– Vladimir Putin, President of Russia.
All the news channels exploded! Elon Musk alone had 33K retweets for quoting Putin. From young children to scholars, politicians and industry titans, our social media timelines are flooded with news on the latest AI breakthroughs, accompanied with strong mixed reviews and opinions. Both sides bring strong arguments when stating that AI will be either our great liberator or our reckoning.
The Russian President taps into a popular theme and this quote appeals to our collective, global fear of Skynet. However, Mr. Putin and his advisors are dangerously wrong. The road to achieving a general, sentient AI that will easily pass the Turing Test and Wozniack’s Coffee Test is filled with too many unknowns and black swan events. If the history of tech has showed us anything though, is that:
These are especially true because of the following two arguments.
The most successful startups have leaders who understand these two factors and leverage this novel symbiosis between human and machine to the max by incorporating it across all departments.
They may not realize it, but anyone who’s part of management in an AI startup has a tremendous opportunity and responsibility: to shape the future of this symbiotic movement in their particular field. That’s why it is concerning, to say the least, that 90% of startups fail.
In this first article, we will look at the general problems startup leaders must overcome, as well as how a stronger foundation can be set to help the entire team navigate through tough waters.
The second article will focus on an additional and novel problem that startup management is struggling with around the Globe: AI.
In his hit book Zero to One, investor and entrepreneur Peter Thiel lays down a comprehensive guide to why most managers are leading their startups into the ground.
To lead a successful startup, anyone at or above manager level needs to know how to confidently answer the following seven questions.
Apple, Facebook, Tesla and other household names succeeded as startups because they could easily answer all seven. Wavely does a fantastic job at answering the first 6, but it was the answer to the 7th that got our team 110% hooked – the US is alarmingly falling behind in recruitment tech. Other industrious nations are moving towards instant-messaging directly between hiring managers and candidates and mobile-first approach to job search and recruitment and it is having a positive impact on their economies. Especially with belief in a stable and static workforce crumbling as younger generations are more ambitious at moving to new companies every few years.
Even after an entire management team confidently answers Thiel’s questions in pursuit of stratospheric growth, they will be plagued by another issue.
To not fail, everyone above manager level must be comfortable in a constant state of discomfort. They must be the first to shout when a fire starts and will have to take the hardest twists and turns to create their own unique recipe for success.
There is no such thing as a perfect business or a perfect plan, because massive screw-ups will undoubtedly happen. If management is not comfortable with that or if they can’t adapt and embrace the struggle, the entire team will suffer, from the junior developer to the CEO and investors. Just ask Ben Horowitz about his journey as a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and then co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz. In his book The Hard Thing About Hard Things he emphasizes that most successful business leaders attribute their success primarily to the fact that they never gave up.
We all know the classic Silicon Valley story. First, a few people come up with an idea and move into their garage to build a Minimum Viable Product. They then test the product and start to improve it to get traction. In parallel, they work on mapping their competition, building their vision, value proposition, go-to-market and business model.
All the data obtained is put into a well-crafted and simple pitch deck of usually 10-11 slides. This pitch deck, as well as a demo, are their main weapons when they proceed to have numerous meetings with angel investors and venture capitalists, so they can get that first round of funding.
What happens after that investment is a much-too-common, unfortunate and illogical scenario. All the months poured into building the pitch deck are discarded and the deck is shelved.
That pitch deck is actually one of the most important and powerful tools a startup has. It’s a living and constantly-evolving document that management should often refer back to. It helps everyone on the team:
It is as simple as this: having a unified message as well as constant clarity over the company’s core values will allow management to stay motivated and choose the best possible course of action when the world turns upside down (which happens on a daily basis).
Within a startup, it doesn’t matter what job function a person has. They have to be aware that they sell the company’s vision (sometimes unknowingly) on a daily basis:
Whether a team lead directs Marketing, Engineering, Sales or Operations, it is their responsibility to ingrain a unified message within the entire company. They must be able to successfully sell it internally, before hoping to achieve any form of success in selling it externally. The road is hard and paved with numerous unknowns, but a few things remain constant in what leadership must do: