Thrash now (E)

0:00Time flies like an arrow, but fruit flies like a banana. Hey, it's Arav, and this is a special archived episode of Akimbo.

0:17This may not surprise you, but in high school, I was on the math team. The math team even had a cheer. Cosine, tangent, arcsine, sine, 3.14159, go math team. And the math team depended in its competitions on a relay race. And the way the relay race worked was each of five people got a problem, but you couldn't do the problem until you got the answer from the person ahead of you in the race. So the first person would solve the problem, come up with the answer, seven, hand the number seven to the second person who would plug it into their problem, and on and on. Well, I was the anchor, not sure why, and I looked at my problem, and I knew I was going to have 15 or 20 minutes to sit there before it got handed over to me.

1:09But I also realized that there were only 99 different numbers that could have been handed to me based on the way the problem was organized. So I built a grid answering pretty much all of the 99 so that when my number came to me, I just looked up in the grid and we got the answer. And that was the one and only time we ever succeeded on the math team. The lesson for me there was an understanding intuitively that turns out to have been built into something called Gantt charts and CPM. And what these are, are techniques that were built by the armed forces to help them with incredibly complicated projects like building a battleship.

1:53If you're going to build a battleship, a whole bunch of things have to happen in the correct order. So a simple little trivial example. If you wipe your face with a napkin and then eat a big spaghetti dinner, the fact that you did it in the wrong order will embarrass you. You have to eat the dinner before you use the napkin. Well, the same thing is true in building a battleship. First thing you've got to do is have a plan, an understanding of why you're even building the battleship and what specs it needs to meet. Then as you build it, you need a bill of materials, you need a list of sources of where you're going to get your stuff, you need your staff to put it together, etc., etc., etc.

2:35And what we see as we do complicated projects is that at the beginning of a project, there are very few dependencies, there are very few constraints. The idea is simple, make up what you want to make up. But as you proceed through the project, your variability keeps getting locked down until the very last person working on a seven-year project to build a house doesn't have any choices at all. All she's got to do is install the lock on the front door to spec. Okay, that makes sense. But where does the relay race come in? Well, it turns out that just about every complicated project is, in fact, a relay race.

3:17You can't start your part until the person before you finishes or at least gets close enough that you can do what you need to do. So if your job is to hang the door on the third floor stateroom of the battleship and the third floor hasn't been built yet, you can't hang the door. Step by step, the thing gets built. So where does the critical path, the CP and CPM come in? Well, the critical path works like this. There are certain steps in the project that will slow down the entire project that everyone is waiting on before it can be completed. There are other steps, not so much. So if the person who's hanging the door on the third floor stateroom is three days late hanging the door, It has no effect whatsoever on painting the outside of the ship.

4:11You can paint the outside of the ship regardless of whether the person who's hanging the door on the third floor does their job quickly or does their job slowly. But there are other tasks, for example, getting the steel delivered that drive the entire project. One day's delay on delivering the steel equals at least one day's delay on the entire project. You can't make up for it. That path, the path that you cannot make up for, the irreducible minimum, that's the critical path. And so our job as producers, as people who create the work that's going to change the culture, is to efficiently get that minimum path to be organized and to happen.

5:02Because every time we veer from that path, we're going to cost everybody money. So a simple example, something that happened to me a few years after the math team Triumph. And that was my great one and only job at Spinnaker Software. And we had 40 engineers working on the project I was running, which was pretty astonishing. and what I knew, what we all knew, is that if we missed October 5th, the deadline we had to ship finished software to Radio Shack, Target, Leachmere, Kmart, etc., we were going to lose five or ten million dollars worth of orders, and if we lost those orders, the whole company was going to go out of business.

5:46So it was pretty clear that that date, that date mattered, and We also had an understanding of where the critical path was. Who was on the hook today? Who was on the hook this week? Who were other people waiting for? What I did was I came in one day with a whole bunch of buttons, and I gave everyone a red button and a green button. I said, here's the deal. If you're on the critical path, wear a green button. If you're not on the critical path, wear a red button. It's really simple. If you're wearing a red button, your job is to get out of the way of people who are wearing a green button. Your job is to figure out how to help people who are wearing a green button get to the point where they can wear a red button instead.

