Pivot: How Top Entrepreneurs Adapt and Change Course to Find Ultimate Success

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Copyright © 2014 by Remy Arteaga and Joanne Hyland. All rights reserved.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Arteaga, Remy, 1962-

Pivot : how top entrepreneurs adapt and change course to find ultimate success / Remy Arteaga and Joanne Hyland.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-118-55971-0 (cloth); ISBN 978-1-118-55997-0 (ebk);

ISBN 978-1-118-55984-0 (ebk)

1. New products. 2. New business enterprises. 3. Creative ability in

business. 4. Entrepreneurship. I. Hyland, Joanne, 1960- II. Title.

HF5415.153.A77 2014

658.4′063–dc23

2013020676

To all of those who have shared my dream of making a difference in our companies and the world, this book is for you—our collective wisdom of what innovation is and will be. I could not have written it without all the valuable learning experiences we have shared together for over 30 years. You are not just colleagues but friends, and I thank you. This book is also for Monique, my partner in business and in life, and Tara, our very much loved dog whom we almost lost in the final days of writing this book. Their love and support throughout the process have been unconditional; and, of course, I cannot forget Nikita, seizing every opportunity to be the center of attention. And for Dad, whom we did lose on July 31st, 2013. You are far better off where you are now. I know how proud you would have been to see the final product.

Joanne Hyland

To my beautiful wife, Barbi Bistrowitz, you inspire me every day with your smarts, and you have partnered with me on so many startups—this book could not have been written without your love and support. This book is also for my mom, Hilda, who instilled the entrepreneurship bug in me with crackers and cheese. I don't think I could have gotten through this book, much less this life, without my pets past and present; you will always have a space in my heart and mind. Not to be forgotten, to my dad, Pepe—this one's for you.

Remy Arteaga

List of Trademarks

1. Facebook® is a registered trademark of Facebook, Inc.

2. Big XYZ™ is a trademark of Bisart LLC.

3. Learning Plan™ is a trademark of rInnovation Group.

4. The Pivot Startup™ is a trademark of Bisart LLC.

5. Bill Me Later® is a registered trademark of Bill Me Later Inc.

6. Gorilla® glass is a registered trademark of Corning Inc.

7. Lotus™ glass is a trademark of Corning Inc.

8. MotionSense® is a registered trademark of Moen Incorporated.

9. Swiffer® is a registered trademark of Procter & Gamble.

10. NetActive® is a registered trademark of NetActive Inc.

11. Genesis Pad™ is a trademark of Innovation Genesis LLC.

12. SIGMA WATERHEATER™ is a trademark of Grundfos.

13. PayWithMe™ is a trademark of PayWithMe LLC.

14. Trade Shades™ is a trademark of Cory Goodenough and Jonny Rio.

15. Stage-Gate® is a registered trademark of the Product Development Institute.

16. Google Trends™ is a trademark of Google, Inc.

17. MySpace™ is a trademark of Myspace LLC.

18. Friendster® is a registered trademark of Friendster, Inc.

Acknowledgments

We would first like to acknowledge our academic contributing authors, Professors Gina O'Connor and Lois Peters, for their exceptional insights and commentaries in Chapters 5, 8, 13, and 16. We also appreciate their excellent feedback for guiding us in how to make each chapter clearer, more consistent, and have the right type of impact.

This book would not have been possible without the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) team's academic research and the two foundational books: Radical Innovation: How Mature Companies Can Outsmart Upstarts (Harvard Business School Press, 2000) and Grabbing Lightning: Building a Capability for Breakthrough Innovation (Jossey-Bass, 2008). These books provide the principles and inspiration for the Discovery, Incubation, and Acceleration (D-I-A) model being put into practice through our teaching, training, coaching, and consulting activities. Dr. Mark Rice has also been a source of inspiration from the beginning, starting at RPI, and then in collaboration with Babson College, while he was dean of the Business School.

We are similarly indebted to Jake Schonberger, Kyle Brody, Cory Goodenough, Jonny Rio, and Chase Darlington for letting us share their journeys through the startup process. The Pivot Startup methodology molds together ideas born of experience and research. The seed was first planted at General Motors, where a rising executive, Tim Costello, took the risk of recruiting a very brash young engineer, Remy, into the Methods team. Tim's insights on new product development and the results from the Methods team served as one of the inspirations for The Pivot Startup. Jacob Brix, a doctoral student from Denmark, also assisted with his keen insights on knowledge construction and innovation.

