Startupification: Recent Episodes
Steven Drost, Matt Farrugia
Matt and Steven recorded live at Turing Fest 2022. The big topic of conversation was the announcement of the Scottish Government’s Tech Scaler contract to Codebase (disclosure: Steven works for Codebase). Hear questions from Matt and the audience about this and get the inside skinny from Steven on what it is, and what it might mean for the Scottish tech eco-system.
Timestamps:
2:30 The three types of people into web3
6:00 web1 vs web2 vs web3
11:00 What actually is decentralisation? What tech has enabled it?
22:30 To what extent is web3 replicating web2?
27:30 The value of digital ownership
39:00 Wait, what is ownership?
45:00 Thinking beyond greed
57:00 Community first: geodesic vs geodetic
Timestamps:
2:00 Touchlab - making skin for robots
6:00 Uses in manufacturing and logistics
10:00 The state of manufacturing
13:00 Is Touchlab building deep tech or a product?
22:00 Reverse engineering nature
26:00 Robots: To be feared?
30:00 How do Deep Tech companies get funded?
37:00 Finding amazing people in Deep Tech
Timestamps:
2:15 A bit about Ooni and where the idea came from
6:45 The true value of a £7.5k crowdfunding campaign
12:30 Enabling communities to do cool stuff
16:30 Creating a new product category and iterating on hardware
24:00 Staying innovative and understanding customers
28:30 The difficulty of productising the Tartine and working with influencers
41:15 Impact led entrepreneurship - what drives it?
Timestamps:
3:00 Big trends in AgriTech from the last 13,000 years
8:00 What are vertical farms?
12:00 The economic benefits
19:00 Emerging business models - farms-as-a-service
21:30 Investment in vertical farms and areas of innovation
26:00 Local food supported by global innovation
29:00 The market - just how big are farms?
35:00 The software behind AgriTech - how do farmers feel about FaaS?
41:00 AgriTech adoption - where we are on the S curve
44:30 Cybersecurity in AgriTech
50:00 What does the competition look like?
Timestamps:
2:00 Bill’s intro, and his interest in scientific policy
3:30 The future of hydrogen, both green and blue
11:00 Is blue hydrogen really environmentally friendly?
21:00 Building innovation into EnergyTech
31:00 What opportunities are there?
35:00 The macro optimism of VC mapped to energy and why energy companies need to innovate
45:00 Renewables and/or carbon capture
52:00 Can we become the decarbonisation capital of the world?
57:00 Where should people look to learn more / train in this new world?
Timestamps:
2:00 What are NFTs?
6:00 Creating scarcity in digital
11:15 How this affects real life scarcity
15:30 Why bother adding scarcity to digital?
22:00 Conspicuous consumption
25:00 The fungibility of art
29:00 Why do we care so much about how art is made?
35:00 Who’s driving this change?
42:00 The fractional participation hellscape
46:00 Whataboutism
53:00 Other collective fictions
Timestamps:
1:00 Michael - from local news to nationals to codeclan to instagram to conde nast to beams
7:00 Beams - building communities on social media
11:00 How do you build a community product in 2021?
20:30 Clubhouse as a platform for VCs and German hip hop
30:00 Old media vs Substack
38:00 Curation
45:00 Building in values to a product
Timestamps:
3:30 Introducing Zara and EdVenture
7:30 What’s involved on the EdVenture programme
12:00 The role of business schools, knowledge transfer partnerships, etc.
20:00 How student debt is holding back the entrepreneurial ecosystem
24:30 Risk in entrepreneurship at University
28:00 What EdVenture is looking at - VC and Impact
31:00 Gen Z and the future of startups
37:00 Building things that should exist
42:00 How VCs are learning about the world
46:30 Gender in student ventures
55:00 Finding your entrepreneurial energy
Timestamps:
1:00 A bit about Daisy.
3:55 Zebras and Unicorns
10:00 Do current playbooks solve the right problems?
14:00 Where innovation in finance will come from
17:00 Bankification
20:30 The role of PE in the future
28:00 Where is money getting pumped from in the future?
34:00 Expanding local maxima
40:00 Infusing positivity into a movement that criticizes the old way
48:00 The opportunity to be ahead of the game in Scotland
50:45 Are Zebras also just following SV playbooks?
52:00 Memesis
54:15 Is VC changing?
55:30 What does success look like for a Scottish entrepreneur?
1:00:00 Being communitarian
Timestamps:
2:00 The current Boeing accelerator programme
5:30 Innovation in aerospace, and lack of playbooks for sustainability
10:00 What drives innovation in aerospace?
