After four years, I realized there was a whole world of thinking that was needed before a line of code should be written. […] I realized coding and designing hardware wasn't as interesting to me as seeing how the whole product the whole business came together. It became exceedingly obvious that I could never guarantee success through great engineering alone.
INTRODUCTION
An excellent read that truly makes it feel like you’re sitting right there with Tony.
Build is a true testament to his love of craft - effortlessly blending key topics like business, leadership, product, storytelling and more.
This is a great book is a great read for anyone, but specifically for founders who not only want a “behind-the-scenes” look at the process of one of the most successful product builders of our time, but who want to learn more about the craft involved.
FUTURENATIVE - THINK BETTER. BUILD BETTER.
I very occasionally send out an email recapping some thoughts, learnings and ideas typically centred around a thesis & approach I call being “FUTURENATIVE”.
In short, the thesis states: FUTURENATIVE individuals and organization find a unique way to leverage apparent tensions and blend both discovery & execution work, in order to unlock massive impact.
You can sign up here to learn more:
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- No matter how much you learn in school, you still need to get the equivalent of a PhD in navigating the rest of the world and building something meaningful. You have to try and fail and learn by doing.
- All these subtle things that you never made a decision about growing up are already implanted in your brain. Most kids don't consciously examine any of these choices. They mimic their parents. And when you're a kid, that's usually fine.
- After four years, I realized there was a whole world of thinking that was needed before a line of code should be written. And that thinking was fascinating. That thinking was what I wanted to do
- If you're not solving a real problem, you can't start a revolution.
- To do great things, to really learn, you can't shout suggestions from the rooftop then move on while someone else does the work. You have to get your hands dirty. You have to care about every step, lovingly craft every detail. You have to be there when it falls apart so you can put it back together. You have to actually do the job. You have to love the job.
I can't make you the smartest or the brightest, but it's doable to be the most knowledgeable. It's possible to gather more information than somebody else." - Bill Gurley
- Your job isn't just doing your job. It's also to think like your manager or CEO. You need to understand the ultimate goal, even if it's so far away that you're not really sure what it'll look like when you get there.
- Becoming a manager is a discipline. Management Is a learned skill, not a talent.
- I realized coding and designing hardware wasn't as interesting to me as seeing how the whole product the whole business came together. It became exceedingly obvious that I could never guarantee success through great engineering alone.
- I started reading management books and realized that a great deal of management comes down to how you manage your own fears and anxieties.
- Storytelling is how you get people to take a leap of faith to do something new. It's what all our big choices ultimately come down to believing a story we tell ourselves or that someone else tells us. Creating a believable narrative that everyone can latch on to is critical to moving forward and making hard choices. It's all that marketing comes down to. It's the heart of sales.
- I push people who are experts, who already know how it's done, how it's always been done, to find a new way to do it
- People won't remember how you started. They'll remember how you left.
- Good things take time. Big things take longer.
- Your story about why you left needs to be honest and fair and your story for your next job needs to be inspiring: this is what I want to learn, this is the kind of team I want to work with, this is part of the mission that truly excites me.
- They were focused on what they could make, not why anyone would want it.
- People are easily distracted. We're wired to focus our attention on tangible things that we can see and touch to the point that we overlook the importance of intangible experiences and feelings. […] the actual thing you're building is only one tiny part of a vast, intangible, overlooked user journey that starts long before a customer ever gets their hands on your product and ends long after. […] You should be able to map out and visualize exactly how a customer discovers, considers, installs, uses, fixes, and even returns your product. It all matters.
- The only time hardware is worth the headache of manufacturing and packaging and shipping is if it's critically necessary and transformative. If hardware doesn't absolutely need to exist to enable the overall experience, then it should not exist. But when that happens, I still tell people to put it away. I say, "Don't tell me what's so special about this object. Tell me what's different about the customer journey." Your product isn't only your product. It's the whole user experience - a chain that one begins when someone learns about your brand for the first time and ends when your product disappears from their life, returned or thrown away, sold to a friend or deleted in a burst of electrons.
- Each phase of the journey has to be great in order to move customers naturally into the next, to overcome the moments of friction between them.
- Make it visible. Physical. Get it out of your head and onto something you can touch. And don't wait until your product is done to get started map out the whole journey as you map out what your product will do. That's how you hack your brain. How you hack the brains of everyone on your team
- Every product should have a story, a narrative that explains why it needs to exist and how it will solve your customer's problems. A good product story has three elements:
- It appeals to people's rational and emotional sides.
- It takes complicated concepts and makes them simple.
- It reminds people of the problem that's being solved-it focuses on the "why."
- The story of your product, your company, and your vision should drive everything you do.