Special thanks to Jeff Hovis of Product Genesis. He contributed tools to make the Discovery and Incubation Toolkits even more robust. We have had a wonderful partnership over the years, become friends, and I (Joanne) look forward to many years to come. Over the past few years, we have developed another great partnership with the International Society for Professional Innovation Management (ISPIM), offering a good blend of academic theory with the practice, and a vehicle for getting the word out. Thank you, Iain and the rest of the ISPIM team, for sharing our passion about innovation.

For their direct contributions to this book, I would like to thank all my corporate colleagues and friends from Grundfos (Lars Spicker Olesen, Soren Bro, Jesper Ravn Lorenzen, Jesper Bagge Pedersen while at the Danish Technical University, Steve Pierson, and Arun Ramasamy); from Moen (Louise Quigley and Mike Pickett); and from NOVA Chemicals (Alan Schrob). As much as you have learned from us, we have learned from you.

Denmark became our incubator of sorts for progressing our thinking and tools. I would like to thank Hanne Arildsen for taking a chance in our early days and bringing our company and D-I-A model to Denmark while she worked at Danfoss, and I thank Stig Poulsen for carrying on the torch. Hanne and I met while I was teaching a segment on corporate venturing at MIT, thanks to Ken Morse. I extend thanks to Thomas Schafer and Rasmus von Gottberg (we also met at MIT) from Novozymes for seizing upon the importance of uncertainty reduction in new business development, and many others who made it work—Karolina, Helle, Marianne, Kristoffer, and Henriette, to name a few. Peter Bruun, Jacob Holst, and Peter Skat-Rordam at the Danish Technical University also believed in our model for new business creation, which we continue to teach today. We have worked together to evolve it to a world-class certificate program in entrepreneurial leadership. Lars Ib, at the Danish Business Institute, is also a believer and has made it an important module in his MBA curriculum. I thank Mads Prebensen for introducing me to Lars and bringing us to Grundfos. Henning Sandager, Thorbjorn Machholm, and Fei Chen (we met at Novozymes initially) have also played a key role in embedding the D-I-A mind-set in Grundfos through the leadership they provide. I also want to thank Allan Silfverberg and Martin Groth for being eager to learn and contribute great insights to our business based on their master's thesis. With these believers and our teaching at the Danish Technical University and the Business Institute, I am delighted we have had the opportunity to have such a great impact in a highly innovative country. There are many others, and you are in my thoughts.

It goes without saying that I have worked with a number of great companies in the United States and Canada in addition to Moen and NOVA Chemicals, such as Westinghouse with Joanna, Kate, Tom, Cenk, and John; Air Products with Ron, Martha, and Nancy; Kennametal with George; and Hewlett-Packard (HP) with Rich, to name a few. Each of you has added new dimensions to our thinking and twists on the D-I-A model. Finally, I would not even be writing this book without my Nortel Networks Corporation experiences. I want to thank my Business Ventures Group team and other colleagues who were a part of this venturing experiment. You were all important contributors to our success. I want to particularly thank Rene, Susan, and Garth for all you did to guide me in the years we were getting started; Jeff for our great partnership; and Pat for making us all more effective communicators. It was just not the right place and time for us to continue.

In 2001, if you had asked what we thought about systematizing what we do in an innovation tool platform, Gina and I would have said, no way. Well, here we are in 2013 doing it. Of course, we still have a few lingering questions and we are likely not completely there yet, but isn't that what learning is all about? So thank you all (those mentioned and in my thoughts) for being a part of the journey so far, and we hope you continue on this path with us.

I (Remy) am grateful to my students at RPI for having given me more than I ever gave them. Their enthusiasm, optimism, and intelligence energized me. I love them all and wish them only the very best as the move on to their careers. Some of the students at RPI took it upon themselves to challenge my thinking on entrepreneurship, including Arthur Ford, Ben Prager, Cory Goodenough, and Logan Shire. A special thank-you goes out to Sam Hagen of UpSmart.com for sitting through many meetings discussing startup methodologies. My time at RPI, as Entrepreneur in Residence and Program Director of the Severino Center for Technological Entrepreneurship, led to many of the insights in the book. The daily mentoring of university startups gave me the opportunity to observe the startup process over and over again. I am of course indebted to Dr. Gina O'Connor and Dr. Lois Peters for their guidance, mentoring, and support. They went from being my professors to becoming my friends—priceless.

