Insights

Maciej Kranz - VP of Corporate Strategic Innovation, Cisco Systems “The only constant is change.” It’s an adage that goes back 2500 years to the Greek philosopher Heraclitus. But never has it been as true as it is today. Technology adoption is growing exponentially, driving change at a dizzying pace. Billions of devices are connecting to networks — most of them the sensors, controllers, and machines that power the Internet of Things (IoT). You probably see the rapid growth of connected devices in your own organization: on the manufacturing floor, in your logistics system, hospital or retail store. But are you seeing the corresponding business impact generated by connected processes and business models enabled by IoT? Over the last 25 years, organizations have had to reinvent themselves every three to seven years to keep up with the pace of change. Companies that missed one technology transition might scramble to catch up, but missing two meant a slow fade to obscurity, irrelevance, and death. Just think about the rapid evolution from records, to cassettes, to CDs — with each transition creating new winners and losers. Today, the evolution has come full circle as digital streaming services have made any kind of physical media obsolete. That kind of relentless change threatens the survival of many businesses. According to The Boston Consulting Group, only 19 percent of S&P 500 companies from 50 years ago are still in existence today. How can you ensure the survival of your business? A new generation of leaders, makers, thinkers, and doers is meeting that change with flexibility and optimism, and transforming it into opportunity. In my upcoming book, Building the Internet of Things, I call these pioneers “Generation IoT.” These are the people who see the transformational power of IoT-driven processes, business models and new revenue streams. They are eager to champion and drive these opportunities in their organizations. These people know that IoT is not just one project, one training session, one change. They know that in order to succeed they and their organizations need to adjust and re-learn, over and over again. Generation IoT is first defined by openness — open standards, open collaboration, open communications, and open, flexible business models. Members of Generation IoT can be found in IT or operational technology (OT). They can run the plant, or be part of the supply chain. They can be vendors, contractors, or CXOs. They can be young or old. All are willing to learn and take risks, and are good at building virtual teams internally and partnering externally. You can recognize these new winners not by their age or their titles — but by their ability to build and deploy agile, flexible business solutions. Here’s an example: a decade ago, visionaries talked about mass customization — building mass-produced products to each individual buyer’s specifications. But it was difficult to implement efficiently and proved to be an idea ahead of its time. Today, IoT makes this concept much more practical and cost-effective because information can be shared in real time between every element in the supply chain. Buyers can click on the components they want. Suppliers and logistics providers can see what is being ordered and adjust their scheduling accordingly. Production systems can be retooled as needed. With the information flowing up and down the supply chain, all the necessary materials are at the production line when that customer’s order is being assembled, whether it’s a car or a three-piece suit. With IoT, mass customization is not just a future possibility — it’s starting to happen. Daihatsu Motor Company is already using 3D printers to offer car buyers 10 colors and 15 base patterns to create their own “effect skins” for car exteriors. Each car rolls off the line customized for that individual buyer. The key question — and it’s the focus of both my book and this blog series — is how it’s all supposed to happen. Yes, vision is important. Pointing your organization toward where and how it needs to transform itself is key. But the road to realizing such vision is a multi-year, multi-phased journey and it starts with you successfully tackling one of today’s business problems. A low-risk, small project based on a well-established use-case is all that is needed to get going. Armed with the initial success, you can then pick a more complex problem and an IoT solution that will also have a bigger impact. IoT is a journey. Along the way, you will break down silos and build understanding and cooperation among IT, OT, supply chain and finance. You will also bring in an ecosystem of partners for a complete, converged solution. The good news is that thousands of your peers have already started on the IoT journey. Based on their experiences, a set of best practices has emerged: • Have a big vision, but start with a small project using one of the four fast payback scenarios I outline in my book: connected operations, remote operations, predictive analytics, and predictive maintenance. • Build you own business case by comparing industry benchmarks with your own total cost of ownership data. • Get a C-suite sponsor, because you are not implementing one IoT project, you are starting on the journey that will transform your organization, your industry, and your career. • Build a cross-functional team; you need complementary skills, so maximize the chances of success by building support and buy-in across your entire organization. Finally, recognize that we’re all relatively new at this. None of us have spent our careers on IoT — not yet. You can be an extremely valuable member of this transformation with the skills you have today. Whether you’re in Generation X, Y, or Z, you can be part of Generation IoT. Stay tuned for my next blog, where I’ll take a closer look at the four fast-payback paths to IoT. - Maciej Kranz, VP, Corporate Strategic Innovation, Cisco Systems

The most powerful tool you have in closing an investor is fear of missing out (FOMO). FOMO only occurs when you have momentum in the round. Once you get that momentum, you start closing investors and a virtuous circle begins, increasing FOMO and carrying you to a great round. Here’s three ways to build momentum when you’re fundraising for your startup.

