Happy Saturday! Here are your 5 things from the mind of Miles for this week.
Welcome to Taylor. I’m thrilled to share the news that Taylor Thompson has joined me as cofounder of our new venture studio. He is a two-time startup founder and an Echoing Green Fellow. He has done consulting and research at HBS on innovation. He also served as board chair for a company that works on impact measurement. Among other things, Taylor is diving in with our first entrepreneur-in-residence on brainstorming and validating startup ideas.
Don’t be Lazy. Arjan Schutte from Core Innovation Capital wrote a blog post saying “the majority of mission-driven entrepreneurs are well intentioned, but ultimately lazy about their mission” and explaining how to be hard core about mission. I liked it so much I had him on the Startups for Good podcast to discuss. What techniques do you use to keep your organization or family on mission?
Othership. The book Breath tipped me off to how breathwork is growing in popularity. Now there is an app for that! A friend told me that his company, Othership reached #1 on Product Hunt. I’m trying it out. I’m more familiar with slowing breath but less with holding your breath. The varied pacing is more extreme than typical meditation or mindfulness exercises. Do you have any experience with similar practices?
What is Market Muda? I’m curious about wasted effort. Are you familiar with the Lean concept of waste? What if you were able to eliminate the muda of sales and marketing, investor pitches or recruiting? In some sense the only value added activities are when you talk to prospects who will buy the product or candidates that are a fit for the job. But how could you know before the conversation? How can you know what someone else wants? Perhaps you create value when you help a prospect make a decision to work with another company? Taken to an extreme, the idea of eliminating the “waste” of the market selection process is scary. A version of this “eliminating waste by eliminating choice” comes up in the book The Every. If one company had enough buying and computer power to decide for consumers, then could eliminate the waste of extra product lines and too much production? My impression is that it probably won’t work and will have lots of unintended negative effects.
Uber Messaging. I’ve heard many people wish for a universal inbox for all their messaging clients. Why isn’t there something that combines iMessage, Whatsapp, LinkedIn messaging, etc? Maybe there is now. Jonathan Swanson is a big fan of Texts so I decided to try it. One of the things I’m wondering is if all these networks will try to fight them as they don’t want to lose a more direct connection with users.
Until next week,
Miles