TL;DR
A reflection on my early days as a tech startup salesman and how profound frustration with a lack of clarity and vision led me to dissent, write a passionate letter to the founders, and eventually resign. Looking back, that letter still captures timeless lessons on the importance of purpose and a sense of urgency, communication, and understanding clients.
My first parlay into the world of technology came through sales. During the early years of my time at engineering school, I worked as a salesman for a technology startup. Although I was not being paid, I was as passionate a salesman as ever. My dream1 at the time was to become a mechanical engineer. Yet I was growing increasingly aware of the ubiquity of software, and I was happy to work pro bono if it meant gaining an insider’s view of how software was built and sold.
As a salesman, I was expected to bring my understanding of our targets’ needs into design sessions. Those days when I would sit with the engineers, playing customer as we produced numerous iterations of application mockups on whiteboards were truly happy days.
As is often the case with client-facing roles, I gradually developed a pulse for strategy and began to disagree with how the startup was being run. You see, a salesman needs clarity to sell and a good salesman is often the first to sense how much or how little clarity his organization truly has.
Each time a salesman qualifies a prospect, he must rely on a holistic understanding of his product and his company (especially where the company is not yet a household name) to present a clear and persuasive message. When such understanding is lacking, the salesman grows frustrated. That frustration is easily redeemed when the company’s vision and positioning are clear, and the salesman need only educate himself. But there is little hope when the root cause of his frustration lies in the company’s own lack of clarity; when it has no coherent vision for its product or for itself.
I found myself in the latter situation, and my frustration grew as I eagerly met more prospects. I wrote a private letter to the founders, and partly because my letter was ignored, I decided to resign from my pro bono role as a salesman (what audacity!)
I stumbled upon this letter some days ago, and I am still proud of it. I think it still articulates (even if imperfectly) what I believe are key elements of startup success:
- Clarity of purpose and urgency
- The ability to communicate that clarity and urgency to every single employee
- A profound understanding of the client’s needs
While the letter is no example in composition2, I continue to believe in its central arguments. And so, for referential purposes, I have decided to publish an anonymized version here. I have largely preserved the letter with all its imperfections and I beg you to forgive the unrestrained passion. I was passionate before I was wise3.
Should We Rethink the System at Company X?
From one of my conversations with Person A, I got insight as to how old X may be; a year or so. If you were speaking to a wall street investment banker about how long he perceives a year to be, his views will be quite stunning. He has seen companies rise and fall in less than a year and has thus grown more conscious of time. I strongly believe that for X and her leadership, now is the time to pick up the wall street notion of time. Why do I say we ought to adopt the wall street mentality towards time frames at X? Imagine the pressure companies get from wall street when they go public; investors are in a mad rush to see their money appreciate and there is no time for gambling. I believe it is the same intensity of pressure we must work against if we are to succeed in this our venture.
My goal in writing this critique is to make clear my criticism of what I see going on in X, and make suggestions. Many of my observations may come from not being fully informed about some important things or things that happened after I took upon myself to write this. I will heartily welcome clarifications and corrections were my statements and opinions create the need.
Criticisms & Suggestions
1. The Lack of clarity in the vision and its execution
Are we a social enterprise, or a for-profit company? I don’t think I and many people involved are clear on that. If we are a social enterprise, then why don’t we talk about that? If we are a for-profit company, then what is our business model? How do we plan to make money? How will we pay for our cost? Are we a for-now company, or do we intend to be around in the next 15 years doing amazing things?
Not that I think that our founders, who are men of honorable mention in their own right, lack a vision. My point is that they have not communicated that vision clearly and explicitly to the rest of us. We are largely left out on this. I think that for us to be efficient; to be able to do things that are worthy of mention, we must have the vision crystal clear and flowing through the veins of every single person who has something to do with X. In the world of business, people work for money, or the passion. At X, we are clearly not into end-of-the-month-excitements. So what then are we working for? The passion cannot just be there, it has to come from the vision of our founders and their ability to COMMUNICATE it to everyone; right down to the last man on the organizational chart.
It is my opinion that the lack of clarity is actually due to the fact that on a large scale PROPER communication has not been done. If we could come up with a mission statement that will guide us through all we do, give purpose to the work we do and inspire, then I think that problem will be solved.
On the side of the execution, I actually mean the structuring of the organization. Organizational design should be done to optimize communication and ease decision making, it can also be used to inspire.
Because we are a budding company; no sales and basically no online presence, I think that structuring the organization like most organizations are structured is rather disadvantageous for us. It brings on board many passive people and kills the morale of the few who could really be helpful. Why should I be kicking my head around working in the sales team when the guys of the classes team literally have no work?
