Four Steps to the Epiphany: the Moby Dick of start-up books
2012/08/29 1 Comment
Image: Front Cover; Source: Amazon
If your experience of Moby Dick was that you were constantly aware that you were reading one of the best books of all time that was opening your mind to new ideas if only you could keep your eyes open, you understand. Four Steps to the Epiphany is the great white whale of start-up books for a reason. Although it is not nearly as easy to read as his disciple Eric Ries’s more famous book, The Lean Start-up, it is much more systematic. This books has some profound insights about understanding why some start-ups can do it one way and others need to do it completely opposite.
Instead of abstracting and generalizing the insights, Blank focuses on the issues of managing under extreme uncertainty in their native context. He tackles every aspect of the non-engineering side of the business. Most of the book is about how to systematically eliminate the market risk for your product, this will be somewhat familiar to you if you’ve read the Lean Start-up. However, seeing the original idea and seeing it laid out in full detail, in the context it originally sprang from adds a lot of richness and practicality to the idea. Blank devotes a good deal of time to understanding how to make technology push and market pull work together. He covers when to go for broke spending money to enter a market and when to hold back and let the customers come to you. Most importantly, this comes with some practical steps to discover when to do each. He even covers how to start converting to mature company once you’ve almost made it.
Much like Melville, Steve Blank will say something really profound and insightful, then launch into a description of whaling–er, uh–start-up processes that are needed to implement that idea. This can make the book a tough slog, because reading a process description around bed time can definitely have soporific effect. However, this tough slog is absolutely worth it if your a practitioner in the world of technology start-ups. You can’t hand it to your cousin that works at a big company and expect him to read it. This is meant for the start-up community. If you are a start-up practitioner, get this book and make yourself read it. You will not be disappointed. I expect my copy to become much more dog-eared than it already is before it gets confiscated for some future company museum.
So how does this relate to robotics…
Reading this book will further persuade you that many if not most management teams of robotics companies don’t have a clue. You’ll even be able to look at robotics success stories and realize–wow–compared to software our industry’s state of management practice is pretty dismal. Many successful robotics companies just fell bass-ackwards into their success. Many were product driven companies to a fault that were able to expensively keep trying until they finally hit a success. This is not the same thing as systematically eliminating and consciously balancing market versus technical risk to produce the greatest chance of creating successful business that uses robotic technology to make money and make the world a better place.
We’ve got a long way to go as an industry. Luckily, now that we know that there’s nothing inherently ‘capital intensive’ about the robotics industry we can start addressing why we have so often screwed it up before.
Where are the Ops Companies?
2012/07/08 Leave a comment
Really where are they? Given how many companies are building some form of robot it seems like there should be some proportionally greater number of companies out there forming to implement, service, and operate these robots. Where are they?
Frank Tobe isn’t finding a lot of them forming in his start-up list. Even the RIA seems to have fewer integrators than suppliers. AUVSI has many more Lockheeds and Insitus than VT Services. One could make a case that this is characteristic of the peculiar industries that we’re looking at. The robotic counter example is perhaps the ROV industry which routinely provides the ROV as a packaged service to the off-shore oil and gas industry. But most consumer robotics are still selling to early adopters. Our consumer customers are all people who want tech for tech’s sake, not to mainstream customers that are just looking to solve a problem.
Think about other complex goods in our economy. Computers have a vast cottage industry associated with servicing and maintaining them which is probably as big or bigger than the software industry proper. All vehicle industries whether air, ground, or sea have vastly more businesses in the business of selling the services than engaged in construction of the vehicles–even if constructors do manage to capture a large share of the total revenues of the industry.
I think our industry has a problem. I’ve talked to people at the oil and gas majors and heard straight out that robotics companies are producing robots which have a business case to be used several applications, but they will never be used until a credible organization to is there to provide the robot as a service. It is a bit of chicken and egg, but I think this applies as you go down the chain, not just in large capital projects.
When doing sampling or reconnaissance, customers want actionable data not a fleet of robots or new employees. I know from experience that infantry brigade commanders love having drone imagery of the battlefield, but don’t want to worry about having to support the drone unit, they just want to see the battle. This is equally true in forestry, agriculture, infrastructure, and minerals.
Do I really want to own a cleaning robot? No, I would much rather have a business that comes to my house every week and keeps the place clean whether that business uses humans, robots, or both.
Even in medicine, if I were a hospital operator I’d love to be able to push the risk of owning the robot back onto someone else. If I can pay per procedure and not worry about utilization, maintenance, or obsolescence–I’m much more game to adopt something new.
To date, our industry has done a relatively poor job of making robotics accessible to people and organizations who aren’t willing to organize around robotics and develop organizational competence in robotics. Providing robotics as a service could greatly expand the number of potential customers. I think when we see these businesses start cropping up, we will know that our industry is no longer in its infancy.
Filed under Commentary, Economics, Start-ups Tagged with aircraft, cleaning, development, device, drones, financing, medical, risk management, robotics, surgical, survey, technology, unmanned, unmanned systems