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.
East Coast Chauvinism in Robotics: Time to Face Facts, Silicon Valley is Kicking Our Ass
2012/06/24 Leave a comment
A cleaned-up version of this article became my first post on Hizook. http://www.hizook.com/blog/2012/06/25/east-coast-chauvinism-robotics-time-face-facts-silicon-valley-kicking-our-butt#comment-971
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I have lots of love for Pittsburgh in particular, but it really pisses me off when people on the East Coast repeat a bunch of falsehoods (See #8) about how Boston and Pittsburgh compare to Silicon Valley and the rest of the world. Many people in Pittsburgh and Boston—including people I call friends and mentors—smugly think that the MIT and CMU centered robotics clusters are leading the world in robotics. This is demonstrably false.
If leadership in robotics means forming companies, making money, or employing people, then Silicon Valley is crushing everyone—no matter what the Wall Street Journal editorial page says about their business climate. I’ve previously published an analysis of the Hizook 2011 VC Funding in Robotics data that shows that the Valley gets 49% of total VC robotics investment worldwide.
I’d now like to add an analysis of U.S. public companies (see bottom of the page). Basically, the ‘Pittsburgh and Boston are the center of the robotics world’ story is even more ridiculous if you look at where public robotics companies are located. Silicon Valley is crushing the other clusters in the U.S. at creating value in robotics and in building a robotics workforce in public companies. (A forthcoming analysis will show that this true worldwide and if you include robotics divisions of public companies not principally engaged in robotics such as Boeing and Textron.)
77% of the workforce at public robotics pure plays is in Silicon Valley companies. An astounding 93% of the market capitalization is headquartered in Silicon Valley and even if you exclude Intuitive Surgical (NASDAQ:ISRG) as an outlier, the Silicon Valley cluster still has twice as much market capitalization as Boston.
The public companies that I deemed to meet the criteria of being principally engaged in robotics, that they had to make and sell a robot, and not have substantial value creating revenues from businesses not related to robotics are listed in the table below.
The one company that I believe might be controversial for being excluded from this list is Cognex (NASDAQ:CGNX). However, while trying to do decide on whether to include them, I found their list of locations. They have three locations in California including two in Silicon Valley. That means that this ‘Boston’ company has more offices in Silicon Valley than in Boston. I’m not an advanced (or motivated) enough analyst to find out what the exact employee breakdown is, but combined with the fact that they make vision systems and supply components rather than robots, I elected to exclude them. I acknowledge that a similar case could be made about Adept (NASDAQ:ADEP) that just made a New Hampshire acquisition, but I have decided to include them and count them towards Silicon Valley. I do not believe that either of these decisions, substantively impact my finding that Silicon Valley is the leading cluster when it comes to public company workforce and value creation.
I’m hoping the people who are spreading the misinformation that Silicon Valley has to catch-up to Boston and Pittsburgh will publish corrections. I believe that this is important, particularly because I want to see Pittsburgh reclaim its early lead in robotics. So many robotic inventions can trace their heritage back to Pittsburgh, it is a real shame that Pittsburgh has not used this strength to create the kind of robotics business ecosystem that one would hope.
It is impossible for communities to take appropriate action if they do not understand where they stand. I hope that this new data will inspire the Pittsburgh community to come together and address the challenges of culture, customer access, and capital availability that have been inhibiting the growth of Pittsburgh’s robotic ecosystem before they lose too many more aspiring young entrepreneurs—such as me—to the siren song of California.
1,100
463
20%
2%
183
43
3%
0%
768
577
14%
2%
174
135
3%
1%
1,924
21,840
36%
88%
619
606
12%
2%
429
1,110
8%
4%
171
13
3%
0%
5,368
24,787
100%
100%
Filed under Clusters, Commentary, Economics, Finance, Public Companies Tagged with Boston, business, California, Clusters, drones, economic, Equity, financing, hizook, market capitalization, New England, Public Securities, robotics, Silicon Valley, Stock, VC, Venture Capital, workforce