3 common routes to the success of Steve Jobs, Warren Buffett and the Cancer

Having read the three biographies of Steve Jobs, Warren Buffett and the Cancer simultaneously, I couldn't help but realize the commonalities that each biography shared. It's not the first thing that comes to mind, considering the diversity of the three: A hippie entrepreneural icon; a famous investor who was the richest man on earth; a disease of age and irony. Nonetheless, all 3 were extremely successful in what they each set out to be. What made them so? What is common and shared amongst the three, that we could possibly learn and adopt in our lives, no matter what we do?

1. Focus. 
• Buffett was a very focused man. Although he worshiped and respected his idol, Ben Graham, he insisted on a starkly different investing outlook from Graham. While Graham liked to diversify his investments, Buffett was all about being focused. Know what you want, and go all in. As such, whenever Buffett won, he won it big. Furthermore, putting all eggs into a single basket, Buffett was 'forced' to do extremely thorough analyses and homework on what he wanted to invest in, before he put any of his money in. Because the stakes were high, he made sure he understood the business well enough, minimized risks and ensured a good margin of safety in his investments. This, in turn, resulted in a much greater success rate as compared to any half-hearted analyses of many more investments. 
• Jobs also believed in being focused. When he took over Apple in 1997, he dramatically axed most of the products the company had in progress. Instead, he simply went up to the whiteboard, and drew two lines to form 4 quadrants -- Pro/Customer/Desktop/Portable. He decided that Apple would only make 4 products, but make them extremely well. We eventually saw that he was right.
• Cancers don't spark off at multiple locations at the same time. Solid tumors originate from a single primary site, from a single cell that had attained initiating mutations. Everything develops from that single cell. 
2. Opportunities are right in front of your eyes.
• Buffett started his business career at a very young age. He was aware of his surroundings, and grabbed any opportunity that came his way. Be it pinball machines or selling cars, his eyes were always open and looking out for opportunities. Nothing unique, nothing special, but from his daily life. 
• Jobs led Apple to create the best products simply from his displeasure in then available technology. He hated the walkman, and wanted a device that could store more digital music than just a few songs. He disliked having to press buttons on mp3s to go through songs one by one. Thus, the iPod with a wheel. He wanted to be able to make calls without the bulkiness of a keypad and excess buttons. Thus, the iPhone with a touchscreen. 
• Cancer arises from nothing other than twisted, altered pathways that already exist in the normal cell. Cancer is not 'created'. Rather, it modifies what has always been there. The well known tumor suppressor gene, TP53, exists to make sure normal, healthy cells do not divide unnecessarily. Over half of human cancers are known to inactivate TP53, thus resulting in uncontrolled cell division forming large tumor masses. The same goes for other cellular pathways that regulate cell division, cell motility and blood vessel formation. It is an unfortunate paradox, a deformed reflection of how our body created so many ways to 'protect' itself and ensure a regulated environment. 
3. Love what you do. No, I don't mean be okay with what you do.. nor to simply like some work on some days. I mean LOVE it to bits. 
• Buffett loved numbers, and he loved the revelation they always brought to him after collecting tonnes of data and analyzing them. He could spend hours forgetting his food and his sleep, just hovering over stacks of stocks or business plans. 
• Jobs was the same. He adored combining design with technology, and never gave up a single moment to work on that fusion. He was concerned about every single detail of design and technology of his products, even as a CEO or chairman of the company. When he was ousted from Apple, he never gave up, but instead started another company, NeXT, to work towards the same goal of fusing design with technology. His decision to take over Pixar was similar. His passion was unmistakable in every thing he did throughout his career.
• "Love" in cancer can be seen in its persistence to overcome. There are thousands of different checkpoints and regulators in each human cell that keeps everything in order. But the cancer cell overcomes each of these. A cancer cell needs to grow and multiply rapidly, thus it mutated/silenced/deleted/overcame cell division and cell growth regulators. After growing rapidly and forming large cell masses, these tumor masses are far from the nearest blood capillary, thus face a lack of access to oxygen and other nutrients needed for growth. Cancer cells thus develop a way to attract blood vessel formation within the tumor masses, a process called angiogenesis. To spread from the primary tumor site to the rest of the body (metastasize), cancer cells need to learn to move. They thus had to overcome cell motility restrictions, squeeze into the blood stream, and adapt to a new environment. The persistence to overcome all these seemingly seemless checkpoints, is what made cancer 'successful' (and scary). 

Steve Jobs passed away from pancreatic cancer; Warren Buffett lost his first wife, Susie Buffett, to lung cancer; Cancer, having known to exist for hundreds of years, is rightfully crowned the emperor of all maladies.

