When you look at all the literature, all the advice, all the blog posts, the articles, the podcasts, the conference talks, it’s all about creating and starting. Because everyone wants to do that, that’s what people write about. At Intercom we’ve added our own content and talks to that along the way. But in reality none of this matters if you’re ignoring existential threats. If there’s some reason, some ticking bomb or a train coming down the tracks, and you don’t care because you’re too busy navel-gazing, you’re going to be in trouble. On that note, I really like this quote from Andy Grove, when he says, “Any degree of success will breed complacency. Any degree of complacency will breed failure. Therefore only the paranoid survive.”

I recently shared these thoughts with a friend who is also a startup founder. The conversation went something like this:

Friend: “Well the thing you have to realize is that the present is the past.”
Me: “I don’t do drugs, so you know …”
Friend: “No no no, listen to me, listen to me. Your product’s already obsolete.”
Me: “What do you mean by that? People like it.”
Friend: “Well, the thing is, people like what’s out there today, but what’s out there today is actually already history. It’s been documented, there are “changes” pages updated, but it’s live, it’s now a part of history. The thing you should be worrying about is that there’s probably going to be a newer, faster, quicker way for your customers to achieve what they want to do in this world, and that it doesn’t involve you.”
Me: “Ooh, that kind of stung.”

The way he described it to me, it’ll feel like you’re on solid ground and everything’s going great. You’ll feel a couple of trembles here, and a competitor there, and a couple of different shifts. But you’ll be saying, “We got this, we got this, we’re good at product.” At some point you realize something’s actually changing, so you start trying to react. But by the time you actually realize it you’re too late. The ground has been torn out from under you, and the worst part is you don’t feel it. It’s purely asymptomatic. If you don’t believe that it can happen, even when times are good, let me put it to you this way: Wasn’t 2007 a great year to be a satnav manufacturer?

Things could not have been better. We were all buying them and putting them in our cars, and they were shit devices, but we didn’t care. Then, somewhere in the Moscone Center in San Francisco, someone waves a new thing around, and poof…business no more.

Both Garmin and Tom Tom have not restored their former value since the introduction of the iPhone – at best they’re a sixth of their peak. It’s a fun version of history to presume they were all literally asleep at the cash register, totally ignoring all these new threats. The reality is I’m sure they watched the keynote and panicked. I’m sure they ran straight to their whiteboards. They probably pulled the product team in on weekends. I’m sure they fired up JIRA, and when it loaded up they’ said, “All right, let’s go and start writing some tickets.” But customers don’t wait around while you’re writing up JIRA tickets. The world will move on, with or without you.

Another simple example: In the graph below, the light-green line represents a product called SMS. Aside from exorbitant roaming charges, SMS was a phenomenal technology. SMS is the only way telcos make money. It’s like liquid profit.

Then 30 engineers got together and built a different thing called WhatsApp. Within the space of two years they’d basically obliterated the majority of the growth in the most profitable part of telcos. Now, it’s important to say I am talking about growth here, because businesses can’t survive on stagnation. They need to grow, because ultimately, on a long enough time frame, all their customers will die, so you do need new customers. You can’t flatline as a business. Flatline actually means you’re going down.

The way this plays out typically is a new threat emerges and the incumbent typically says, “Oh yawn, someone started a product, who cares?” Eventually WhatsApp puts out a press release saying, “We’ve just got our 100,000th user,” and the telcos are like, “Hahaha, 100,000 users, what a joke.”

Then at some point WhatsApp puts out a press release saying, “We have our 100 millionth user,” and the telcos think, “Oh.” Then by the time they decide to fight it is literally already a done deal, and there’s no turning back. If that framing sounds familiar to you, it’s because it’s the words of Gandhi, who’s obviously got a lot of great quotes and isn’t necessarily a product manager. One of the points he made was this idea that, “At first you’ll ignore them. Then you’ll laugh at them. Then you’ll fight them, and then they will win.” That tends to be people’s attitudes towards new products.