- And when I say "story," I don't just mean words. Your product's story is its design, its features, images and videos, quotes from customers, tips from reviewers, conversations with support agents. It's the sum of what people see and feel about this thing that you've created. And the story doesn't just exist to sell your product. It's there to help you define it, understand it, and understand your customers. And it all starts with "why." Why does this thing need to exist? Why does it matter? Why will people need it? Why will they love it? And you have to hold on to that "what" "why" even as you build the the features, the innovation, the answer to all your customers' problems. Because the longer you work on something, the "what" takes over the "why" becomes the more your gut, a part of everything you do, that so obvious, a feeling in express it anymore. You forget how you don't even need to much it matters.
- There's a competition for market share and a competition for mind share. If your competitors are telling better stories than you, if they're playing the game and you're not, then it doesn't matter if their product is worse. They will get the attention. To any customers, investors, be partners, or talent doing a cursory search, they will appear to The more people talk about them, the the leaders in the category. greater their mind share, and the more people will talk about them.
- A good story is an act of empathy. It recognizes the needs of its audience. And it blends facts and feelings so the customer gets enough of both.
- Every person is different. And everyone will read your story differently. That's why analogies can be such a useful tool in storytelling. They create a shorthand for complicated concepts-a bridge directly to a common experience. That's another thing I learned from Steve Jobs. He'd always say that analogies give customers superpowers. A great analogy allows a customer to instantly grasp a difficult feature and then describe that feature to others. That's why "1,000 songs in your pocket" was so powerful. So "1,000 songs in your pocket" was an incredible contrast it let people visualize this intangible thing -all the music they loved all together in one place, easy to find, easy to hold and gave them a way to tell their friends and family why this new iPod thing was so cool. [...] knowledge almost nobody had. So we cheated. We didn't try to explain everything. We just used an analogy.
- Evolution: A small, incremental step to make something better. Disruption: A fork on the evolutionary tree-something fundamentally new that changes the status quo, usually by taking a novel or revolutionary approach to an old problem. Execution: Actually doing what you've promised to do and doing it well
- If you're going to pour your heart into creating something new, then that thing should be disruptive. It should be bold. It should change something. The key is to find the right balance not so disruptive that you won't be able to execute, not so easy to execute that nobody will care.
- So either the landscape was going to change under our feet, or we were going to change the landscape. We had to disrupt ourselves. When you can see the competition nipping at your heels, you have to do something new. You have to fundamentally change who you are as a business. You have to keep moving. You cannot be afraid to disrupt the thing that made you successful in the first place. Even if it made you hugely successful.
- You need constraints to make good decisions and the best constraint in the world is time. When you handcuff yourself to a deadline-ideally an external. immovable date like Christmas or a big conference-you have to a execute and get creative to finish on time.
- 1. Team heartbeats: Each individual team makes its own rhythm and deadlines for delivering their piece of the puzzle. Then all the teams align for ....
- 2. Project heartbeats: These are the moments when different teams sync to make sure the product still makes sense and all the pieces are moving at the right pace.
- Generally any brand-new product should never take longer than 18 months to ship -24 at the limit. The sweet spot is somewhere between 9 and 18 months. That applies to hardware and software, atoms and bits.
- The joke is that it takes twenty years to make an overnight success. In business, it's more like six to ten. It always takes longer than you think to find product/market fit, to get your customers' attention, to build a complete solution, and then to make money. You typically need to create at least three generations of any new, disruptive product before you get it right and turn a profit.
- There are three elements to every great idea:
- 1. It solves for "why." Long before you figure out what a product will do, you need to understand why people will want it. The "why" drives the "what."
- 2. It solves a problem that a lot of people have in their daily lives.
- 3. It follows you around. Even after you research and learn about it and try it out and realize how hard it'll be to get it right, you can't stop thinking about it.
- Anything worth doing takes time. Time to understand. Time to prepare. Time to get It right.
- Money burns fast. If you don't have the confidence to move forward quickly, you'll have to continually slow down to consult a hundred people about a thousand decisions. You'll lose sight of where you're trying to go in the face of all the different ways to get there.
- If you want to start a company, if you want to start anything, to create something new, then you need to be ready to push for greatness. And greatness doesn't come from nothing. You have to prepare. You have to know where you're headed and remember where you came from. You have to make hard decisions and be the mission-driven "asshole."
- Even if it looks easy, it never is. There are just varying degrees of difficulty from damn hard to nearly impossible.
- It's like playing chess. You always have to think two moves and two investment rounds ahead.
- Understanding your customer-their demographics and psychographics, their wants and needs and pain points-is the foundation of your company. Your product, team, culture, sales, marketing, support, pricing--everything is shaped by that understanding. For the vast majority of businesses, losing sight of the main customer you're building for is the beginning of the end.