Timothy Chou, Ph.D. - Lecturer, Stanford University In 2004 I published my first book, The End of Software. At the time I was the President of Oracle On Demand, so many people found it a curious title. In the book I discussed the fundamental economic reasons software should be delivered as a service. As an example of new startups in the field I highlighted four companies: VMWare, salesforce.com, Netsuite and OpenHarbor, which were all pre-IPO companies at the time. While I didn’t get all four correct, three of the four have gone on to be major companies driving the second generation of enterprise software. When I left Oracle, I started to wonder what was next for enterprise software. We’ve built CRM, ERP, HR, supply chain and purchasing software for on premises deployment and now all are being delivered as a cloud service. While delivery as a cloud service provides both lower cost and higher quality, the functionality has remained largely the same. So, are we at the end of innovation for enterprise software? In 2010 I started a cloud computing class at Tsinghua University in Beijing. The Amazon team was kind enough to give me $3000 worth of AWS time for the students to use. I showed up in class and told them it would buy a small server in Northern California, Virginia or Ireland for 3 ½ years. They looked bored; after all, they could also get a server in China for 3 ½ years. Or, I said, $3000 will buy you 10,000 servers for 30 minutes. So, what could you do with 10,000 servers for 30 minutes? Like you, I’ve heard the buzzword IoT for quite a few years. I mostly ignored it because I wasn’t sure why my toaster should talk to my coffee maker. But a few years ago I invited Bill Ruh, CEO of GE Digital, to deliver a guest lecture at my Stanford class and his talk raised my curiosity; so a year ago I decided I needed to learn what was going on in industrial IoT, or some would call enterprise IoT. With the help of a crowd of at least a hundred experts, I documented nearly twenty different case studies spanning all of the major industries: power, water, oil & gas, agriculture, healthcare, construction and transportation. Mid way through building all of these cases the answer to my two questions became obvious. While second generation enterprise software has helped reduce the cost and improve the efficiency of some enterprises it has done little to transform our physical world. With the decreasing costs of sensors, compute and storage we now have the ability to create a more precise planet. And unless we all move to Mars, we’re going to need to produce energy, water, healthcare and food more efficiently, more precisely. And if you consider that all developing economies require fundamental infrastructure, shouldn't we engineer next generation healthcare, power, and agriculture using powerful new IoT software? In the developing economies we skipped land line telephony, will it not be possible to skip ahead in these other critical infrastructure areas? A few weeks ago we launched my new book: Precision: Principals, Practices and Solutions for the Internet of Things in London on the River Thames. The book is written for anyone who wants to be a student of the subject, whether you're a focused on technology or business. The first part of the book divides the technology principals into five major areas. We discuss the things or machines themselves, how they are connected, what is done to collect information, how you can learn from things and finally what can be done with what we’ve learned. While many are implementing IoT solutions using current technology, it should be recognized most of the technology to date has been built for Internet of People (IoP) applications. But things are not people. For instance, there are many more things than people, things can be where people aren’t they have more to say, things talk much more frequently and things can be programmed, people can’t. While there are numerous technology challenges and opportunities within successfully implementing industrial IoT solutions, this distinction has great relevance to those enterprises that build machines (e.g., gene sequencers, combine harvesters, wind turbines) and finally on those that use these machines (e.g. hospitals, farms and utilities). The second part of the book contains fourteen case studies that span the major industries of power, water, healthcare, transportation, oil & gas, construction and agriculture. You'll meet Nick August, who is a farmer on the Cotswalds, learn about how an autonomous train will run from the north of Australia to Perth this year and how you can use machine learning to predict electric grid failure. Some companies have already begun to make the investments in industrial IoT. GE Software, for instance, was founded in 2011 with a $1B investment. CEO Jeff Immelt has declared that GE needed to evolve into a software-and-analytics company lest its machines become commodities. Immelt has set an ambitious target of $15B in software revenue by 2020. PTC has taken an M&A path and invested over $500M in a series of companies, including ThingWorx, ColdLight and Axeda. On the venture side, you may not have noticed but Uptake, a Chicago-based IoT startup, beat Slack and Uber to become Forbes 2015's Hottest Startup. They raised $45M at a $1B post funding valuation. I’ll let you be the judge of whether it’s time to invest in IoT. But whether you’re a student at Berkeley, someone who works for an enterprise tech company, a venture capitalist, a CEO of a textile machine company, or the Chief Innovation Officer of a hospital, I’d encourage you to make Precision: Principals, Practices and Solutions for the Internet of Things part of your summer reading list and start exploring how you’ll be part of creating a more precision planet. - Timothy Chou, Lecturer at Stanford University; Chairman, Alchemist IoT Accelerator; Former President of Oracle on Demand ‍

Hacker News can be a great source of finding engineering talent for your company. Here are few ways I have found on HN to source great talent for my own startup:

“90% of startups fail.” You’ve probably heard that before. But what does it mean?

