in Venture Capital so she had her fair share of stories. I was really impressed with her perspective on development and seemed to have a very Lean outlook after all of her experiences. I collated the points of her talk below and most of it resonated very well with how I am currently thinking.
- It’s the business model, stupid – first place to start when a company isn’t working
- Most technical decisions are actually business decision
- It’s not just about money, it’s also opportunity cost
- Support the lunatic fringe
- Understand the assumptions so you can quickly adjust when things don’t work out and they don’t
- Innovate around what is core for you and outsource the rest
- You are building for the platform of tomorrow, not of today
- You must understand your customers ecosystem and fit in effortlessly
- If you can’t win then recognise early and deal with it
- Think backwards from your customers
- Narrow the customer set to provide 100% solution
- Understand the ecosystem and the business model
- Build 95% solution and pay 5% is Google solution
- 60% of VC’s don’t return on their capital