A Change is A-Brewin'

There's a lot of news in Kognioworld, but I'll make you read until the end to get to it. First, let's have dinner. :)

I Need a Hero
We all need heroes--not just role models, but heroes. There's a difference, I'd say. This is especially true when you're striking out to start something on your own. It doesn't matter if it's not your first time around the bases, there will be things you'll be doing for the first time ever. You'll probably look to role models and advisors to see how they've done it in the past. But you'll look to your heroes for inspiration. They're the ones who may not have experienced something you exactly are experiencing in this moment, but their success, or perseverance, or dedication, or wisdom push you to continue. I can't say that I have one particular venture hero, and the ones I do have will likely come across as cliché. Oh well.

For brevity I'll focus on one: Steve Jobs. The man wasn't perfect--far from it. He had his detractors, but there was a way in which he galvanized his supporters that was incredibly impressive. My running theory for why he was able to do this in spite of... erm... dictatorial... tendencies was that he was wholly consistent. Everything he did seemed to emanate from a central core purpose. Everything. From starting Apple to design decisions to his management style. By having this consistency, his team always knew what to expect of him and what was expected of them. And because so few people are as wholly consistent as Jobs was, his personality was naturally attractive. Being so attached to his purpose drew others to his purpose.

Thinking about Jobs as a hero is an important reflection point. How can incorporate aspects of him into my approach to entrepreneurship. I think the first step is to dig deep, deep, deep down inside and uncover what is it that motivates me, that drives me to do more. And then work on something that directly allows me to do that. Steve Jobs wouldn't have been the great leader he was in an industry he didn't care about so much. From there, draw my actions from that purpose, understanding that I'll never be exactly like Steve Jobs. That's OK. Better even, because it means I really need to be Chris Swimmer. How I manifest my purpose in my work will be very different from Jobs, but if I can be remembered for being driven by purpose then I will be happy with my legacy.

Testing Testing
So we did our user surveys. It was a lot of fun. The results? Well they were a bit all over the place, to be honest. A lot of that I can chalk up to poor survey design. It was a bit long and people seemed to be lost in the terminology. That also showed us a bigger problem of Kognio--we have trouble clearly identifying exactly what we're doing. Part of that is simply because we don't have a product yet. Part of that is because we likely all have slightly different versions of the idea in our heads. That's problematic. Basically the results showed that people would have interest in a product that helps simplify their research needs. Their primary problem areas were finding the right keywords, identifying trustworthy information, and organizing their results. We feel that our product would address the two latter needs, though it would take some work to identify a solution to the keyword problem.

A Pivotal Moment
To be frank, though, this has all been pushed out of our current focus, because it appears that we won't be continuing on with the company. I'll give you a moment to collect yourself.

So why? Well, we were facing multiple team issues--the first being that the two other founders will be having visa issues. One really soon and one down the line. We could overcome that, but in the discussions about visa strategies, it became apparent that the programmer was less committed to the team than he would need to be for us to take big risks like moving to SF to start the company. Without him firmly in place, things started to feel shaky. But this allowed me to step back and reconsider what exactly it was that I wanted out of this. And then I thought about Jobs and my own purpose. I felt a breath of fresh air because it turned out, working on someone else's idea felt constricting--more constricting than I had even realized. Stepping outside of the venture box I had put myself in with Kognio allowed me to more objectively assess my purpose, my team, and our idea. This is not a failure and not even a setback. It's more like a stepback, allowing me to reposition myself for something that will go further to satisfy me. I woke up the other morning thinking only of what drove me and I had an interesting realization:

I've spent years traveling. 43 countries to be exact. I'm nowhere near done, but one thing that I've always tried to do is convince more people to just do it. Yes, in the Nike sense. Everyone is always so impressed with my travels, yet very few people follow my lead. "It's too hard." "I don't have the money." "I can't just leave everything I have here." All of those, I always, say are BS. Where there's a will there's a way. And thinking about the digital trails Kognio was supposed to create, I thought about real trails. What if I could build an app that facilitates the travel organization process in a way that helps people make the leap and get out of their geographic comfort zone. It's vague now and I promise isn't some typical travel app, but it's something I actually want to exist in the world and so I'm strongly attracted to it. If I can help more people experience the world as I have, then how will that impact the way they view the world? I guess you could call this a pretty major pivot: digital trails --> real trails.

I'm not sure what this means for class. I might switch to this new thing for the final presentation, but I've got a lot of reflecting to do before that.

Getting in Front People. There's the Beef

Getting Meaty

The Wharton Game

This week in class we did something quite interesting. We shifted focus away from our own ventures to do a bit of role playing. It turned out to be a pretty fun exercise! I was picked to be a founder of the company In The Game. All of the companies were a bit silly, and I thought it would be frustrating to pitch mine, but it turned out we were all more or less in the boat. The game started and it felt like a switch was flipped. People put on their hats and went for it. I immediately connected with Scott, who was an executive on the hunt for a company. Just what I needed. He was quite aggressive, pushing me on numbers which I had to make up on the spot. It was actually intense, but I got the hang of just making things up. Sometimes I had to take a stab at things and just hope they made sense. He wanted on the team but he wanted to be equal status in shares, essentially bumping himself up to co-founder. This was tough to swallow, but I had an underhanded mission: to not be the CEO (that's what I was told about my role). I read that as meaning I wanted the control out of my hands and to maximize my return. Scott was a bulldog and seemed eager to get out and attack the VCs, so he'd get better deals from investors than I would--that means I'd give up more shares up front for an employee to save shares from going to VCs later. It was a definite gamble, but I agreed and had his full buy-in and let him loose. In the end it worked--we ended up with two $500k investments, giving up a total of 8%. That means I gave up 40% of the company for $1m and got a CEO on a $60k salary. I would have liked more, but we spent too much time trying to get big amounts instead of cobbling together smaller investments.