The following experiences, in addition to many I could not fit here, helped form the tapestry of ideas in the book. First is my time as founder and COO at Extreme Interactive Media Inc.—my second startup. It was driven with a gunslinging approach to entrepreneurship, and due to extraordinary selflessness on the part of Al Isaacs, Barbi Bistrowitz, and Freakboy John Brodigan, we were able to successfully exit. Next, I had the chance to mentor some wonderful startups over the years, including PayWithMe, Vitalvio.com, Vulcan Technologies, Green Energy Efficiency Solutions (GEES), VirtuallyShow.com, and Synderela.com. Synderela LLC sticks in my mind, as it was the first fashion startup I ever mentored. The women at the startup, Nicole Petito, Susan Dimeo, and Yalenis Cepeda, spent countless of hours discussing ideas with me, and for that I am very grateful. Finally, my time as CEO of DualAlign.com taught me so many lessons about what to do and not to do with a startup. I am thankful to all the members of DualAlign LLC for their support and encouragement over the years.

Introduction: Is There a Better Way?

It was Friday morning, July 20, 2012, when Remigio Arteaga (Remy, as he is known to his friends) and Joanne Hyland were meeting in Troy, New York, to discuss their new cloud innovation platforms. As the meeting entered its fourth hour, Remy began to think back to his third startup, Ironsilk—a web platform that enabled the delivery of premium content to members. It was launched in 2001, a year after Remy's second startup was acquired. Remy thought back to how excited he was then. Like so many startups, Ironsilk started with a detailed business plan covering everything from business model to five-year financial projections. Remy spent considerable time working on Ironsilk's business plan. Today, premium content can be found everywhere, but at the time it was an unproven business model. In fact, the debate on whether to restrict content to registered members was still a few years away.

Remy's idea was to have Ironsilk deliver premium content from video game websites to fans of such websites. In return for viewing free premium content, fans would opt in to receive third-party e-mail advertisements. By opting in for e-mail advertisements, fans' e-mails became a valuable asset that was then shared with third-party advertisers for a fee. This fee was then split between Ironsilk and the video game website owners. With the success of his previous venture and a strong business plan at his back, Remy put pedal to the metal and quickly developed and launched Ironsilk. Ironsilk grew quickly and in the first six months had roughly 500,000 members. You might think that this is the story of another great success—but not quite. There were a couple of key assumptions that Remy baked into the startup. One was the rate that advertisers were willing to pay. Another was the amount of work needed to manage the video game owners. Both assumptions proved to be wrong, and Ironsilk was closed within the year. Its demise could have been prevented, Remy thought.

At the same time, Joanne was finding it hard to concentrate. Earlier that day she had read an article about her former employer, Nortel Networks Corporation. The article was about the fall of the once multibillion-dollar multinational telecommunications firm. In 1996, prior to founding the rInnovation Group, a well-respected innovation-consulting firm, Joanne was the director, and eventually vice president, of the Business Ventures Group (BVG) within Nortel. Like so many internal venturing groups, BVG's mission was launched with good intentions. It was supposed to make a giant company like Nortel nimble and quick, so that it could compete with all those Internet startups. BVG had many of the same enlightened elements that you see in today's corporate venture groups, including an advisory board made up of internal executives, a structure that allowed for spin-outs and spin-ins, business assistance, access to equipment and office space, and financing. It even had incubator space separate from Nortel's space.

Not surprisingly, BVG began to struggle. It was very clear to Joanne early on that there were different expectations among Nortel's stakeholders about the alignment of investments with current versus future strategy, the right balance between spin-ins and spin-outs, the role of the advisory board, the time and investment required for market creation, when was the right time to spin out a venture and bring in venture capital, the requirement for more strategic skill sets to deal with the uncertainty and complexity, the need for streamlined processes, and so forth, although Joanne lacked the experience to describe them as clearly as she could today. On top of that, her team was working to establish a complete management system for innovation to overcome the management challenges, but mergers and acquisitions (M&A) activities started to take precedence over what had been Nortel's strong research and development (R&D) heritage, with its ability to leapfrog generations of technology. Joanne wondered where Nortel might be today if a different path had been chosen. In Chapter 2, she will elaborate upon her story of Nortel and this leading-edge approach to innovation.

