On Navigating the Unknown
George Babu, Partner
A mess navigator; recognizes the magic in founders and helps them chart a path through all the chaos towards their dreams.
Ever since I started working, as far back as highschool, for me it was always about putting emerging technology into the broadest possible use, as fast as possible. As a kid, I watched my uncle building computers for use at his bank. As a teenager in the 90s, I helped small businesses set up computer networks, worked for the oldest mayor in North America at the time, the mayor of Mississauga, helping her team explore and adopt new technology (like old school voice dictation, decades before Siri), and created a GUI for my classmates in high school to make using the then text-based-web easier (before Mosaic became popular!).
In college, I got an internship at Research in Motion before it was the famous Blackberry, and I stuck around for a decade witnessing first hand the infamous hockey stick. I was always amazed at how messy and chaotic it was inside when everything looked like a fairytale on the outside from press coverage to the stock price. I learned first hand to embrace and love the messiness. That’s just what startups go through as they’re moving at great speeds in unknown spaces and going up against the status quo. I initially worked on product as an RF engineer doing research into emerging wireless tech. I then had a chance to see all that is necessary to make a company successful from marketing to sales to legal and all the other functions. I joined RIM when it was unknown, before it became the underdog, the challenger to Nokia and Ericsson that created the ubiquitous “CrackBerry”. I also witnessed that same visionary company getting sideswiped by Apple and Google. It’s so easy for companies to get trapped in one way of viewing the world, not paying attention to the changing facts on the ground, the underlying currents signalling a shift in a market, and the new ways to view the world.
It became my mission to learn about all the other things that matter in a company, beyond engineering. I sought out opportunities where I worked with founders and basically took on everything they didn’t want to do from facilities, to office management to legal to operations to marketing and sales. My point of view is if you’re a Founder/CEO, you have to expand your awareness to all the other things that are not your area of expertise. That rarely happens with founders - and it is definitely easier said than done. But thinking about your business holistically is imperative to successfully avoiding blindspots and working towards the right priorities. Co-founding a couple of companies with incredible entrepreneurs, engineers and scientists, Rypple and Kindred, I strived to make forward-thinking technologies a reality, working on everything from commercialization and team building to fundraising and acquisition. You only realize the full weight of that once you’ve done it yourself first hand as a founder of your own company.
Reflecting on my experience, a few threads remain consistent throughout:
Founders over-index on their area of expertise, and often that expertise is building products. Over-indexing creates life-threatening blindspots. Important areas end up being under-invested in, leaving massive gaps for competitors to seize. You see this most often in startups treating go-to-market as an afterthought. But you also see it in less obvious areas such as legal or building operations for scale. You will see founders who bury their heads in the sand just dismissing other areas as unimportant.
One of the hardest skill sets to acquire is quickly learning things one doesn’t know both as a founder but also as an organization. After realizing one’s lack of knowledge, founders have to quickly figure out if they should bring in consultants or advisors to identify gaps or hire best-in-class to augment the team internally. Companies often don’t do this quick enough and hence lag behind until it’s too late.
Startups often fail to grasp the facts on the ground fast enough to survive. Founders need to create ways to quickly learn and internalize what’s really going on for themselves and their teams. When you’re innovating, it’s of course the case that the market won’t see what you see. They often don’t believe it’ll work or understand its uses. Founders have to find a healthy framework that allows them to evaluate the nature of the skepticism that exists and understand which of it to dismiss and which of it to address. This can single-handedly make or break a company.
You’ll get a great deal of false indicators of success like being invited to conferences and featured in the spotlight or getting pats on the back when you land a round of funding. You also often get signals that you’re the cool kid on the block from startup beat press or being the highlight of the VC circuit. Founders get distracted by this. I did! But if you’re not focused on the business, building your products, closing deals, scaling your revenue, and generating real value then you’re not on a path to success (which for me is building iconic companies that have a lasting and positve impact on the world).
You spend all of your life being a winner, getting prizes and “achieving”. And then you found a company and you’re faced maybe for the first time with losses and setbacks, criticism and a spotlight that shines an intense light on all the things you’re bad at. Emotionally, this is one of the most difficult things for founders to learn how to adapt to and grow past. I’m always striving to calibrate and strike that balance of what I listen to and how I internalize it -- and it is just not that easy.