PR hacking -- getting your first hundred media coverage

I recently attended another meetup on PR hacking, and how to get 200+ media outlets in 21 countries to love your startup. The speaker was Ben Kaplan, founder and CEO of PR Hacker, which basically helps startups hack their way through marketing their product. It was a very interesting session, and I had some great takeaways from Ben:

1. Relate your product to timely news or generate the news yourself. Why wait for news to match your product, when you can create your own? For example, if your product is about how to help improve posture of office workers, link it to a recent piece of news that mentioned a celebrity getting ill from poor posture. If there are no relevant news available, generate your own news about how facing the computer for long hours results in bad posture and poor health. Do surveys and interview people to get statistics of how many people get back aches, and how many of those work at a desk-bound job. (Of course, do make sure that your news are reliable) 
2. Make it easy for media outlets to say "Yes!" Customize your tactic of contacting media outlets to each one of them. For example, find the best times to contact a morning show producer, which would probably be different from the best times to contact an evening news producer. Measure the response rates with the various methods, and use the best ones for other similar media outlets. And of course, leverage the numbers game in your favor -- the more you contact, the more positive response you will receive. Another trick to increasing the number of "yes"es, is to choose email over a phone call. Why? Because if you were contacting the wrong person, it is much easier to forward an email than to pass your phone number to the right contact.
3. Create strong "traction steps". A media hit is not the ultimate goal -- it is essential to follow up after the exposure. A traction step would be the next step of action you hope the viewer would take, be it visit your website, sign up for a beta, or call a phone number. Include that action step in your media exposure, so your 'contact' with the audience does not end right there. 
4. Adapt your approach to the specific media type. To make an impact, tell a good story, and optimize it! Optimization is done largely by trial and error, and takes a lot of time. However, the effort is definitely worth it, because reaching out to media without an optimal story line is almost as good as not getting any media exposure at all! Try different ways of telling stories, try different stories, basically try, try, and try more! You'll definitely get better as you go (and remember to measure the impact of each iteration)
5. Create waves of media coverage. Having one giant wave of media coverage is not sufficient. Instead, when the ripples from that first wave has almost died down, start another wave, with a different / wider set of media. When that dies down, start yet another one. Such multiple waves not only keep your customers coming, but may also serve to interest potential investors, when they realize there's always something new whenever they meet with you. An active startup is definitely much better than a stale one ;)

Negotiation and Expectation

I have had the privilege of having been taught by Margaret Neale, a Professor from the Stanford Graduate School of Business, whose research specialty is in negotiation. Here's a publicly available webinar on her lecture:

Negotiation by Margaret Neale

It is a very thorough lecture on the basics of negotiation, as well as tricks of the trade (more about that next time). What was new and thought-provoking in this lecture, was the following statements by her:

"You're underachieving if you have low expectations for yourself... Expectations drive behavior. The higher your expectations, the better you tend to perform." As such, setting higher expectations can actually improve your performance during a negotiation. You have to be willing to fall off the horse, to push your limits, to get the best you can do. Having a mindset of being willing to fall off the horse means being willing to walk away from a deal, to say no, if the deal is not good. A good negotiation leads you to become better than before you started. The key is, however, not to fall off the horse, but to become so good at the trade that you never have to fall off the horse. This takes not only tonnes of practice, but also a lot of discipline.

Margaret A. Neale

Adams Distinguished Professor of Management, Stanford Graduate School of Business

Margaret Neale’s research focuses primarily on negotiation and team performance. Her work has extended judgment and decision-making research from cognitive psychology to the field of negotiation. In particular, she studies cognitive and social processes that produce departures from effective negotiating behavior. Within the context of teams, her work explores aspects of team composition and group process that enhance the ability of teams to share the information necessary for learning and problem solving in both face-to-face and virtual team environments.

From Bench to Boardroom

Published in the journal Nature Biotechnology, Bassil Dahiyat describes his journey from being a PhD student at California Institute of Technology, to being CEO of a life science startup. He offers the following advice to anyone trying to follow a similar path:

1. Establish credibility. 'Nuff said. 
2. Develop business model for CUSTOMERS, not your product/technology/service. A big tendency for entrepreneurs with academic backgrounds is to have the product ready before even considering the market or the customers. The product is usually their expertise, and was developed from grad school / postdoc and the like, instead of finding a customer and market need first. This reversal of sequence sometimes leads to not having a product-market-fit, which is essential for success. (More about how to develop product-market-fit next time)
3. Network, network, network!! No matter how well known you are in the academic field where you developed your product, the business will involve many other people -- partners, investors, customers, payers etc. Don't imagine that being well known in academia equates to being well known everywhere else. Attend conferences, join meetups, speed dating, talk to everyone. Some say 80% of the start-up effort should go into marketing. Not only will this network get you investors and customers, it will also bring extremely valuable feedback to make the product better. 
4. Embrace change. Sometimes, academia trains a person to become very rigid (faithful?) and stubborn. That has to be relaxed a little. Pivoting a start-up is very common, and may often lead to something much better. Be agile and adapt to opportunities. Recognize quickly when something is not going right, and restructure. 

Dahiyat (2012). Stranger in a strange land? Nature Biotechnology. 30(11), 1030-1032.

Growth Hacking -- getting your first 1000 customers

Being involved in early-stage startups, we always think about getting 100,000 customers, 1 million customers etc, when we pitch to investors. Because that's where the money is. However, what REALLY is difficult (and one of the many major reasons startups don't even get past the initial phase), is how to even get your first 100 and first 1000 customers. Customer / User traction builds upon EXISTING customers/users. Virality, no matter how inherent and how great, also builds upon existing relationships. But why doesn't anyone talk about the initial growth? The first 1000 customers cannot be obtained by virality nor networks. After the first 50-100 customers that are usually family/friends, where do we get the remaining 900 people to start building traction?