If you want to see the best example of what it means to first laugh at something, a new threat, I really like Steve Ballmer’s reaction to the iPhone.

If all that the mobile revolution, the new Android and iOS things, did was kill Windows Phone, that’d be fine. Windows Phone wasn’t a huge thing for Microsoft, it was a part of their Windows Everywhere strategy. But mobile didn’t actually kill Windows Phone. It attacked the whole entire desktop concept, which scares the hell out of Microsoft because that was their core.

It wasn’t obvious that a phone could be really, really bad news for a desktop operating system, but it turned out to be. The realization here is best summed up for me by this quote from Steve Sinofsky, who is ex-Microsoft and is now at Andreessen Horowitz: “No technology is the center of a system, but rather a constellation of bodies under the influence of each other.”

“No technology is the center of a system, but rather a constellation of bodies under the influence of each other.”
STEVE SINOFSKY

He makes the point that all these technologies just intertwine with each other. It’s not clear that a phone was going to destroy a satellite navigation company. It’s not clear that messaging software would destroy a telecoms company. It’s not clear that a phone would disrupt desktop. But what happens in technology are these tectonic shifts, literally the plates slide from under you, and if you’re not aware of all of them and how they interact, you’re in big trouble.

To go back to Intercom for a second, we didn’t come this far to only come this far. How do we actually keep going? How do we make sure that we don’t get caught up in one wave and then finish up?

Technology will continue to spit out innovation after innovation after innovation. The question you have to consistently train everyone to ask: does this new technology that’s happening or that’s being released make it in any way cheaper, faster or easier for our customers to make progress in their lives? That’s the repetitive question you have to ask, whether you see Bluetooth or WiFi or cloud or mobile or touch or voice or audio or messaging or bots. You name it. Because if it does make it cheaper, faster or easier for customers to make progress, they’ll go there, and you’ll be busy writing up JIRA tickets.

Connected with this is that the things we need to do in our lives rarely actually change. But the ways we can do them will always change. There are very few new behaviors in life. To give you some random examples, for as long as there have been kids in schools there have been kids passing notes to each other. Protocol with notes is that you make sure no one else can see it, you rip it up or you eat if the teacher catches it, but you just get rid of the thing. The idea that this was a disposable message that can be passed between two people for their eyes only, has gone on today, and we know it best as SnapChat. One of its core purposes is that exact job.

Those of you who are closer to my age probably had a box that you put photos in under your bed. These photos, curiously, are not on a shelf for everyone to see. They’re specifically for you, and you only want them at certain times. Today we use technologies like iPhoto or Dropbox’s Carousel, when it was around, to do this exact same job. The need has not changed, but the tool has.

If you’re renovating a house, in the old days you’d have a scrapbook with all the stuff you can’t afford. Today you do it with Houzz, or Pinterest. The need doesn’t change. The ways you can do it always change.

The way  to stay relevant is  to pay attention to what is called the OODA loop. Can you Observe, can you Orient, can you Decide, and can you Act? If your OODA loop is fast enough that you can keep up with the industry, you will always be in a great position. However if you are slower than the industry then you’ll be in trouble.

If you’re faster, every time the industry spits out something new – cloud, for instance – you can release something that works with cloud. You can release many iterations, and you can consistently evolve and build new stuff. The very second mobile comes out, you can build mobile straight away, because you can move as fast as the industry, or faster. That’s really, really important.

But the very second this arrow changes direction, and you find yourself moving slower than the industry, it’s game over. They’re spitting out technology after technology after technology, and your team is still talking in years and Q4 2018 and stuff like that. As the technology changes, you then find yourself being the company who in 2016 says, “We’re now available online.”

What that looks like is what Marshall McLuhan described as walking backwards into the future. You are moving into the future whether you like it or not, but your vision hasn’t changed. You’re still trying to force old-world ideas into a new world. That’s why it constantly comes back to this question: every time something changes, can we be cheaper, faster, or easier?

Coming soon – Part Two

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