Of course, this simulation isn't very much like reality. I do think, however, there's a lot of value in what we did. First, it's very revealing about personality and mindsets. For example, I got a bit steamrolled by Scott, and the negotiation felt very real. But then I turned it to my advantage. What does that say about my style? Sometimes in negotiations, I do have a tendency to be pushed too much, and that's something I have to be on the lookout for. Luckily, when I'm making these agreements in real life, I won't be forced to make decision in the moment--or at least it's unlikely. Overall, after the game, I'm excited to get out there and really do this in real life!

Scaling Up

Kognio at this point admittedly doesn't have the most specific strategy for securing financing outside crossing our fingers for Y Combinator. We find out tomorrow(!) if we get an interview with them, and we can decide funding from there. They'll give us $120k in seed funding and then put us on track to pitch in front of a large amount of investors on Demo Day. We've also applied to Stanford's StartX, which doesn't provide funding but does connect us to investors. We plan on spending the entire summer hunched over together working on the product no matter what happens, which means that the majority of our costs will be just costs to support us living. We think we can bootstrap this reasonably well. In the interim, depending on the progress of our product, we'll probably reach out to angel investors (if YC doesn't work, of course). Obviously the longer we wait at this point, the more proof of concept we'll have and so the more leverage we'll have in negotiations for financing. I can't put a specific number for what control we want to retain after Seed/first round, but I know that we want a balance of king/rich. It's idealistic, but we believe in the idea and its value at scale, but we want to shepherd it to a sustainable point.

Demographics!

I've quite literally just finished surveying a bunch of potential users. It was really fun! I baked cookies and made t-shirts for my cofounder and me. It feels real. And that was almost as important as actually getting in front of people and talking to them. We gave them a pretty hefty survey to fill out in exchange for a freshly baked cookie. I've got a stack of about 50 surveys to wade through and then we'll be able to decide what our next steps are. The main aim of the survey was to understand how people do internet research and where their pain points were (and how much pain it actually caused). Secondarily, talking with people as they filled in their surveys was quite helpful for developing further surveys. We had too many questions and were too vague on a few points, particularly the meaning of "internet research". We had debated about these things beforehand, but it was good to get some data behind our uninformed opinions! That's just generally true. At this point I'm staring at this stack and wondering we'll be tweaking market assumptions. This survey doesn't lend itself to changes in that sense, because our money is planning on coming from advertisers. I think we're a bit away from tackling those assumptions.

Anyway, here's a picture from today's activities!

Go out and Play!

Testing, Testing

This coming week is particularly exciting for Kognio. Why? Because we're doing user surveys! Wooooohooo! When I joined the team it was on the premise that I like to talk to people. And it's true. I've been pitching people's ears off. It's a lot of fun to hone the craft. But it's not user surveying. This is a bit different and new for me, and I've wanted to be creative about how to get talking to a lot of people. How are we going to do it? Well Abhishek (my co-founder) and I are going to set up in the lobby of Gutman library and entice people in with snacks. We'll get some feedback to test our hypotheses and put people down on a list for further feedback in the future. After a bit more discussion with the team, we've decided to take a step back and restructure our hypotheses. The main hypothesis contains the sub-hypotheses that we really want to be focusing on for the time being:

Main Hypothesis
# Currently, the search-to-learn method (ie, using Google to explore a new topic) is inefficient and impractical in some cases and therefore people would use a platform that alleviated the inefficiencies.

1. No guidance on which keywords to start a search with to best begin exploration. 
2. Web page info (Title, Description, Link) in result pages carries insufficient information to judge the web page accurately enough in terms of quality, difficulty, length.
3. No guidance on where to go after you performed first iteration of search 

Secondary Hypotheses

# Our solution, sequenced trails of content, will be a big enough value-add for users to get them shift away from their current methods of learning things on the internet.

# The AI we create will be "smart" enough to alleviate the inefficiencies in current search-to-learn methods.

Tertiary Hypotheses

# Enough users can be reached to create a "tipping point" to really develop the availability of trails (we don't know what that tipping point is yet...)

# This is primarily an AI problem... or it's primarily a UX problem... want to find that out.

During our session at Gutman (on Thursday 4/9!) we'll be surveying people on how they go about their extended searches. We'll be asking about the tools they use, how they do it, their frustrations they face when learning something via search. We know from our own personal experience and our discussions with people casually that this problem exists, but we want to hear how other people articulate it.

Also, on a very important note, I'm going to make t-shirts. Yes. It's important. Why? It's time for us to feel like a real thing--whatever that thing may be at this point. I'm excited, at least.

Costs

You may have guessed by now that if we're building this platform, it's going to be developer heavy. That means we're going to be very heavy with fixed costs. I imagine hordes of coders working ceaselessly to improve our algorithms. On top of that we'll need UX people to make the whole thing sing. I hope that these people will be our army of user testers. 

Since we're a service platform without any physical products to be delivered, it's smarter to approach this as a Cost of Revenue problem. That means our cost of revenue will be comprised of 1) marketing and 2) bandwidth from increasing users.

Employees

As I mentioned before, we're going to be heavy into developers, but we think that we can get to launch with just the three of us as co-founders. That puts a lot of pressure on Ashwin, the technical co-founder, and we may find that we need to bring in some other coders to help get us to launch. In general, we hope to pay people at around market rates for their roles (ie, $80k for a junior developer), but hopefully we can increase that as we go along. Hiring and onboarding processes are extremely interesting to me and my role at Kognio since it has so much to do with culture. We'll focus on culture-fit when hiring and initially hire junior level, with maybe mentorship pairing. I personally benefited from this while working at Magoosh, and I'd like to see it flourish at Kognio.