Startup DNA: Speed Wins

Yevgeniy Brikman
ybrikman.com | @brikis98 | brikis98.blogspot.com
Worked at a couple successful startups:
LinkedIn, TripAdvisor
Built a lot of stuff:
Enterprise products, hiring tools, scalable infrastructure,
company culture, engineering branding, travel apps, VoIP
software, innovation programs.
About me

Wrote a book about what I learned
www.hello-startup.net

These are my personal observations on a
few traits that make startups successful.

Outline
1. Make excellent mistakes
2. Boyd's law
3. Speed Wins

Outline
1. Make excellent mistakes
2. Boyd's law
3. Speed Wins

"Make excellent mistakes"
Dan Pink

The road to startup success is paved with failure

Failed projects

● Answers
● Events
● Tweets
● Github
● Countless other experiments that never
made it past a "dark launch"

● Beacon
● Places
● Deals
● Credits
● Questions
● Lite
● Email

● Wave
● Buzz
● Labs
● Health
● Knol
● Catalog
● Video
● Answers

The Pivot

● Started as a way to share images in Game
Neverending, a massively multiplayer online
game.
● Rewritten to focus on photo sharing
● Acquired by Yahoo for $35m in 2005

● Started out as burbn, an HTML5 mobile app
for location-based social networking with
photo sharing as one of many features
● Completely rewritten as a photo sharing
focused native app
● Sold to facebook for $1bn in 2012

Twitter
● Started out as odeo, a site to create and
share podcasts
● Struggling to stay alive, they held a
hackathon. Jack Dorsey proposed the
microblogging concept (originally, text
message only).
● 500m users and $10b valuation in 2012

"Timing, perseverance, and ten years of trying
will eventually make you look like an overnight
success."
Biz Stone

The Failure

Richard Branson
● Virgin Clothes failed
● Virgin Cola failed
● Virgin Vision failed
● Virgin Vodka failed
● Virgin Wine failed
● Virgin Jeans failed
● Virgin Cars failed
● ... and many others failed
● ... but several hundred others succeeded

"I have not failed. I have just found 10,000 ways
that won’t work."
Thomas Edison

Reid Hoffman
● His first startup was Socialnet.com: a social
network for dating.
● Never heard of it? Exactly.
● Went on to become COO of Paypal, co-
founder of LinkedIn, and one of the most
successful angel investors of the last
decade.

"If you're not failing every now and again, it's a
sign you're not doing anything very innovative."
Woody Allen

Note: these are not failures, but experiments.
The goal of an experiment is learning.

Outline
1. Make excellent mistakes
2. Boyd's law
3. Speed Wins

"Speed of iteration beats quality of iteration."
Boyd’s Law

Time
Maturity
Mature, stable
Proof of concept
Idea
Product development (assumption)

Time
Maturity
Mature, stable
Proof of concept
Product development (reality)
Idea

Time
Maturity
Mature, stable
Proof of concept
Product development (reality)
Idea
A very large portion of development
time is trial and error

In a trial and error world, getting to errors
faster is the key to success.

Time
Maturity
Mature, stable
Proof of concept
Product development (technology comparison)
Dynamic/interpreted
languages
Static languages
Idea

Time
Maturity
Mature, stable
Proof of concept
Product development (technology comparison)
Idea
Dynamic/interpreted
languages
Static languages
Find error Find error

Time
Maturity
Mature, stable
Proof of concept
Product development (technology comparison)
Idea
Boyd’s Law

Time
Maturity
Mature, stable
Proof of concept
Product development (technology comparison)
Idea
Dynamic/interpreted
languages
Static languages
Innovation
Advantage

Time
Maturity
Mature, stable
Proof of concept
Product development (framework comparison)
Idea
RoR, Play Spring MVC, Servlets
Innovation
Advantage

Time
Maturity
Mature, stable
Proof of concept
Product development (methodology comparison)
Idea
Agile, Lean Waterfall
Innovation
Advantage

"If you're not embarrassed by your first release,
you've launched too late."
Reid Hoffman

Outline
1. Make excellent mistakes
2. Boyd's law
3. Speed Wins

"Speed wins"
Stephen Kaufer

Fundamental idea behind Agile and Lean:
some of your assumptions wrong.

The problem is, you don’t know which ones.

Winners recognize their startup “vision” as a
series of untested hypotheses in need of
“customer proof.”
Steve Blank

Time
Maturity
Mature, stable
Proof of concept
Product development (reality)
Idea
“customer proof”

“The only way to win is to learn faster than
anyone else.”
Eric Ries

Time
Maturity
Mature, stable
Proof of concept
Product development (technology comparison)
Idea
Faster learning

Speed wins strategy: design experiments that
offer maximal learning at a minimal cost
(e.g. MVP, customer development, A/B testing)

“The world is changing very fast. Big will not beat
small anymore. It will be the fast beating the slow.”
Rupert Murdoch

Recap
1. Make excellent mistakes
2. Boyd's law
3. Speed Wins

For more info, check out my book
www.hello-startup.net