CS183C: Blitzscaling

Instructors: Allen Blue, Reid Hoffman, John Lilly & Chris Yeh

October 6, 2015

Today

1. OS1 Recap & Themes 2. OS2 Intro 3. Mozilla OS2: Competing Asymmetrically 4. OS2 Scaling and Resourcing 5. Prep for Thursday

What themes were most common across Sam, Michael & Ann?

Where was their insight most divergent?

Why??

Organizational Scale 2: Tribe

Things start to move more quickly :)

Class Structure: Organizational Scale

Org Scale (employees)

User Scale (B2C users)

Customer Scale (B2B)

Business Scale (rev)

OS1: Family 1s 10,000s 0 <$10M

OS2: Tribe 10s 100,000s 1s 10M+

O3: Village 100s 1,000,000s 10s 100M+

OS4: City 1,000s 10,000,000s 100s $1B+

OS5: Nation 10,000s 100,000,00+ 1,000+ $5B+

OS1: The Household

1. Identify a non-obvious market opportunity where you have a unique advantage and/or approach.

2. Building a product with strong product/market fit

OS2: The Tribe

Execute & iteratively improve a plan which gets you to significant market share.

OS2: The Tribe

Get to scale:

1. Create your plan; execute it; learn from it; rethink it; build market share.

2. Adjust your product-market fit as you learn.

3. Address any competition by moving faster to market share.

OS2: Becoming a Tribe

1. A bigger team to scale, including new functions:- a bigger team to learn and build

- marketing/PR

- customer service, sales (for enterprise)

- business development

2. Agile development and technology

3. Business operations (expenses, office space etc.) to let the team focus on what matters

4. The right financing and capital allocation to allow it

We’re going to talk about

Mozilla from 2005 to 2008

First some context

In 2004, Microsoft & IE had ~95% share of personal computing

marketshare

That looks like this

5%

Microsoft 95%And Microsoft had 100%

distribution advantage

By the end of 2004, Mozilla had built Firefox 1.0

Breakthrough product - fast - popup blocking - tabbed browsing - integrated search - customizable

Product Market Fit: Why?

Key feature: popup blocking

Sustainable feature: tabbed browsing

Trigger: security

Best product is important, but not enough.

So Mozilla competed asymmetrically.

Naturally, they took out an ad.

In the New York Times.

The core insight: Mozilla was the community.

So the key was to let the community see themselves in Mozilla.

And to help the community help.

Move ahead 8 months to June 2005 when I got there

Launch worked - 10M downloads first 30 days

Growth was strong; financials strong

Clear product-market fit

15 people in the organization

Mozilla at this point was a non-profit, open source, 6 year overnight

success.

Not viral spread

Spreading because we had a global community who made it spread.

Critical Decisions in 2005

1. Hiring & compensation - winning & losing

2. Grow as distributed organization

3. Always treat community as insiders

4. Ignore enterprise, & everything else other than normal humans

5. Always hold mission as top goal

Timeline & Headcount Growth

2005 Firefox 1.5Started MoCo

2006 Firefox 2.0

2007 No Firefox major releasesStarted Mozilla China, Labs

2008 Firefox 3.0, spun out ThunderbirdStarted Fennec, grew labs

2009 Firefox 3.5; Thunderbird 3.0; Fennec on MaemoServices, video, developer tools, more

Total Headcount at Year-end

2005

2006

2007

2008

2009

2010

2011

0 80 160 240 320 400

406

341

258

196

132

85

40

+113%

+32%

+48%

+55%

+32%

+19%prop

osed 2010 Firefox 3.6, 3.7; Fennec on WinMo, Android?

Weave, Jetpack, reinvigorated+integrated Firebug

2011 Firefox 4 Desktop & Mobile More services, identity?

Move ahead another year to July 2006

Market share > 10% (~25M DAU, ~75M MAU)

Product-market fit extremely clear (not viral!)

Organization now ~30 people

With PMF, you start to see new issues

Opera 1%Firefox

12%

Safari 4%

IE 83%

Summer 2006, Net Applications

Mozilla BoD Deck (excerpts)July 7, 2006

Organizational Overview• Scaling still an issue for everyone

• EA, “chief of staff,” project manager??

• Must get serious about VP operations & GC

• Actively looking for 2 engineering managers, add’l product managers

• Low key looking for VP marketing

Firefox High Order Bits

• Where will Firefox be at the end of 2006?

• What’s a reasonable goal for 2006? 2007?

• 01/06 we said 20% market share

• What can and should we do to affect marketshare numbers? What are we doing to increase it today?

Firefox Context (1)• About 13% worldwide marketshare

• varies significantly by country and group

• 25MM active users on a given day

• Growth in the US appears to have slowed?

• Continuing to work on data and analysis

Firefox Context (2)• Initial Disruption Period of Fx 1.0 diminishing

• IE 7 and Safari on Windows

• iTunes has been disruptive; might an iTunes- focused Safari be the next disruptive event?

• What do we do to maintain momentum / motivate our community?