I’ve been having a blast since we sold StackStorm to Brocade.

Sean Jacobsoh - Partner, Norwest Venture Partners Contrary to common belief it’s not poor market timing, aggressive competition or a lack of ability to raise capital that kills the bulk of startups. Rather, according to CEOs of failed startups, it’s a lack of market for their products. That’s right—all too often startups burn through their funding, iterating on their big idea, without validating that it solves a problem at a price customers are willing to actually pay. In the enterprise, this is even more critical as early adoption needs to be closely matched with the proper pricing structures. But even if you’ve hit on a true need in your market, there are still a number of other pitfalls that can be hard for first-time entrepreneurs to avoid. Three of the most common reasons I see enterprise products and start-ups fail include: Low customer adoption/use. If it takes too much time to onboard, doesn’t resonate with CIOs or your target buyer (which could be the head of marketing, sales, finance, HR) or is too cumbersome for employees to use, it won’t gain traction. Product is not working as intended. Customers may have initial patience for a few minor bugs, but ongoing problems requiring significant rework can sink your company. This is especially true in the enterprise market, as your product outage could cost your customers thousands or even millions of dollars. Doesn’t address a top problem of your target customer. No matter how amazing your product is or how well it solves your customers’ problems, most companies only have enough budget to address their top two or three pain points. Creating robust buyer customer personas ensures you’ve done more than just scratch the surface of their true organizational needs, allowing you to prioritize your product roadmap accordingly. The Road Map for Ensuring Startup Success Communication is key. At Norwest Venture Partners, we’ve found that it’s important for enterprise companies to start by creating a customer advisory board and involving them in the development of each new product or product iteration. Test and obtain feedback from them in real time, as they use the product and test out your demos, and do a weekly gut check to evaluate how sentiment is trending. Start small and work out the kinks before scaling up to your overall customer base. By involving your customers in your product iteration, they become more invested in your success. In turn, that means they’re more likely to give you the level of rich feedback you need to take your product to its next level and win over your market. Some founders worry that they can only keep their clients happy by delivering every product iteration they request, but that’s not the case. If you involve your customers in your product development process, they will see the issues you encounter along the way, and won’t be surprised if it doesn’t ultimately work out. Focus on how you can get them excited about helping to define the roadmap–which may include scrapping some products that won’t keep your product on the path to success and longevity. Your customers aren’t just buying that initial product you have on offer. They’re buying your long-term vision too. If you’re concerned that scrapping a feature too soon is going to sink your company, consider the alternative. What if you hold out hope for six, nine or even twelve months and the end result is still the same? By failing to take decisive action, you’ve now wasted resources, money and customer time on feedback for your doomed product. This misstep can put you at a disadvantage to your competitors and even cause you to lose some great people who wonder why you let them sink so much of their time and creative energy into a project that had little hope of seeing the light of day. Identifying the Right Market to Disrupt To be successful, a startup must build products that solve real problems the right way. “You have to look for new enabling technologies, or major trends, like fundamental trends, that create a wide gap between how things are done and how they can be done,” said Aaron Levie, CEO and co-founder of Box, in his Building for the Enterprise lecture. “Looking back in time to our business, the gap was basically storage was getting cheaper, internet was getting faster, browsers where getting better yet we are still sharing files with this very complicated, very cumbersome means. Anytime, between the delta of what is possible, and how things work today is at its widest. That is an opportunity to build new technology to go solve a problem.” But even great ideas can fail. So how can you recognize when you’re actually on to a billion-dollar valuation-creating product? In my experience, immersing yourself in your customer’s world is the best way to gain the awareness to spot the real opportunities for market disruption. For instance, it’s unlikely that Marc Benioff would have had the inspiration, confidence and vision to have moved CRMs into the cloud with the founding of Salesforce without his years of success at Oracle. As Benioff counsels in his book Behind the Cloud, “Don’t be afraid to ignore rules of your industry that have become obsolete or that defy common sense.” Although some outsiders have a knack for coming in without prior industry experience and hitting the ball out of the park, most successful startups are founded by someone who is obsessed with creating a better customer experience, who understands the industry’s pain points and daily challenges inside and out. If you can tap into the issues that are driving your customer crazy and causing them to lose sleep while efficiently solving them, the market is ripe for your taking. - Written by Sean Jacobsohn, Cloud VC | Partner at Norwest Venture Partners ‍

