Triple Shot Saturday - Edition 15
Three of the highest signal-to-noise ratio snippets from the startup/tech podcasts for founders/operators.
Here are my favorite three snippets from the podcasts I read this week.
But before this, it would mean a lot to me if you could take 30 seconds to complete this reader survey.
In the early stages of Rent the Runway, the founders, Jenny Fleiss and Jennifer Hyman, lacked a tech background and hadn't yet built a digital platform. So, they built an offline MVP to test their hypothesis. They set up trunk shows at various colleges. These were in-person events where they displayed and sold their merchandise. The first trunk shows were held at Harvard Undergrad because it was an easy way to access their target customer, college-aged women, and because graduations provided a reason to rent a dress.
…well one thing I feel really passionately about is that anyone who has a business concept needs to find a way to test it as soon as possible and I often say it's not just testing it to validate the business concept and to see if their product Market fit but it's also to see like if you enjoy spending time working on this business so what did that mean for Jen and I well the first thing was just like talking to more friends and people around us we were at business school we had our core customer like everywhere around us and so we were asking people at lunch we were hosting little cocktail parties or focus groups with our classmates we were sending out surveys with Survey Monkey like there's always something you can do to immediately get in there.
And then the next phase was actually going and setting up trunk shows at different colleges to see if people would rent dresses so without any technology and without you know a tech background anything we still had ways that we could get moving and we could understand if this was something that would resonate with customers our first trunk shows that we did were at Harvard undergrad across the river and we knew girls were going through graduation moments they had a reason to rent and we set up a shop for different customer groups we had a sority come we had a woman in Business Club come dance group come um and we were able to really see our customer in action and to understand more clearly if they would pay for this product if they were going to take care of the dresses if they were going to return the dresses..
They also used these as a way to tell their prospective investors that the concept works - one of the early investors in Rent the Runway, Scott Friend from Bain Capital, attended one of the trunk shows.
for me you know with Venture capitalists in particular because we immediately realized that they were not our core Target consumer we wanted to always show them that unlock of the emotional connection with women and fashion and so it was wonderful that Scott from Bain had come to that trunk show but what we did was we took video testimonials of customers or even Snippets from some of these trunk shows and we would start our VC pitches like just showing those videos to let these often men experience and see firsthand from our customers eyes what that actual value proposition was because it's so easy for you to immediately think oh it's 10% of retail price or it takes less time than shopping at a store but we're like that's you know that's only a small part of it here…
Link.
Dan Blumberg, founder of Modern Product Minds and former product leader at The New York Times, LinkedIn, and Citi, was on the Rocketship.fm podcast. He spoke about how different companies use different types of product discovery methods. He compared LinkedIn and New York Times’s product discovery process. He recommends that the right way to pick product discovery process depends on (a) scale of the user base (b) mindset of the product leaders (c) lifecycle stage of the company.
At LinkedIn the approach there is it's so heavily focused on like there's such scale unless you're unless you're testing on some really obscure part of the product. There's such scale that the mental model there is like let's just launch it. Let's just run an AB test. The AB testing frameworks are are so good and there's such scale you could have results of your of your AB test, you know, and oftentimes within a week. Um, and that was very different than that's very different certainly than any B2B place that I've consulted to or worked with where there was there's just by definition basically there's not that scale.
…also at LinkedIn, it doesn't necessarily apply to like a brand new product. That that really more applies to like iterating on an existing product is is is AB testing is is the number one way that that's usually done there.
..when I was at the New York Times, uh, we really embraced, you know, really a lean startup playbook of, you know, understanding, you know, who is your customer, what is what is their what are their pain points, you know, what are potential ways to solve it, and really embrace, you know, a, you know, that that build measure learn, build, measure, learn, you know, feedback cycle, uh, and launching lots of prototypes. Um, one of the things that I really appreciated with some of the researchers that I work with at the times was using a technique called provocations. Presenting people with prototypes that provoke a reaction. And it might not even be the thing you actually plan to launch. It's just to get them to speak about things in a in a deeper way than if you just say like, you know, like for example, when I was at the New York Times, uh, on a team focused on getting more readers and more engag outside the United States.
Sarah Guo and Elad Gil sat with the one and only Jensen Huang on the No Priors show. One of the topics about which Jensen has spoken a lot recently is ‘Data Center as a unit of computing,’ replacing the traditional focus on individual chips or servers. This means building the full vertical stack from chip to software, in a very Apple-esque way to get performance gains that outperform only software-makers or only chip-makers. Here’s how he unpacks it.
a. Nvidia's data centers are built with a full stack, vertically integrated approach. This means that they design and optimize every system layer, including hardware, software, and networking, to maximize performance. They then disaggregate these components to sell to cloud providers like GCP, AWS, and Azure.
Computing is just not used to it's not what it used to be you know I say that the new unit of computing is the data center that's to us so that's what you have to deliver that's what we build now we build a whole thing like that and then we for everying single thing with every combination uh air cooled x86 liquid cooled Grace ethernet infin band MV link no MV link you know what I'm saying we build every single configuration we have five supercomputers in our company today next year we're going to build easily five more so if you're serious about software you build your own computers if you're serious about software then you're going to build your whole computer and we build it all at Goodale this is the part that that is really interesting we build it at scale and we build it uh ver vertically integrated we optimize it um full stack and in and then we disaggregate everything and we sell in in parts that's the part that is completely utterly remarkable about what we do the complexity of of that is just insane…
b. Nvidia approaches data center construction with a product-oriented mindset, ensuring that every aspect, from planning to operation, is optimized.
Usually, for a supercomputer system like that, you plan it for a couple of years. From the moment the first systems are delivered to the time you submit everything for some serious work, it’s not unusual for it to take a year or more. That happens all the time, and it's not abnormal.
We couldn't afford to do that, so a few years ago, we launched an initiative in our company called "Data Center as a Product." We don’t sell it as a product, but we treat it like it is—everything about it.
All the network configurations we pre-staged—I mean, we pre-staged everything as a digital twin. We pre-aged all of his supply chain, we pre-staged all of the wiring for the networking. We even set up a small version of it, kind of a first instance, you know, a ground truth, reference zero, system zero before everything else showed up. So by the time everything arrived, it was all staged. All the practicing was done, all the simulations were done.
And then, even then, the massive integration was a monument of, you know, gargantuan teams of people crawling over each other, wiring everything up 24/7. Within a few weeks, the clusters were up. It’s really a testament to his willpower, how they think through mechanical and electrical challenges, and overcomes what are truly extraordinary obstacles. What was done there was the first time a computer of that scale has ever been put together so quickly.
The networking team, computer team, software team, training team, infrastructure team—the electrical engineers, the software engineers—everyone worked together. It was quite a feat to witness.
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Rohit