11:30 What makes an industry specific accelerator successful?
15:15 CVC in aerospace
17:00 VCification
21:00 How should an incumbent support startups?
26:00 Education in corporates
29:30 Where is industry 4.0 heading?
35:00 Contrasting failure in startups vs incumbents
41:00 Do companies need to move at the pace startups do?
47:00 Industrial ecosystems reinventing themselves
53:00 Missing institutions
57:00 Iterating around hardware
0:45 The origin of the word accelerator, and the origin of the Edinburgh tech ecosystem
3:00 The early days of VC blogging
9:30 The Boulder Thesis and creating startup ecosystems
16:00 Complexity in communities
25:00 Playbooks vs Complex Systems
30:00 Topophilia and the love of place
38:00 Is there a need for a new institution within ecosystems to help understand complexity?
40:30 Inclusivity in ecosystems
2:00 Where the term bundling comes from.
5:00 Telecoms: Triple play and quad play
6:05 Being bundle blind
11:00 Is bundling just an enforced cross sell?
15:00 Homogeneous vs heterogeneous bundling
20:00 Is it up to startups to unbundle?
24:00 Apple One
30:00 Cultures created via bundles
33:00 Unbundling and D2C
37:00 .. and back to culture.
42:00 Not everyone is the same - the benefit of not bundling
48:00 Rome with no coffee
51:00 What does bundle thinking do to help you for PMF, exiting, etc.
Timestamps:
3:00 The state of LawTech
6:30 Where does innovation in LawTech come from
12:30 Does the partnership model being so immovable make innovation impossible?
15:00 Internal and external empathy
19:30 Rejigging law firms to encourage innovation
24:30 Building products internally
29:00 Solving productivity gaps, curation of new products, and law eating software
31:00 Has “legal tech” underdelivered so far?
37:00 Will there be a new persona for the lawyer enabled by tech?
42:00 How much the law drives change
Timestamps:
13:00 Introducing Gary
4:30 Intrapreneurship vs entrepreneurship
6:30 Corporate vs startup playbooks
9:00 Working with startups
11:00 The role of corporate support for startups
17:00 Do startup business models gel with corporate sales?
21:00 The importance of having a Systems Integrator
27:00 Does the SI route work in the UK?
29:30 Case study: Dropbox and Box
33:00 The long sales cycle of corporates
41:00 Incubators and accelerators role in educating startups on all this
43:00 Understanding what a corporate needs from a startup
Timestamps:
1:55 Mark’s CV, startups, Cisco, Skyscanner and beyond
3:15 Unicorns, ecosystems, and education
4:40 The Logan Report
5:15 Unicorns
8:15 The startup/scaleup funnel and education
12:30 Playbooks, frameworks, and models
16:30 Heuristics and creativity
24:00 The place of Silicon Valley in playbooks
28:00 Solving the cold start problem of an ecosystem
34:00 The value of iteration in an ecosystem
42:00 Tipping points
47:30 The top of the education funnel - making computer science exciting for kids
55:45 Antifragility
Timestamps:
6:00 Genevieve’s CV
8:00 Introducing the Autonomy, Agency and Assurance Institute (3Ai)
10:00 What it’s like running a startup in a University
16:00 What is the vision behind 3Ai
20:00 Technical fetishism
26:00 The importance of history and place in how things get built
31:00 Avoiding getting bogged down in mimicry - of other places, or the past.
36:00 What is the ontology/building blocks of 3Ai?
38:00 Getting out of normative notions with feminist/queer theory - how do you encourage playfullness in a system?
40:00 Is credentialism changing?
Timestamps:
1.45 What is GPT-3? The ultimate autocomplete tool.
2.45 A bit about the creators of GPT-3, OpenAI
7:50 How does GPT-3 work?
12:15 What are they spending all that money on?
16:30 What’s the driving force behind it?
21:00 A few examples of what GPT-3 can create
26:15 GPT-3 and the Turing Test
35:00 Understanding analogies
36:45 The consequences for society (and developers)
42:00 GPT-3 and NoCode
47:30 The future of work for data scientists
49:30 GPT-3 in the Stack
53:00 Ethical concerns
Timestamps:
1:45 The big Twitter hack
6:45 How did it happen? Was it an inside job?
7:50 Types of hacks
14:00 Potted history of cybersecurity and the current metaphors
22:00 Cybersecurity in the time of the cloud
28:00 The kill chain and why people are the route of entry
31:30 The evolution of the cyber criminal
33:30 Is there more talk of cybersecurity these days?