I think that X should have just two divisions; the tech and the operations divisions. The tech guys will have to handle things like marketing and strategical problems since they know the product better than anyone else, while the operations team will focus on executing the strategy. The sales and financial stuff can be handled by the founders. I think that this simple structure optimizes for communication and provides us with the best working model seen where we are.
I also think that meetings that require the presence of the entire staff, be they by teams or whatever be held more often to optimize our communication. If we all know where the company is going at a particular time, then we have more people brainstorming and generating better ideas. Not that we should discuss everything, but I think management should make the decisions of what to withhold based on how risky discussing them may be.
I am not calling for sackings, but I think that if we make X as small as possible, then it makes it easier for us to do the difficult work we have to do to enable us start off smoothly. It also makes us sure that everyone on board is deeply motivated by our vision. I can bet that a motivated bunch of 8 people can change the world faster than an unmotivated bunch of 100 people.
2. The need to actually determine our market and look at it through the right lens
I think that we are not looking at our market through the right lens, and even if we were doing that, then we are not grasping the reality of that picture and working for that. On the one side, it seems like we are working to bring education online, then on the other it seems like we want to provide an opportunity for the under-privileged to get quality education, and yet on the other it looks like we are just targeting the secondary education sector.
After doing an analysis of my own, I arrived the conclusion that the most logical market we are targeting is comprised of people who have no chance to be educated in regular schools AND have the interest and the means to learn online. To a noticeable extent, our culture is hostile towards education; people who are uneducated at a certain age choose to shy away from education, and our education is strictly geared towards passing examinations. It is worth applause, that one of X’s goals as I know is to make education a more practical and interesting thing, but is that what our market is really looking for? I think what our market wants or safe to say, a large portion of our market, is to pass those exams that they need to pass in order to get jobs. People just want to pass competitive examinations. Let us focus on helping them do just that.
How we approach the market is an issue that I think will demand a more collective brainstorming session. But come to think of this using conventional wisdom. If people sought education just for education’s sake, then those of us who are more educated than the average person in our target market AND are more versed with the internet should make use of the numerous online learning forums that exist for our level. We have Cousera and EdX, and even though our school sometimes requires us to use these platforms, how many of us do? Quite a small number!
I think that the reason for that are not complicated; we don’t just feel like it! If educated men like us who should appreciate first-hand the importance of online learning are still lagging behind, what more of the uneducated? My argument is that there should be another alternative to using the heavy data-consuming strategy, that will in turn lower the opportunity cost for our users.
If we provide our content in ways that are cheaper and more convenient than what is already out there, AND in ways that help our target market to simply pass the competitive examinations that get them closer to their dream jobs, then I think that it gives us a considerable head start. Imagine taking a well prepared geometry course online that requires you to load 57kb (Please check the way Edx gives courses on html for better understanding) of data versus to watch a video that requires 4Mb; which do we think appeals most to our target market? We should be finding more effective ways that fit the financial and cultural reality of our target market.
I think that instead of seeing ourselves as a company trying to provide video classes, we should face the reality and position ourselves as a company that is out to provide people with the resources that will help them pass those exams by focusing more on working with past questions. This as we all know is the best way to increase the odds of people succeeding in examinations.
In this business, our obvious competitors will be the teachers and other students who write numerous pamphlets each year ( Some of them are really good). But with all technology offers, I believe we can have a considerable advantage over them. Instead of providing dead pamphlets, we can create real time practice environments (Similar to CodeAcademy) and accompany them with videos - no longer video lessons - but videos in which help is given with the corrections of those past questions. Not just for the examination classes, we can get custom tests for the other classes and create environments where people can also practice for tests and examinations.
Conclusion
Having spoken in particular about the importance of having the smallest team possible, the question may arise; “How do you make all those videos with a small team?”.
I think that generally, the idea of using videos should be avoided to the greatest extent possible. If we are intentional enough, we can focus on providing rich and interesting material using text and other low-data consuming alternative forms. I detest videos also because they do not work for the durability of X. How will we record videos of good and uniform quality when we leave school and no longer live in the same city? Much of what we do now is easy because we are students in the same location and making the videos under constant conditions is no big problem. When we all leave school, that wouldn’t be the same. But if we had leveraged on our ability to use other means, I think that problem will really not be a problem.
I may not have gotten my points clear, my arguments may have been largely emotional etc. But I hope that this ignites a flame that will consume all of us; to do things with a clearer vision that will in turn motivate us and guide us on this rocky path.
Footnotes
The French system has what I believe is a superior approach to engineering education; students spend two years rigorously studying mathematics and physics before choosing a field of specialization.↩︎
I beg your forgiveness. I was only a teenager when I wrote this letter.↩︎
I was passionate before I was wise, but I like to think I have since become both.↩︎