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!