Reaching New People• Affinity groups/ vertical marketing

• Joga extension as the model

• What’s next and when? Fantasy sports? social networking?

• “Long tail” distribution by many groups

• offer customization (snippets, sidebar, etc)

• program in conceptual phase, not yet concrete

• Other?

Google’s Context• Has realized that the browser is critical to them

• can’t allow MS to have a choke-hold on their customers

• Current browser strategy: support leading alternative browser (Firefox)

• High level question: is this the correct browser strategy?

Google Issues (1)• Browser is critical but “destiny not in their own

hands”

• Fx growth at a marketshare number that is too low for safety

• Not clear that they or we have a plan to address

• increasing Fx market share or

• arrival of IE7

Google Issues (2)

• Webkit/Safari on Windows is coming

• Replay of the Unix wars?

• believe anything > IE & 1 other browser target for web developers will fail, hurting Google

• Apple pushing Webkit (faster, smaller, accessible)

Google Issues (3)• 80%IE, 20% Fx not enough, but hopeful

• 80% IE, 10% Fx. 10% Safari is a win for MS

• 80% IE, 20% Safari is bad for Google

• If Google believes the latter will happen, then it must create its own browser

• Hopes that some “convergence” between webkit and Fx is possible (rationale voices understand the difficulties)

Critical Decisions Summer 2006

1. Accelerate product releases (Fx2, Fx3), and stay the course with Gecko vs Webkit

2. Aggressively invest in more localizations, global reach

3. Keep building community, keep treating them like insiders, embrace all

Mozilla Corporation All Hands Meetingjohn lilly / april 27, 2007

2 years ago...

~15 employees, no MoCo, 2 people in MozJP, 2 in MozEU

~15 million users

$15 million in the bank

working on Firefox & Thunderbird 1.0.6 (& 1.0.7!)

Now...

plus approximately 25 interns in US, China & Japan!

Product & Marketing

EngineeringPlatform & Firefox

G & A

Put Another Way...

Dave CampDeveloper

1

90

Dave CampDeveloper

Mozilla CorporationFirefox Development Team

1

60

100s

Seth SpitzerDeveloper

Mozilla CorporationFirefox Development Team

DailyContributors

60

100

1000

Seth SpitzerDeveloper

Mozilla CorporationFirefox Development Team

DailyContributors

Contributors

1000

10,000

Mozilla CorporationFirefox Development Team

DailyContributors

Contributors

Nightly testers

300kMonthly users

(>180,000,000)

Nightly testers

Beta testers

Contributors

Sometimes Things That Seem Big, Aren’t

Firefox 3 Launch July 2008

Launched in 70 languages (IE7 launched 5)

Issues on the Horizon (but for OS3, not for OS2)

1. Chrome

2. Farmville (no, seriously)

3. But mostly: Mobile

Paths to Scale consumer and enterprise

OS2: Scaling

Execute & iteratively improve a plan which gets you to significant market share.

OS2: Scaling Consumer Products

• Growth through Value

• Virality

• Word of Mouth

• Repeat Use (vs. churn)

OS2: Finding Growth through Value

• You’ve found product-market fit (organic or inbound usage)… with which segments?

• Not — nice — want — need

• Options once you have found where the product-market fit is:

• Improve product market fit for “nice” groups

• Take full advantage of want/need groups

• Optimize growth at “nice” level

OS2: Scaling Consumer Products

• Growth through Value

• Virality

• Word of Mouth

• Repeat Use (vs. churn)

• Growth through Awareness

• SEO and SEM

• Partnerships

• Facebook, LinkedIn

• Incentives

OS2: Scaling Enterprise Products

• The decision-maker growth hypothesis

• Beta customers

• Beta customers to validate value hypothesis, identify needs

• Will confirm or refute your sales decision-maker hypothesis

• Successful beta customers become “lighthouse” customers

• Build awareness at low cost

• Trade Marketing: Gartner and Forrester

• Pitch reporters and bloggers.

• Consumer-style bottoms-up approaches

Resourcing Execution scaling team and essential operations team

Resourcing Execution

Your operational decisions should fit into two categories:1. Direct, leveraged investment in the scaling goal2. Keeping the scaling team focused by removing distractions

Resourcing Scaling: Development and Technology

• Agility (speed and flexibility) is the key target

• Optimize for speed of pivoting

• Development process is as important as the tech

• Expect to accumulate technical debt

• Almost certainly need to grow the technology team

Resourcing Scaling: Learning

• Data and Dashboards

• PR/MarComm

• For Enterprise:

• Customer Service

• Sales (not sales manager)

• Business Development

Resourcing Scaling: Recruiting

• You will have to reach beyond immediate network

• All of your recruiting will be outbound

• Hire a recruiting lead who can do this

• Full-time, attracting cofounder-equivalents

• Set up a simple, modestly rigorous hiring process

• Reference checking

• Five interviews per candidate

• Establish a talent brand, cheaply

• Engineering should contribute to open source

• MarComm should land speaking engagements

Resourcing: Protecting the scaling team

• Essential: generalists who can allow the founders and scaling team to concentrate on scaling

• Minimum team for essential but distracting needs:

• Customer Service and Business Development (for consumer companies)

• Security

• Your workspace

• Travel and expense policy, accounting, legal, finance

• Office manager, utilities, vendor relationships, food

• IT and productivity technology

OS2: What’s next?

