Two Thirds Done

Thoughts and experiences of an eighty one year old Wild Duck.

Avram Miller by the sea
EN | IT

587 posts since 2006

Category: Lessons from a Wild Duck

  • If you have to give a demo for someone to understand your business, you don’t have a business

    This is a continuation of of lessons I am posting on this blog. I may use them to do a podcast or even a video course. Not sure, yet. Look forward to your comments here or feel free to send an email to flightofthewildduckbook@gmail.com. Don’t forget to read my book, The Flight of a Wild Duck.

    I thought I would share my approach to first meetings with entrepreneurs. Others will have different methods. It is essential to be adaptable.  

    Skip the Demo

    “Don’t give me a demo,” I would say as entrepreneurs started their presentation. Then, I would observe their expressions, which slowly melted into a range of emotions: astonishment, bewilderment, shock, confusion, frustration, and even anger. I deliberately provoked their reaction to observe their response, which often gave me much insight. Asking to reroute is a form of stress testing that helped me asses the management’s ability to respond to changes. But mostly, I did not want to see the demo, especially at the beginning of the meeting. I might ask for it only once I understand the business and want to understand more.

    While demos can be helpful to an investor’s understanding of the Opportunity being presented, they can also be deceiving, creating an impression that the company is further along than it is. The demo is about the company’s product, but a company has to be more than the product. While I knew that, so many founders did not. They thought of their business as the shipping container for their product. 

    Often, I asked if we needed to go through their presentation. If they said yes, I would ask how many slides and ask them to keep the formal presentation down to 20 minutes. My preference was to have concepts explained to me interactively. I wanted to ask questions because not only did I want the answer, but I wanted to explore the depth of the person answering.

    Having multiple team members at the presentation, even if only one is speaking, was invaluable. I would look into the eyes of the others to gain valuable insight into the team’s dynamics.  

    Opportunity and Strategy

    Understanding the Opportunity the company was addressing and their Strategy for pursuing it was paramount to me. Unless the Opportunity was not compelling and the Strategy believable, I had no further interest. It should only take a few sentences, a paragraph at most, to convey the essence and potential of the Opportunity and the path to achieving it. Not only is it essential to do this for potential investors and customers, but it is also an essential ingredient in aligning all the company’s employees. If you want them to March together, it is helpful if they know where they are going and how they are supposed to get there. 

    I remember when Mark Cuban and Todd Wagner presented broadcast.com to me in early 1997 (it was a bit like Shark Tank, but this time, Mark was on the stage, and I was the judge). They explained that many people wanted to listen to sports games played by their former college teams. Hundreds of such sports events took place weekly, but there was no way to access them then. Mark and Todd had devised a way to recast local radio coverage, unlocking a significant market opportunity. I was excited to hear them explain the potential even though I had never attended a sports event. Radio, which was only audio, did not require much communication bandwidth, which was great because broadband was in its very early stages. It would take until the year 2000 for there to be a million broadband home subscribers. We (Intel Capital) invested $3.8 million into broadcast.com. Yahoo bought the company a few years later, and we sold our stock for over $75 million. Mark and Todd did not spend any time talking about the technology, nor did they demonstrate it. They focused on Opportunity and Strategy, and they won me over. 

    Homework for Aspiring Entrepreneurs

    An excellent way to develop the skill of articulating both the Opportunity and the Strategy is to use companies you know and write a paragraph describing the Opportunity and Strategy as you understand them. Examples include Airbnb, Uber, Tesla, Salesforce, Slack and Facebook.  Feel free to send my your home work at flightofthewildduckbook@gmail.com.

  • Think more and do less.

    Think more and do less.

    When I was writing my book, The Flight of a Wild Duck, I intended to have a section on the lessons I learned over my fifty year career.  But after three years of working on the book which was already over three hundred pages, I decided to separate the lesson section. Now, two years after my book was published, I have decided to do the lessons. 

    However, I am not sure as to the best way to do them.  I can post them to me blog, or to Medium or use Sub-stack.  I am also considering do audio and video versions, using TikTok and Youtube.  

    Please share with me your thoughts either in the comments or send me an email to avram@avrammiller.com.

    Below is an example.

    Think More and Do Less

    In my extensive experience working with early-stage companies for forty years as a board member, advisor, and investor, I have concluded that entrepreneurs are driven to make something happen and make it happen quickly. Making things happen is laudable, but making the right thing happen is essential.  

     At the early stage of forming a company, it is imperative to determine the opportunity first, develop a strategy for obtaining it, put together the resources to implement it, and eventually reap the rewards.   I call this OyStER (Opportunity-Strategy-Execution-Reward). You can read more about this here .

    Changing course will be difficult and expensive once you start down a particular path, especially if you have already raised money. Of course, that is not impossible, but it would be far better to have made that change in advance.  

    A great example is the founding of Compaq Computer, which was founded by Rod Canion, Jim Harris, and Bill Murto in 1982. All three founders were former senior managers at Texas Instruments. They left their jobs to start Compaq. The original IBM Person Computer was unlike any other IBM product as its design allowed for third-party software and hardware. I discuss this in my book, The Flight of a Wild Duck. The Compaq team decided to develop a hard drive add-in (5-megabyte Winchester disc from Shugart Associates). Then, they went out to raise capital. They meet with the legionary Ben Rosen of Savin Rosen (Ben had been a very successful tech journalist and then started the PC Forum). Ben met with the founders and was unimpressed with their concept. He correctly felt that many companies would offer this, and there was little value. He politely told them to return to the drawing board, and they did. It was not a drawing board by a placemat in the House of Pies in Houston, in which the idea of developing a portable version of the IBM PC was drawn. Compaq was one of the most successful technology companies of the 80s. Unfortunately, they did not successfully transition when challenged by Asian companies now producing what had been turned into a commodity, the PC. Their failure to do that is the subject of another lesson.  

    There are many great opportunities, so you need to make sure you start with a great one. There are many strategies, so explore several and be clear why you chose the one you did. In thinking about the opportunity and the strategy, engage those who can help you think things out. Having a network of advisors and mentors is priceless. Of course, you must pay great attention to your instincts and intuition. You must have the conviction, even if this means ignoring what others are saying. But the process and dialog will help you think all this out.