6:30By identifying where the critical path was, we could honor it. We could organize around it. And we could make it more efficient. Too often, what we get hung up on is trying to invent stuff when the critical path is more important than our invention. Steve McConnell wrote a great book about managing software projects. You can find a link in the show notes. And in the book, he talks about why most software is lousy. And it has to do with the critical path. Here's the way to understand it. When you're writing version one of a piece of software, you're probably writing it by yourself or with just one or two people.

7:14As a result, you can get to the purity of the expression that you are seeking. Okay, fine. The software comes out. It probably fails. Most software does. But maybe it strikes a chord. Maybe people really like it. At this point, it's time for version two. Well, if you're making version two, it means you've got a few more resources. and so some more people joined the team. It still gets pretty good because everyone can sit around a table. The critical path isn't the thing that's going to make you live or die, succeed or fail. But version 3, version 3 is where the problem comes up because in version 3, there's real money on the table.

7:56There are a lot of people paying attention. The general counsel, Steve Ballmer. Ladies and gentlemen, Steve Ballmer!

8:23The people on the board, the packaging people, the people who have to buy all the supplies, the assembly line, the marketing people, the sales people. And what this means is that as you develop the software, the number of people who are impacting the critical path goes up and up and up. And making a change to your software five months in is really, really expensive. And unfortunately, big egos and big drama from people at the top of the hierarchy mean that they don't look at it at the beginning. They look at it at the end. They're too busy to look at anything before the last minute. And they look at it at the last minute and go, oh no, you can't do this.

9:08You've got to change this fundamental piece of it. There's a committee meeting, people pushing each other to average it out, to lower the stakes. And as a result, the project slows down because it's not one or two or three great programmers giving up a weekend or two to fix it. Instead, it's 30 or 300 or even 3 ,000 people who have to modify their plans and their schedule for the great relay race they're in because some CEO or some general counsel or some brand manager said they didn't like the shade of blue that's on page three. So what does Steve prescribe? He talks about this idea of thrashing.

9:53Thrashing is the creative work. Thrashing is the part where we get to the core of the magic that we are creating. And too many organizations thrash at the end. At the end, they start to have meetings about the who's it for, the what's it for, what difference are we trying to make, how do we make this magical. It's too late. It's too late because the battleship is mostly built. The CPM, the relay race is mostly organized. Every change toward the end, not only is super expensive, but those changes toward the end are rarely going to be effective because they don't get at the core of what you are trying to do.

10:32The alternative is to thrash at the beginning. Because when we thrash at the beginning, it's cheap. When we thrash at the beginning, we can use a whiteboard. We don't have to use millions of dollars of software code. If someone on the team says, I know it when I see it, they probably don't belong on your core team. And if someone claims to have authority in your organization, they need to be in the meeting at the beginning. They may not come to the meeting at the end. Those people, the ones who claim to have authority, if they're there at the beginning, they can have influence. They can have input.

11:09They can take responsibility. But as the project advances, they've got to get out of the way. So another story from my time at Spinnaker. The president of the company, David Cease, was a great mentor and hero to me. He did super work, but also he let me flail and fail and invent. And he also loved games, and we were in the games business. And what would happen is that people would bring him software that was running, that was almost ready to ship, because he was really busy. He would look at it at the end. But David loved games, so he would chime in. Some of his suggestions were actually really good.

11:51It didn't matter. They were really expensive. So I shifted the way I was willing to work with him. And what I said is, look, here's the script for the game. Here's every word that's going to be in the game. We've worked out how we want it to flow. Here it is in writing. It's 30 pages long. We are not going to start coding until you approve this script. I'll sit here for as many days as you want. There are three of us doing nothing. But I will sit here until you read the script and approve it. And once you read the script and approve it, then we'll start coding. And we did the same thing for the music, and we did the same thing for the graphics.

12:30So sure, there was room for little tweaks at the end, but we weren't going to have a discussion at the end about the characterization of Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, or the way that Roger Zelazny's characters were working in Nine Princes and Amber. We had those conversations at the beginning. We invited a talented person into the circle to thrash, to thrash early. that if you can thrash early, you can make great work, and then you can produce like a professional. And what it means to produce like a professional is to honor the relay race, to understand who's got a green badge and who's got a red badge.