Evan Powell - Founding CEO, Stackstorm & Nexenta This post is, like many a blog, written largely as a bread crumb — a way to track my thinking. In the weeks since closing the sale of StackStorm to Brocade I’ve set off on a great adventure — getting to know many more entrepreneurs and investors while attempting to sharpen my understanding of relevant domains and technologies. My goal is simple — I want to learn to pick opportunities better. And while doing so I want to help entrepreneurs and learn a lot. This blog covers the discipline I’m attempting to follow in evaluating opportunities. My next blog will cover some of the opportunities I’m uncovering. Picking: Josh Kopleman from First Round (@joshk) has a great series of tweets recently on the importance of picking for entrepreneurs as well as investors. One of my favorite tweets: Yes, +100. So how does an entrepreneur pick? (Please, please correct and expand my thinking here.) The $1bn bar. Michael Porter in effect. The trick is to find opportunities that you *know* can create a space or at least become a winner in a space that is large enough that you’ll be worth $1bn with growing revenues in less than 10 years. OK, once again, how? How do you make that determination? In my case, I write-up 5 forces frameworks. And I have a lot of question marks in the key areas that I seek to fill in through conversations and education. I’m hopeful that these write-ups will themselves become breadcrumbs that will help me and the entrepreneurs I’m supporting. I tend to drill in on ecosystem and community dynamics because I’ve been somewhat successful in understanding and leveraging these areas. I am extremely confident in my ability to see how hard or easy it will be to get a community and a channel going. And here is one spot where a VC — who has lots of advantages versus me in picking including an infinite network — does not have something I do have: years of experience in actually doing the work. It is easy for me to go from a) potential space to b) community dynamics to c) relevant partners and d) a team than someone who is looking at many, many opportunities. The judo I typically try is to define a space and to start to market that in my discussions with potential teammates, investors and users. Also something that has been helpful for me in the past is to think about a tag-line for the space — think of the space itself as a product worthy of positioning. Once you find such a space — one that you can both help create and that you are confident is worth billions — then claiming leadership of it is pretty straightforward. Think software defined storage and Nexenta or event driven automation (still young) and StackStorm. We were able to seize leadership of those spaces (for better and worse) because I had helped to create them. 2. Personas While arguably you could subsume a focus on personas as one part of the 5 forces framework, I choose to break these out. A focus on who are the users, where do they hang out, what do they believe, how are they changing is all important. This does not necessarily mean that you need to be one of them. However you do need to know the secret handshakes. Only by getting inside their head can you become the natural choice for them. Yep, I’m talking design from the get go. If an entrepreneur pitches me an idea and yet does not engage with me on who exactly is the user and how is that profile changing over time, well, at the very least they need a lot of help. I’m working with one company that has recognized that developers have become all important to their adoption. And yet they have not yet unpacked what that really means for the self adoption journey from hearing about them through initial usage and support and so forth. 3. People At this stage of my career it almost goes without saying however the people need to be people I want to spend years with -> I’m going to help them achieve their dreams, will I care about them, respect them, go the extra mile for them and with them? Also, not quite the same point, but the more I do this the more I understand the importance of taking the time to shake and grow the network to find the penultimate list of experts as teammates and as initial users. If I were thinking about a start-up focused on public government I’d be looking to get on the President’s calendar. And if you cannot get to that level then something is wrong either with the idea, your pitch and positioning, or — your passion. 4. Passion At some point something should click. For me I imagine betting absolutely 100% of everything on the idea, including the next 5 years of my life. Will I bet my daughter’s college fund on this idea, team, and opportunity? If so then I know I’m onto something worthy of all out effort. If not, then I owe it to myself to not dive in and to help the entrepreneurs see what at least for me is missing. As an aside — note to self — if I don’t chase at least a small percentage of the entrepreneurs away by being too direct and candid, then I’m being too nice and wasting everyone’s time. For those following closely you might have noticed that this boils down to 4Ps: Porter (i.e. the space and 5 forces), Personas, People (focusing on the team and early user)and Passion. In the next post I’ll highlight a few of the spaces I’m learning about and companies I’m helping or at least trying to help. As a bit of foreshadowing, I’m trying to improve my extraordinarily rusty coding skills — doing some python hackery — and am fascinated by opportunities being created by machine intelligence, serverless computing (and other aspects of the AWS effect), non volatile memory, and more. I also think DevOps has a long, long way to go before becoming mainstream, which is both a shame and a huge opportunity. And I’m wrestling in a few cases with whether a company should focus on picks and shovels or whether they should be mining the gold themselves. - Written by Evan Powell, Founding CEO of Stackstorm and Nexenta, and Advisor / Angel investor in a few Alchemist companies including TextIQ and Data Fellas. ‍