- No matter what you're building, you can never forget who you're building it for. You can only have one customer. Choose wisely
- You will encounter a crisis eventually. Everyone does. If you don't, you're not doing anything important or pushing any boundaries.
- 1. Keep your focus on how to fix the problem, not who to blame.
- 2. As a leader, you'll have to get into the weeds. Don't be worried about micromanagement-as the crisis unfolds your job is to tell people what to do and how to do it.
- 3. Get advice. From mentors, investors, your board, or anyone else you know who's gone through something similar. Don't try to solve your problems alone.
- 4. Your job once people get over the initial shock will be constant communication.
- Forming that team and shepherding it through its many transitions is always the hardest and most rewarding part of building anything.
- Different people think differently and every new perspective, background, and experience you bring into the business improves the business. It deepens your understanding of your customers. It illuminates part of the world that you were blind to before. It creates opportunities.
- Everyone has different styles, but you can't be so low-key that you never dip below the surface, never push to understand who this person really is. An interview isn't about carefree small talk. You're there for a reason. In an interview I'm always most interested in three basic things: who they are, what they've done, and why they did it.
- I usually start with the most important questions: "What are you curious about? What do you want to learn?"
- I also ask, "Why did you leave your last job?"
- Why didn't they fight harder? And did they leave a mess behind them? What did they do to make sure they left in the right way?
- And why do they want to join this company? That reason had better be completely different from why they left their previous job. They should have a new story, a compelling story, about what they're excited about, who they want to work with, and how they want to grow and develop.
- What kinds of questions do they ask? What approaches do they suggest? Do they ask about the customer? Do they seem empathetic or oblivious? You're not just interviewing to see if a person can do the job required of them today. You're trying to understand if they have the innate tools to think through the problems and jobs you don't see coming yet the jobs they can grow into tomorrow.
- Growth can catch you off-guard like that. Because everything always falls apart just when it feels like nothing can stop you. Breakpoints typically come at moments when things are going great business is booming or at least product development is humming along. It seems like you've finally figured it out and are on your way.
- It's either grow or die. Stasis is stagnation. Change is the only option.
- If you can see it coming, you can design your future. But first you have to get past the fear. So here's what's going to scare people most and how to help them through it.
- Everyone should know what matters at your company what defines your culture. If you don't explicitly know your values, you can't pass them on, maintain them, evolve them, or hire for them.
- Breakpoints don't just happen to the company. They happen to you. As a CEO or founder or leader of a team in a larger company, the bigger your organization grows, the more isolated you become and the further the product retreats from you. Don't worry about what you're going become. to lose think about what you're going to.
- Everything that needs to be created needs to be designed - not just products and marketing, but processes, experiences, organizations, forms, materials. At its core, designing simply means thinking through a problem and finding an elegant solution. Anyone can do that. Everyone should. It's not just about making things pretty-it's about making them work better.
- Avoid habituation: Everyone gets used to things. Life is full of tiny and enormous inconveniences that you no longer notice because your brain has simply accepted them as unchangeable reality and filtered them out.
- Design thinking forces you to really understand the problem you're trying to solve. There are no perfect designs. There are always constraints.
- But you shouldn't outsource a problem before you try to solve it yourself, especially if solving that problem is core to the future of your business. If it's a critical function, your team needs to build the muscle to understand the process and do it themselves.
- Designing isn't something in your DNA that you're simply born with it's something you learn.
- The people who notice the problems around them and then dream up solutions - are mostly inventors, startup founders, and kids. Young people look at the world and question it. Steve Jobs called it "staying a beginner." He was constantly telling us to look at what we were making with fresh eyes. We weren't designing the iPod for ourselves we were making it for people who had never experienced digital music.
- While good marketing is anchored in human connection and empathy, creating and implementing your marketing programs can and should be a rigorous and analytical process.
- 1. Marketing cannot just be figured out at the very end. When building a product, product management and the marketing team should be working together from the very beginning.
- 2. Use marketing to prototype your product narrative. The creative team can help you make the product narrative tangible. This should happen in parallel with product development-one should feed the other.
- 3. The product is the brand. The actual experience a customer has with your product will do far more to cement your brand in their heads than any advertising you can show them. Marketing is part of every customer touchpoint whether you realize it or not.
- 4. Nothing exists in a vacuum. You can't just make an ad and think you're done. The ad leads to a website that sends you to a store where you purchase a box that contains a guide that helps you with installation; after which you're greeted by a welcome email.
- 5. The best marketing is just telling the truth. The ultimate job of marketing is to find the very best way to tell the true story of your product.
- An ad can't be understood without knowing where it will appear and where it will lead to. A webpage can't be approved until you know who will be routed to that page and what they'll need to know and where the call to action will take them. Everything is connected to everything, so everything must be understood together.
- but finding the best way to tell that story to customers is an art. It's a science. It's marketing.