13:09But the third thing I wanted to talk about is the biggest one, and it's a simple question. And the question is, when? that Groucho Marx, with his flip remark about fruit flies, understood that the order you tell the joke matters. If you say, fruit flies like a banana, and time flies like an arrow, it's not funny. The order matters. The when. And if you're going to bring an idea to the world, the when matters. Arlo Guthrie made his career, not because he's Woody Guthrie's son, but because he showed up at the Newport Folk Festival with a song, a song that millions of people came to love and respect.

13:5950 people a day, I said 50 people a day, walking in, singing a bar, Alice's Restaurant, walking out. If he had brought that song to Newport a year earlier or a year later, no one would have ever heard of Arlo Guthrie. Or Bob Dylan, also at the Newport Folk Festival.

14:38When he went electric, it was too soon. It was too soon. It was too soon for Bob Dylan, the folk singer, to go electric. And the fact that he went electric just a little too soon is what made Bob Dylan, Bob Dylan. Same thing's true with technology. Technology, the ratchet of technology, keeps changing the rules. It keeps creating a new when. And the way we have to interact with that when is to launch whatever culture change we seek a little too soon. Now there are some people, you know one or two of them, the dreamers, who are always way too soon. They were working on virtual reality seven years ago.

15:22Now they're on to teleportation or advanced AI that will control everything in the universe. They're always too soon because they don't want actually to be on the hook to ship their work. And then you know more people, way more people, who are always a little too late. They're the ones who are showing up and saying, I got a great idea for an app for the iPhone now. Too late. Too late. That door is mostly closed for people with limited resources. The when question. You know, the dimensions of up and down and in and out. those dimensions are easy to understand. But the dimension of when, when should I launch this?

16:03When should I say this? When should I bring this to the world? There's an art to that. Venture capitalists, successful ones, understand this art. And the art is to be just a little too soon. So when I was launching Yo-Yo Dine and we were going out to raise our first round of venture Capital in 1995 or 6, there were VCs who said to me, we don't think email is going to work. Like, I have an email address, but my wife or my husband doesn't have an email address. So nah, we're not interested in a company that's going to be based on email. See ya. That was good. That was really good. At the time, it was hard to hear, but it was really good that smart, technically facile people thought email wasn't going to work.

16:50Because if everyone said, well, yeah, this is obvious, then I was too late. That the key, whether you're making music or writing a book or creating software or leading a class, is if you want to change the culture, two-thirds of the people need to think you're too soon. If everyone thinks you're too soon, please write it down. We'll remember you as a genius 100 years from now. But if two-thirds of the people think you're too soon, you might be on to something. A little too early is just right. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.

17:46Hi, this is Vasilis from Greece. Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is... And that completes my question. Hi, Seth. This is Heather in Bermuda. I have a question for you about pricing and offers. I've had a few people tell me recently that they can't afford something that I'm offering. I totally understand that. I'm a very frugal and cost-conscious person. But they also tell me that they watch my videos every week and they love my work, so I get the sense that they trust me. and I'm confident that I've put together more value than the price. So I'm wondering what I'm missing in communicating that value.

18:22You've said that people's heart rate goes up right before they make a decision. So what do you find is the most important piece of making an offer, particularly when it's through a static web page like your Bootstrappers workshop, that inspires people to make the decision to register? Thank you so much for everything you do and for the way you do it. Thanks for this, Heather. as so often happens, the words can get in the way. In this case, the word is afford. I believe the people visiting your website can't afford a private jet or even a chauffeur, but can they afford$20 for a pound of coffee or$50 for some software that might make their life better?

19:09Probably. That's not the question. The question is, are you asking them to make one decision or two decisions? One decision is, you've already decided that you're the kind of person that spends money on software or that you're the kind of person that spends money on coffee. So consider buying this item today. That's very different than saying, now I need you to make two decisions. One, change the way you think about spending money. And two, once you've changed the way you make that decision, make a new decision about which item you're going to spend the money on. And that's much more difficult.