34:00 Why it’s easier for cybersecurity companies to get product-market fit
37:00 Retrofitting cyber security with Darktrace
44:00 Staying agile to beat the bad guys
46:00 Are innovation and cybersecurity pulling in different directions?
51:45 Having a risk framework - NHS Digital vs DeepMind
55:30 How do we build security into the startup stack?
2:00 What are Growth Loops?
5:30 Growth Loops vs Funnels
7:00 Non linearity in growth
9:00 The platonistic breakdown of growth loops
12:45 User generated content loops
15:30 Uniqueness in growth loops - linking in channel, pricing market, product etc.
21:00 The background of growth loops - Brian Balfour, Andrew Chen and David Skok
25:30 Harry Dry
28:00 HubSpot and the new marketing
31:00 Viral marketing modeling
41:00 Picnic’s growth strategy
45:00 Picking the moment of highest return on a loop
48:00 When is it important to think about growth loops?
53:00 Leveraging other platforms for growth loops
55:00 Are growth loops a new thing?
Timestamps
3:00 What is NoCode?
6:30 The NoCode “movement”
8:00 Who is NoCode for?
10:00 Indie hackers vs established businesses
14:00 The new Stacks
18:00 The economics of NoCode
22:00 Constraints in NoCode
25:30 .. and the creativity that fosters.
29:00 Matt’s NoCode Tunnock’s Project
34:00 NoCode creating tech inclusion
42:00 Where does the value lie in NoCode?
48:00 NoCode as curation
53:00 Will we just end up with loads of broken companies?
1:00:00 NoCode as Pulp Fiction
Timestamps
1:35 What is B2D?
3:35 Is it a product strategy or a go to market playbook?
4:30 A brief history of B2D
6:00 GitHub, Twilio, and Stripe
12:15 The empowerment of developers
14:30 B2D vs other tools, ie why isn’t Slack B2D?
19:00 .. and Slack vs Microsoft Teams
22:00 Startups + corporates participating more in the world of developers
28:00 B2D curation and onboarding
34:00 IT and developer culture
37:00 The shift to bottom up adoption, ie Adobe
38:45 A look at the biggest B2D company
56:00 B2... IT?
Timestamps
1:30 An overview of the healthcare landscape, 10% of UK workforce work in health and care
NHS biggest employer in Europe, but healthcare hasn’t gone through the tech revolution that fintech etc have.
5:15 Big areas - Digital Transform, how Healthcare is delivered (and unbundling), BioInnovation in therapeutics and treatment, Computational modelling, Robotics and Automation (maybe).
8:15 Startups selling to the NHS
10:45 Telehealth
12:45 The story of Incredible Health and unbundling
17:30 Taking a part of healthcare and reimagining around modern practice, eg PillPack
21:50 Public vs private healthcare markets, the Venture Capital view on healthcare
35:15 Apple and Google in healthcare
37:30 .. and Amazon’s acquisitions and healthcare explorations
44:00 PillPack, iteration and sustaining innovation.
51:00 Computational modelling, data science and privacy
57:00 Therapeutics - is it a space for tech startups?
1:01:30 Return to startup thinking, and venture capital
Timestamps
2:00 Context: Marc Andreessen’s essay, It’s Time to Build
5:45 Further context: Why Software is eating the World
11:00 It’s Time to Build - Things aren’t being built, coronavirus is showing that we can build faster, stagnation,
18:00 Why is everything moving so fast in the world of bits, but not the world of bricks? Lack of desire, inertia
20:30 The politics of the post
22:00 What the opportunity for non software companies looks like
25:00 Short term responses to Covid-19 vs jobs of the future
30:00 Critiques of the Marc Andreessen’s post
33:45 Ezra Klein’s response - the problem with the current political setup, inertia and vetocracy
39:00 Building in a world of atoms - sustaining vs iterative
42:30 Why do we have Twitter and no flying cars?
49:00 The need to create mechanisms for safer bet investments that are better for society
52:00 Allowing for failure in the world of atoms
57:00 Creating new priorities and venture building
1:00:00 Where will these new priorities come from?
1:04:00 Does he mean it when he’s challenging the left to prove a superior model?
Timestamps
1:50 What is a go market strategy?
3:00 Tactics and execution - what is your clever plan to get your product bought? Level 0 - Build it and they will come. Level 1 - Have ANY sort of plan. Level 2 - Have a CLEVER plan. Level 3 - Use someone else’s plan.
5:36 Setting the scene - Sales and Marketing - Lesley’s Compass
12:00 Toothpaste vs Jet Engines
16:00 Distribution Strategy - Zero Touch, Low Touch, who the buyer is
21:00 Disruption vs Diffusion - Facebook spitting out startups
33:00 Go to market strategies in an era of Bring Your Own Device and Human Avoidance Software
42:00 Channel partnerships
46:00 How do you get started with a go to market strategy?
57:00 Should you build a channel partnership early?
References:
https://firstround.com/review/leslies-compass-a-framework-for-go-to-market-strategy/
https://tomtunguz.com/b2d-go-to-market/
https://a16z.com/2017/06/09/distribution-channel-partnerships-alex-rampell/
Timestamps:
2:30 The difference between AR and VR.
4:30 The Future of Work - Immersive training, Augmented Intelligence, Making remote work less isolating
12:00 Are we all going to be using VR to work in the next 5 years?
17:00 Is AR a good interface?
21:00 Google Glasses and fashion
25:15 AR, VR and dystopias - security, liberty, privacy, and health
30:00 VR as a step up in remote sales
36:00 The future of leisure
41:15 Crossing the Chasm of VR
47:00 Back to AR: HoloLens and Magic Leap
50:00 Apple’s eventual takeover of the AR space
57:00 The rise of AR/VR in China
2:00 Startup programmes saturation, Google, Twilio, IBM, YCombinator, ..
3:00 The Graph, explained
6:00 Which verticals are on the left or right of the graph?
9:30 What does each space look like? Startups - fizzy, bootstrapping, failure. Lots culturally though. Scaleups - shedding generalisms, getting rid of playbooks, making your own playbooks. Big companies - you lose the learning/growth, get into maintenance mode.
14:50 Riffing on the galleon metaphor
18:00 Microsoft as a “startup”
21:30 Loonshots, Safi Bahcall. How can you be a startup and a big company at the same time?
24:30 How startups work with big companies
29:00 Levels of corporate engagement: Level 0 - we should do a proof of concept. Level 1 - we’ll do a POC, but it’s mostly for our learning. Level 2 - The startup is learning, and there is exchange of value. Level 3 - very clear POC, with accurate milestones.
35:00 Why do big companies do POCs?
39:30 Should big companies be aspiring to be lean? IE launching MVPs, iterating, etc..
43:00 SpaceX vs Boeing as a case study - mentality, culture, and fail whales. Why vs How.
Timestamps:
3:30 What is unit economics? The gross margin on a per unit sale. Value creation vs value capture. SaaS, recurring revenues, ..
7:00 The startup path to understanding unit economics, through the lens of an investor. [Link: a16z’s views on investing in unit economics (vs team, product etc.)]
12:00 Case Study (of bad UE) - Casper, the mattress people. An IPO as a moment of truth.
16:00 Pricing as a reflection of a founder’s experience/cultural values/confidence/ambition
20:00 The UE of how to build a $100 million business (Christoph Janz & Boris Wertz)
32:30 Turning an understanding of UE to action - LTVs, CACs, no touch sales, inbound marketing
35:30 Moz, content marketing, #whiteboardfridays
41:00 The need for sales people (and pricing high)
43:00 Churn, Net Negative Churn, and Churn in B2C [David Skok (Matrix Partners)]
46:00 Bebo, the the viral coefficient, and capturing lifetime value
48:00 Cohort analysis in churn
51:30 WhatsApp, and hunting amoebas
53:00 Why is noone hunting elephants?
57:00 Hiring misfit sales people
Timestamps:
3:00 Jobs To Be Done, and the influence of Clayton Christensen
4:50 A History of JTBD - what it is, the Innovator’s Dilemma, disruptive vs sustaining innovation
12:00 Making things that customers actually want
15:00 JTBD for startups & corporates (& VCs)
17:00 The famous JTBD milkshake example
25:00 Turning JTBD into action.
30:00 Jobs as progress, or jobs as activities
35:15 Kodak picking the wrong Job
41:00 User stories vs JTBD
46:30 “Does it deserve to be?” - JTBD from a developer/product manager’s perspective
48:00 How does JTBD tally with software products?
55:30 Translating JTBD interviews into sales and marketing
Timestamps:
2:00 Product Market Fit - what is it?
04:30 “You’ll know when you don’t have it, you’ll know when you do have it”
06:20 Where does PMF start?
13:30 Product User Fit, CEO Magic,
19:30 Who is the CEO before and after PMF?