- A spec and messaging aren't instructions that are set in stone. They flex and change, shifting as new ideas are introduced, or new realities slap you in the face. Building a product is like making a song. The band is composed of marketing, sales, engineering, support, manufacturing, PR, legal. And the product manager is the producer making sure everyone knows the melody, that nobody is out of tune and everyone is doing their part.
- This person is a needle in a haystack. An almost impossible combination of structured thinker and visionary leader, with incredible passion but also firm follow-through, who's a vibrant people person but fascinated by technology, an incredible communicator who can work with engineering and think through marketing and not forget the business model, the economics, profitability, PR.
- There are generally three kinds of CEOs:
- 1. Babysitter CEOs are stewards of the company and are focused on keeping it safe and predictable. They generally oversee the growth of existing products that they inherited and don't take risks that might scare executives or shareholders.
- 2. Parent CEOs push the company to grow and evolve. They take big risks for larger rewards. Innovative founders-like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos-are always parent CEOs.
- 3. Incompetent CEOs are usually either simply inexperienced or founders who are ill-suited to lead a company after it reaches a certain size. They are not up to the task of being either a babysitter or a parent, so the company suffers.
- I love asking dumb, obvious questions or questions from the customer's perspective usually three or four "Why is that…? Why did that ?" questions will get to the root of what you're trying to understand, then you can dig in further.
- You don't have to be an expert in everything. You just have to care about it. They can keep an eye on the long-term vision while still being eyeball-deep in details. They're constantly learning, always interested in new opportunities, new technologies, new trends, new people. And they do it because they're engaged and curious, not because those things may end up making them money. If they screw up, they admit to It and own their mistakes.
- Bad CEOs come to board meetings and expect the board to help them make decisions. Good CEOs walk in with a presentation of where the company was, where it is now, and where it's headed this quarter and in the years to come. They tell the board what's working but they're also transparent about what isn't and how they're addressing it.
- The best CEOs always know the outcome of a board meeting before they walk through the door.
- Teaching is the best test of your own knowledge. If you're struggling to explain what you're building and why, if you're presenting a report without really understanding it, if the board is asking you questions that you can't answer then you have not internalized what's actually going on at your company. That's when you might have a real problem.
- Most people and companies need a near-death experience before they can really change.
- All acquisitions come down to what you're trying to do when you're buying a company do you want to buy a team? Technology? Patents? Product? Customer base? Business (that is, revenue)? A brand? Some other strategic assets?
“Great companies are bought, not sold." - Bill Campbell
- But once you set the precedent and shift people's expectations, it's almost impossible to claw your way back.
- Unless you stay grounded […] you start to forget the daily pains of the people you're supposed to be creating painkillers for.
- But most CEOs who are on the brink of failure just shut their eyes and wait for the crash. There's often so much of their ego wrapped up in being a CEO, so much time and work. People spend their entire lives striving to lead a company. They make it the center of their self-worth and their identity. Ego is a hell of a drug.
- It's your job a as a CEO to constantly push your company forward to come up with new ideas and projects to keep it fresh and alive. Then it's your job to work hard on those new projects, to be as passionate about them as you were about the original problem you came there to solve.
- Only after you exhaust that list can you stop getting distracted by the past and start getting bored. This is a necessary step. You absolutely need to get bored before you can find new things to be inspired by.
- It won't just solve your customers' pain points; it will give them superpowers. If you make something truly disruptive, truly impactful, it will take on a life of its own. It will create new economies, new ways of interacting, new ways of living.
- The thing holding most people back is themselves. They think they know what they can do and who they're supposed to be, and they don't explore beyond those boundaries. It's a lot like pushing past the first version of a product. You dedicate every minute, every brain cell to creating V1. Exhausted, you edge it over the finish line. But even though it took all you had to make it, V1 is never good enough. You can see its huge potential. You can see how much more it can be. So you don't stop at the finish line you keep pushing until you reach V2, V3, V4, V18. You keep uncovering more ways that this product can be great. Humans are the same way. But so many of us get stuck at V1. Once we settle into ourselves, we lose sight of what we can become. But just as products are never finished, neither are humans. We're constantly changing. Constantly evolving.
- But eventually they realized that moment had been a turning point, a jumping-off point. It changed the trajectory of their entire career. The things you built together changed their life. And that's how you'll know you've done something meaningful. You've made something worth making.
FUTURENATIVE - THINK BETTER. BUILD BETTER.
I very occasionally send out an email recapping some thoughts, learnings and ideas typically centred around a thesis & approach I call being “FUTURENATIVE”.
In short, the thesis states: FUTURENATIVE individuals and organization find a unique way to leverage apparent tensions and blend both discovery & execution work, in order to unlock massive impact.
You can sign up here to learn more:
