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Interviewee profile
- familiar operating in the space between USD 0-100 million revenue
Startup's three top concerns
- Product market fit
- Distribution
- Business/Monetization model
Types of Tech companies
- Software - network companies
- Software - efficiency companies
- Hardware
Drivers that create a fast moving environment which makes possible fast Pace of innovation
- Network capacity
- Moores law - hardware capability
- more product n services gets created that were previously not possible
- This is on top of Demographic changes - traditional companies will generally deal with this
Five year plans needs to take into account the chip/network innovation trajectory
A typical cycle of planning
- 3 year visions
- plan for next 4 quarters
- ship on a weekly basis
- vision could always change
Time horizons for execution iterations
- Pre-production market fit - typically looking at 3 months outlook
- Pre-distribution - go to market - typically looking at 1-2 years (become more traditional cycle)
RnD that is ahead of the curve to understand where the trend is else we become obsolete
Software is going into a lot of traditional industries that is changing the game
- Uber
Frameworks/principles to develops strategy
- strategy = differentiated value proposition
- customer segmentation
- value proposition to segment
- how are we different
- capabilities developed within the company
- what are we not doing
- product is a major part of the strategy = a differentiated product is extremely important especially for network based companies
- how are we building and leveraging network effects
- distribution mechanism
- potential competitive moat
- data networks
- collect n use data they are collecting it is a huge asset
- communications networks
- everybody wants to communicate on it
- how build and design network values
Measurements
- because is technology base - can deploy much faster deploys everyday some new value to
- instrumented correctly impacting the market everyday
- combine data and feedback to company
- marginal distribution cost is zero
- data implementation and rapid experiment
- design Thinking is becoming popular - core part of software technology space
- startups need discipline to implement this (competitive advantage) shorter planning cycle
Business model
- Can experiment pricing since zero distribution cost
source: From an interview done with Ved