Finally, this very important but often forgotten topic was addressed at a recent meetup I attended, organized by a team of students from the Stanford Graduate School of Business, called "Igniters". The speaker was James Kennedy, founder of piehole.tv. They had recently obtained their first 1000 customers, so James was a perfect person to speak about the topic -- both success and fresh in mind. A few take home points that I personally felt were new and useful:

1. Brainstorm on 30 different ways to get leads, and 30 different ways to get conversion. Getting leads (the connection and the list of people) and conversion (leads becoming sales) is very different, so methods for both need to be brainstormed separately. 
2. Delete the 1st 20 things on both lists. WHY!??!?! Didn't you just brainstorm 30, why delete 20 of those now? The reason being -- the first 20 is probably extremely common, and everyone else is already doing it! Not to say that you shouldn't use any of them anymore (tried and tested), but if you want to be different, or if you aim to disrupt, go for the last 10 that you had to squeeze dry your brains to get to. 
3. Test only a couple of methods each month, using a metric to measure effectiveness of each method. Discard the ineffective ones after each month, and test new methods. Keep using the effective ones, and eventually dedicate most of your resources to the most effective.
4. A/B testing. Optimizely is a useful site to help you do your A/B test. (Hey, they have big-name customers such as Walt Disney Company, Fox media, Starbucks, techcrunch!) 

Let me know if any of these were useful in helping YOU get your first 1000 customers! :)

What is "failure" to you?

I was once having a random discussion with my PhD supervisor (I prefer to call him my mentor), when he threw me this question, "What is failure?"

That's a deep question. What IS failure? The Marriam-Webster dictionary defines it as "falling short (of intended objective)". When have we failed? When do we consider ourselves a failure? When do we feel like failures? When do others think of us as failures?

As a scientist, I get 'failed experiments' all the time. Amongst what I used to consider 'failed' experiments, were actually 'negative' data that were opposite to what I had expected or hoped for. These, my mentors used to tell me, were not bad. Negative data is still data, they told me. And they helped to build the puzzle we were trying to solve. Learning to embrace negative data was a tough road. Not just because they are counter-intuitive, but also because negative data is still not widely accepted for publications -- something that is needed for a scientist's career to progress.

Regardless, I did not embrace "failure". Falling short of my own high expectations, and comparing with my genius peers who were all stars in their respective fields, was not helping. Being trained to be critical of everything around me and of myself, I seemed to be "failing" all the time.

It wasn't until I met a whole network of entrepreneurs in the Silicon Valley, that my perspective began to change. 99% of start-ups fail, but everyone in Silicon Valley still wants to start a new company, or work for a start-up. Nobody cared that most start-ups don't succeed. People here embraced failures. In fact, they were proud to have failed. Failure was not something negative, on the contrary, it's something great! Chip Conley (founder of Joie de Vivre hotels) calls these, "noble experiments".

I remember my mentor ending our discussion, commenting that everyone fails at some point of their life. The question is, when? The earlier you experience failure, and learn to get back up, the greater your chances are at success in the future. If you've always been successful all your life, and one day stumble into failure from a high point, it's going to be painful, and very difficult to climb back. So don't be afraid of failing. Embrace them!

Why Can't Scientists be Entrepreneurs?

It's not the first thing people associate together -- Scientists and Entrepreneurs. Why? Because of the many (stigmatic) differences between the two.

1. Scientists are practical; Entrepreneus dream big.
2. Scientists are analytical; Entrepreneurs are creative.

3. Scientists are conservative; Entrepreneurs are risk-takers.

As I went through business school, majoring in entepreneurship, I constantly struggled with these thoughts, of whether I, with a science PhD, would fit in with the business crowd? How would I have to adjust to be an outstanding entrepreneur? Am I an oddball?

Through the process, I realized (to my joy) that there are actually many qualities of a good scientist that makes a good entrepreneur:

1. Passionate and motivated. It takes a whole lot of passion and motivation to do research, when you're the only one who knows (or believes) it will work, when many other researchers are trying to prove the opposite, and when all other life's entertainment has to take the back seat. Entrepreneurs have to dedicate their life to their business too, because otherwise no one else will.

2. Never give up. A PhD is not an easy route, and it takes a lot of grit to get to the end. The same goes for business, when many times you only have yourself and your business to believe in. It all boils down to faith.

3. Used to the notion of "first winner takes all; second gets nothing". In science, it is a race to publish. If your competitor beats you to publishing the same discovery/invention, the novelty in your work is completely lost, and there is no more value in everything you've dedicated your life to the past few years. The same goes for many start-ups, where the first start-up to deliver the product to market (provided it is of good quality) captures a huge market share, gains critical traction, and no competitor can fight them. (Think facebook...)


So, if you are also a scientist, and have secretly desired to start your own business but never dared to voice out the "ridiculous" dream, stop keeping it a secret now! Be brave, go ahead, and shout to the world. You've got what it takes! :D