24:10 PMF with respect to products & services
27:00 Pivots pivots pivots
36:00 Favoured approaches to finding PMF
40:00 Superman’s approach to understanding PMF
47:00 PMF in B2B vs B2C
48:00 European attitudes to PMF
Timestamps:
2.19 What are network effects?
4:05 Where does the idea of network effects come from?
10:10 The crystallisation of an ecosystem as network effects
15:25 Return of the Stack
17:30 Network effects in startups
20:30 Types of companies that have network effects
24:25 Network effects as moats, and why VCs love them.
28:00 LinkedIn as a case study
34:10 When do network effects fail?
38:00 When network effects happen accidentally - or not
43:05 The long tail of network effects
46:40 The cold start problem
49:00 Virality vs network effects
53:30 Do network effects imply the formation of monopolies?
56:00 Fortnite as a worried monopoly
1:01:20 Internal vs external networks, and the future of Slack
Timestamps
1:54 What do we mean by X-Tech?
4:50 Matt’s categories of X-Tech
8:05 Why do some new types of technology not get an X-Tech?
12:05 Neologisms to help communication
14:05 Is X-Tech just another word for digital transformation?
18:10 Can a Y-Tech company take lessons from an X-Tech company?
25:40 Deep dive into PropTech, WeWork, opportunity, and failure
35:00 Is X-Tech even important?
39:34 Will the future of X be defined by X or Tech?
41:30 Is X-Tech just software applied to the service sector?
48:20 X-Tech in corporates
51:15 Z-Techs - what’s still to come?
55:45 What can be done to create more X-Tech startups?
Timestamps:
3:42 What is the Stack, and where does it come from?
12:57 Stack dissatisfaction, and its overuse
16:50 Startup vs corporate understanding of the Stack .
20:52 .. and how it is lost in translation. The Stack is about interfacing between layers
24:12 Why isn’t the Stack based on a hierarchy of needs?
26:32 The overuse of computational metaphors without engineering rigour
31:17 Value chains vs the Stack
35:12 Breaking Bad as disruption of the Stack and/or value chain
37:20 Creating actions from the Stack ..
42:40 .. and building a business with knowledge of the Stack
50:12 Understanding your place in the Stack, and moving through it
52:52 Antifragility
Timestamps
3:00 What is Deep Tech?
4:49 Is Deep Tech a market failure?
11:09 ARM vs Apple as Deep Tech case studies
11:25 Startups & Deep Tech
14:20 Deep Tech waits for a product to make it shine
16:32 When Deep Tech companies think they're Product companies
21:29 (Deep Tech vs Product) vs (Product vs Feature)
26:03 What does the world with AI look like?
35:10 Deep Tech in Ecosystems
38:37 Funding in Deep Tech
47:50 Return to Ecosystems: Deep Tech towns and Product towns
56:00 What cities want to be?
1:01:17 Is a Deep Tech city anchored on a University?
1:06:15 Where should Deep Tech companies start up?
Timestamps
1:05 What is a playbook?
4:39 Where does the idea of a playbook come from?
6:22 Theory vs practice
7:55 Stripe’s B2D playbook
11:07 A playbook as an allegory
13:21 Memesis (again)
18:05 When you’re no longer following - Samsung vs Apple
1:16 Atlassian’s team playbook
21:23 Checking the impossible is still impossible
31:52 Comparing ecosystems to playbooks
33:55 Replacing playbooks with narratives
39:15 Creating (and iterating) a culture playbook, Netflix through to HubSpot
41:35 Is a playbook just how people learn stuff?
43:25 First Principles Thinking
49:27 Fake it until you make it with Aristotle
54:20 Playbooks as a learning model
Further resources:
Stripe’s B2D playbook
Atlassian’s Team Playbook
Apple’s Walled Garden
Netflix’s Culture Deck
First Principles Thinking
Timestamps:
5:00 What is an ecosystem?
9:31 What have you got without entrepreneurs (as opposed to service companies) and investors
10:43 Quality of funding - what makes investors good investors?
18:00 How the state can derisk an ecosystem
23:24 Operator angels - people who are in a fast growth startup but also actively investing
27:10 Startup talent - what’s the experience level of your ecosystem?
32:25 The value of success stories, and local maxima
36:10 Academia and the role of Universities
42:33 Corporates
47:00 Mimesis
50:00 Cities and being good citizens
53:16 Ecosystems as a network effect
1:00:25 The future of ecosystems - how software is changing the world
1:00:33 What cities globally will thrive?