REBOOTIn Search for the Land of Opportunity Jawwad Ahmed Farid CONTENTS Foreword & Preface Foreword Preface to the Third Edition Preface to the Second Edition Author’s Note Chapter Zero Who Am I and why did I write this book Book One - Avicena Memories Before the Beginning Aleph on the Scene California Hiring Pre Launch Process Launch Business Development The Silver Lining or Biz Dev II The End i Book Two - The Blue Screen of Death The Blue Screen of Death Reboot Why Failure? Book Three - Pitching for Startups An Ideal Pitch Appendix Cast of Characters Avicena Timelines Building a Business Step by Step The Original List of Myths References Reviews Author & Copyright ii DEDICATION “Behind every successful man is a penniless wife.” To loser husbands and loving wives; To Fawzia for saying yes; To my Ammi(s) for their support and prayers; To Abba for believing in us despite our failures; To Whitney, Biggadike and Ken for asking “Why not?” To Sarwar and Denise for Avicena. iii FOREWORDFOREWORD && PREFACEPREFACE 4 FOREWORD Entrepreneurs seem to come in two varieties. There are those that begin small … perhaps with an invention close to home, building a product to meet a very specific need, either for themselves or for a friend in another business. They build the first iteration on a shoestring, and deliver it to their inaugural customer. They experience some success, and sell the product to other customers. Before they know it, they have a fledgling business. The business grows without a rigorous business plan, board of directors, disciplined marketing, or any of the other accoutrements of mature firms. These businesses grow easily up to the point where the entrepreneur can no longer personally manage every facet of the business. At this point, most of these endeavors struggle, hitting the wall without disciplined processes and procedures. A small percentage of these businesses make the transition to mature management processes of planning, implementing, and measuring. Many remain small businesses, staying within the founder’s comfort zone. And many die. I’ve always called this business founder the “accidental entrepreneur”. They are driven by need. They create a product to solve a focused problem, but are rarely driven by a love for business in the abstract, or business as an art form. Often they are surprised at their own success, having begun with modest goals. They soon find that building the first product, taking on the role of inventor, is very different than the role of businessman. Most fail when they either can’t or won’t transition from building a product to building a business. This book is not about the Accidental Entrepreneur. It is about the “purposeful entrepreneur”. The Purposeful Entrepreneur begins with a big idea. Not the solution to a small, focused problem, but an idea with larger scope and impact. From the very beginning the Purposeful Entrepreneur plans on building a business with impact. They think further ahead. They have visions of greatness. They are driven by scale. They want to change their piece of the world. But most of all, every Purposeful Entrepreneur that I have known loves business. Business for business’ sake. As an art form. As the highest expression of the most complex strategic games that humans play. 5 So what does the Purposeful Entrepreneur do? They plan on bigness from the start. They plan on success. They plan on rapid success. But mostly they plan. They put the right team together. They raise capital. They execute quickly. They succeed or meet the Blue Screen of Death. The world is littered with books about entrepreneurial success. Even books documenting high profile failures begin with wild success. But most attempts to create significant businesses out of dust do not end with entrepreneurial success. They end in anguish. When the Accidental Entrepreneur fails it is a painful thing, but the sphere of people touched by the event is limited by the scope of the startup. When the Purposeful Entrepreneur fails…well, we are left with a much bigger hole in the ground. Why is there so little written about entrepreneurial failure, with this the more common experience? For one, it takes a lot of courage, confidence, and borderline audacity to walk the path of the Purposeful Entrepreneur. When failure happens, it shakes one to the very core. Few want to talk about it, let alone write a book. Most retreat to the safety of traditional employment. A few lick their wounds and give it another go. Fewer yet eventually succeed. “The Blue Screen of Death” is an important book. It captures the very essence of the gut-wrenching effort it takes to create a company from nothing. And even though it is fundamentally about failure, you will recognize that the difference between failure and success is but a few small decisions. Jawwad Farid, now a successful entrepreneur, emerged from failure more valuable than if he had succeeded. He learned the process, but also learned much about the inflection points that define failure and success. Jawwad is one of the few that took stock of the lessons learned, greatly expanded his personal capital, and gave it another go. In the end, if you hunger success, it is most important to study failure. Shane A. Chalke Entrepreneur 6 PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION Why Do Startups Fail? No, really, why do we fail? Why isn't an even mix of ambition, inspiration, hard work, talent, drive, commitment and creativity enough? And why more often than not, a superior mix of the above ingredients fares much worse than a boring, passé combination. I have spent the last two decades asking this question. I have asked dreamers, students, gurus, teachers, failures, entrepreneurs, friends, investors and partners. Yes there is a list of causes as well as a checklist of do's and don'ts; if you want or don't want to fail. But there is apparently also a common cause of failure. More common than the common cold. Like the common cold, symptoms that you could defend against by dressing in layers, getting your daily dose of vitamin C and D, washing your hands frequently and getting off that comfortable padded chair. It's called pitching and selling, shaking hands and closing deals. Startups fail more often than not because the founders don't understand the process of selling. They don't get it. They are not comfortable with persuading, pushing, asking and closing. What do founders do when they come across something they are not comfortable with or good at? They outsource it. At times to an in house rain maker, occasionally to an outside partner with uniformly disastrous results. But selling shouldn't be that difficult or scary. To sell we have to get customers to try our products, ask them to buy it after a trial and then close the deal. Trial. Ask. Close. Three words. Words that have sunk many a startup before you and will keep on sinking them for times to come. The first edition of Reboot (Blue Screen of Death) was dedicated 7 to understanding failure. I was curious about the wrong turns I had taken that led to two painful dead ends and fairly large holes in the ground. The second edition was one part cleanup and one part what followed Avicena years. When we published the two editions, failure was common but its coverage on Borders' bookshelves was minimal. 8 years later failure is now sexy and much talked about and Borders is gone. You can actually go out and buy a book on the subject (this being one of them). There are a number of frameworks out there that even help you manage it when it occurs. Is there still a need for a book? Or even worse, a third edition? I guess you can blame it on the Asia Pacific ICT Awards, the P@SHA Social Innovation Fund and over a thousand MBA students at the SP Jain campus in Dubai and Singapore. As we worked through hundreds of business plans, pitches and mentoring sessions all across the Middle East & Far East it became obvious that the second edition was also lacking. It's easy to identify a problem. (Teach teams how to pitch). It's difficult to find a fix that works. While we partly discussed solving some of the challenges in earlier editions, selling and pitching required a more detailed treatment. If you knew that the inability to sell was the root cause of most failures, a book on the subject should devote some attention to how you could fix that one specific problem. Luckily Ken Morse and Bill Aulet from MIT's Enterprise Forum showed us a way with their seminar series on global selling. Selling is not rocket science. It is a process. Pitching is one of the steps in that process. The challenge is that while marketing is taught well in most schools, pitching and selling generally don't get as much attention. 8 With the work done on customer personas by Steve Blank and the minimal-acceptable- feature-set-thinking of lean startups, there is now no shortage of frameworks or case studies on customer development, pitching or presenting. Practice a bit and you can get it right too. Which is what the 3rd edition of Reboot is all about. A bit of practice, some thinking, a few case studies and a handful of resources on pitching, combined with the original focus on failure. The iPad platform makes it more interactive and the videos add flavor and color that were missing from earlier print editions.