Next 2 weeks (OS2)

10/8: Jen Pahlka, Code for America

10/13: Mariam Naficy, Minted

10/15: Shishir Mehrotra, new project; former YouTube

Jennifer Pahlka

Founder & ED, Code for AmericaFormer US Deputy CTO Ran Web 2.0, GDC

Thinks about movements, communities & how to get real & leveraged outcomes

Assignment: reading & forum discussion

Appendix

OS2: Navigating Competition

• Competitive threats come mainly from other startups (or parts of companies which are operating as startups) who are approaching the same market as you.

• You should rarely respond to competitive threats.

• On the contrary, your goal is to force your competitors to respond to you.

• Stealth mode can be helpful to give you as much runway as possible before competition finds your space “interesting”

• Main threat is that your competitors will learn faster and better than you do, and scale more quickly.

• You win by iterating and learning more quickly, to improve product-market fit and to scale market share faster.

Financing the Tribe financing strategy and capital allocation

Resources: Financing strategy

• You will almost always need to raise money here, because you are hiring non-founders who require salaries, and it’s highly unlikely your business has grown to the point where it is throwing off sufficient revenue.

• You should strive for a quality venture round as soon as you can, even if you don’t have product-market fit yet.  That’s ideal, but the sooner you have the money the faster you can scale.

Resources: Capital Allocation

• Minimize outgoing expenses

• Carefully manage large expenditures

• It’s “costly” to grant equity to employees, but that bill doesn’t come due for a long time.  This is a key way to attract quality talent, so you don’t want to be parsimonious here.  You’re playing for a big exit, after all.

• Often the largest commitment is an office lease.  Don’t sign a long-term lease, as you don’t know what you’ll need if you’re blitzscaling.

• You can’t save your way to success.  Optimize your spending to maximize your learning.

The Power of Networks• “As much as I’d like to say the value of YC was the advice of the

partners, it’s really the network of alumni.” (Sam)

• “All the enterprise software companies [in YC] get all their customers from the YC alumni. I have no idea how you do it if you don’t have that!” (Sam)

• “The best companies are using their employee base to unlock the latent talent in another organization. They’re just picking great talent from other companies one at a time. They’re snipers.” (Ann)

Founders are Quick and Decisive• “Founders can be presented with a problem that you’ve never

seen before and solve it very quickly.” (Sam)

• “You need to be screaming across these stages. Today we’re in technical insight mode, in a month we should be productizing, and monetizing right after that.” (Michael)

• “When a founder is frozen or needs more data, that’s the sign of distress.” (Ann)

Be Contrarian—and Right• “Great ideas that look bad lead to outsized returns.” (Sam)

• “[Contrarianism is] where you find value as an investor. It’s the wild enthusiasm of conventional wisdom that chases prices higher in an investment round.” (Michael)

• “Every great startup has one fundamental assumption that has a less than 50% chance of being correct, but if true, will give you a 100X advantage in the market.” (Ann)

Build in Diversity from the Start• “Diversity is a clear win.” (Sam)

• “Diversity in terms of perspective is very important. I don’t think you can go from a homogenous organization to a diverse organization later on. It’s very difficult.” (Ann)

• “To the extent that you can round out one another’s edges, we like to see that kind of yin and yang. In our own firm, me and Mike, you just look at us, and we’re clearly very different. He’s a lover, not a fighter…I’m more of a fighter.” (Ann)

Don’t Believe (or Pay for) the Hype• “[A big self-inflicted problem are] Founders that fall in love with

their public image — who want to be on those 30 under 30 lists. Founders who go to networking events. ‘You were out of the office more than you were there.’ When you say it like that, the problem is obvious.” (Sam)

• “What I wish was on the [things to ignore] list is f---king PR. The idea of founders as brands is a lie. It’s a lie spread by the people who sell ads for pageviews. Many times, PR can tip the outcome in the wrong direction.” (Michael)

Real Founders Make Money• “Many things are being backed by VC right now that are not

businesses — they are public goods, science experiments, or hobbies.” (Michael)

• “An opinionated person who wants to start a company ought to know how they intend to go to market. If that doesn’t exist, it reflects a laziness of mind and is a big red flag.” (Michael)

• “There are lots of unicorns today that are still searching for that scalable business model.” (Ann)

Individual Flavor• “Joining a successful company has a higher expected value that starting a

startup.” (Sam)

• “Every big, good idea is going to be subjected to a devil’s advocate, who should be the smartest person you can find, whose job is to try to destroy the idea.” (Michael)

• “Treat yourself to shareholders. Convertible debt is a terrible poison in our industry. Ownership mechanisms ensure the best long-term custodianship of those investments.” (Michael)

• “One of the most important pieces of a marketplace is not demand, it’s supply. If your supply is loyal, the demand will come.” (Ann)