19:58So if you look at Nike selling sneakers that cost$200 a pair, they never could have pulled that off at a mass market level 30 years ago. Because 30 years ago, people said, I can't afford to spend that kind of money on a pair of sneakers. But over time, their culture has changed. And so now Nike says, hey, if you're the kind of person that spends hundreds of dollars on sneakers, buy this pair as your next pair. But they're not spending a lot of time trying to get non-sneaker buyers to decide to become the kind of people who spend a lot of money on sneakers. Hi Seth, it's Stuart. My question is, how would you go about bootstrapping a non-profit organization?

20:45And how do the principles of bootstrapping apply or not in what are often two-sided markets? Thanks. Thanks, Stuart. There are two questions here. The first one has to do with starting non-profits. While it's tempting to believe that non-profits are generally funded by large numbers of philanthropists giving small amounts of money, In general, it's not the case that a nonprofit is almost always bootstrapped because the founder goes to two or three or four passionate individuals and says, if we could work to solve problem X, is that the sort of thing you'd like to support? And so it begins with one side of the market, which is the donor and the founder deciding to take on a problem.

21:37The second half of your question, though, is about two-sided markets, which is super fascinating, and we might do a whole episode about it. Think about Lyft or Uber. The drivers don't want to drive unless there are passengers, and the passengers don't want to use the service unless there are drivers. How do you solve this problem? Two sides, both sides waiting for the other one to go first. And often what happens is you have to prime the pump. Well, the same thing is true in scaling a nonprofit, that future funders want to see that people are being served, but people are difficult to serve if you don't have funders.

22:19And that's why most nonprofits work on problems that can be solved from the edges. They don't say, this will not work until we have spent$500 million building X. Instead, they say, this one soup kitchen, this one modality brought to a certain kind of problem, then we're going to be able to scale it. That's why it's so difficult to start a nonprofit to do something like come up with a vaccine to a disease, because either it all works or it doesn't work at all. Much more often are nonprofits that are able to nibble around the edges. to start a soup kitchen, to build one prototype preschool. Because if you can prove it in the small, then you can activate the other half of the market, gain more funders, and scale it.

23:17So we do need a mechanism for these moonshot-type nonprofits, just as the moonshot itself wouldn't have worked if we'd only made it an eighth of the way to the moon. One giant leap for mankind. Some of the most important problems we need to solve require them to be done in one fell swoop. But currently, our culture isn't well organized around that sort of problem. Hey, Seth, this is Sean calling from California. Long time fan of the show, fan of the show from the very first episode, long time fan of your work. And I have a question that kind of spans multiple episodes. it's kind of actually been a question I've had ever since I started following your work.

24:03You talk a lot about the role of the artist, to use your example of Bob Dylan being the one who challenges the culture and brings people new ideas. And that vision of being an artist really appeals to me. In many ways, that's the kind of artist I want to be. But you also talk a lot about finding and or creating, well, really finding, finding a tribe who's already looking for a certain thing and giving them that, you know, preaching to the choir. I've heard you say it's not necessarily a bad thing. There's something to be said for preaching to the choir. So my question really is what, what, what do I do with that tension?

24:45Because on the one hand, I see that it's, it's mentally practical to find people who already know what they want and just give them that. But, you know, especially when it comes to building a career and, you know, you know, if I want to get to a point where I can, you know, be a full time in my art, I need to do that. Thank you for your art and your question. You are right. Preaching to the choir is way more effective than preaching to people who have no interest in hearing from you. But what's not true is that the choir always wants to hear the same music. So if we think about, I don't know, Philip Glass or other contemporary modern composers, they did not create their music to be played on Top 40 radio.

25:37They created their music to be played for people who wanted to hear new music. Or if we think about Baroness Freitag, who made the infamous fountain urinal that Marcel Duchamp took credit for, and the other conceptual artists, or people who were on the cutting edge of contemporary art, they weren't making their art to please the middle of the market. Norman Rockwell was doing that. They were making their art to please people who were looking for new art. So yes, there is a group, a tribe, that is fascinated by whatever it is, new tech, new food, new painting, new music. And the artist will understand the market better if she's willing to engage with those people first.

26:30And the second half of it is this. It's entirely possible you can't make a living doing your art. There's no doubt that Bob Dylan would have kept doing what he was doing, even if he was still in the East Village. Because what it means to make art isn't always that you get to make a living. It might just mean that you get to make a difference. If you've got a question, we'd love to hear it. Please visit akimbo.link and press the appropriate button.