Inspiration for the Book

I (Remy) love startups. Some may think the word love is too strong, but if people can love their cars, then I can love startups. The process of starting with nothing and ending with a Google is nothing short of remarkable to almost everyone, including me. People find the stories of Apple, Google, Instagram, and Groupon inspirational. The triumph of determination, intellect, and hard work against insurmountable odds is part of the human DNA. How else did we make it from cave dwellers to space travelers, if not for our intellect and determination? It turns out there was another aspect of humanity that helped our earlier versions progress—creativity. Not the modern use of the word, the historical use. Historians are quick to point out that the result of creativity is tools. Humans are the only species on earth that use their creativity to improve and enlarge their tools. We don't need to limit tools to handheld objects; they can include things like writing and reading. The key point is that as humans we build upon the work of others. We refine, enlarge, and combine tools to make new tools. We learn from the past to improve the present. We take this notion for granted. Yet, when it comes to startups, entrepreneurs and their advisers seem to be constantly working on re-creating the wheel. They treat startups more like an art project then a business endeavor. They view the entrepreneur as an artist who is there to produce the next Mona Lisa, or in the case of startups, the next Facebook.

It was this type of thinking that started me down the road that eventually led to this book, because I knew that startups could and should be managed. In fact, I had even developed startup management methods to assist the entrepreneur in launching and managing a startup. Developing methods and processes is in my blood. My first job after graduating from college was at General Motors (GM). My job at GM was to develop new product development methods based on the latest research and best practices. To do this I had to synthesize information, detect subtle patterns, and connect the dots. This came naturally to me and I thoroughly enjoyed my job. Since then, I have been on a path to do the same thing with startup management. It took time—nearly two decades of being an entrepreneur, being around entrepreneurs, studying entrepreneurs, and studying innovation—for the stars to align. When I was presented with the opportunity to write the book, I immediately contacted Dr. Gina O'Connor about contributing to the book because of her outstanding research in studying corporate entrepreneurs. She suggested that I coauthor the book with Joanne, who is a world-class innovation consultant, and I agreed. Joanne has spent about as much time studying and working with corporate startups as I have spent working with startups, and our two methodologies are based on the same type of thinking.

The inspiration for this book comes down to our desire to change the way startups are managed, from a go with your gut approach to a more methods-based approach of managing the uncertainties that every startup faces.

How We Got Here

Joanne and I met in 2004 at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), when Joanne was a guest lecturer at my MBA innovation class. I approached her after the class and asked her what it would take to launch a consulting business. I was passionate about how innovation methods could be applied to startups. I knew from firsthand experience that traditional management methods did not work.

As I mentioned earlier, my first experience with innovation came at GM, of all places. It was my first job after graduating with an electrical engineering degree from the University of Rochester. I was selected to be part of an internal group that served as a quasi think tank or consulting group for a division of GM. The mission of our group was to change the way GM did business—quite a lofty mission for a group of very young engineers (the oldest at the time this group launched was 26). But I was young and did not understand how big a mountain we had to climb. My job was to develop new product development methods based on customer needs and competitive analysis. This was the mid-1980s, well before books on competitive analysis, Quality Function Deployment (QFD), or six sigma became commonplace. There I was meeting with experienced engineers and scientists, telling them that their approach to new product development was wrong. Needless to say, they did not welcome me with open arms. Over time, though, many groups began to implement these new methods; unfortunately, most groups did not, and by now we all know what happened to GM.

I could see even then that applying traditional management techniques to the development of truly different new products did not work. Unknowingly, our group developed methods that had learning built into them. The discovery methods that we developed had many of the elements that author Frans Johansson wrote about in The Medici Effect,¹ a book on how people develop ideas. After GM, I went on to launch or be the CEO of seven startups. It was during this time that I came to appreciate fully the fact that traditional management techniques should not be applied to startups. I realized that the myths perpetuated by the media, of entrepreneurs succeeding because of natural-born talent, persistence, and sheer will were just that—myths. We've all heard these myths and we want to believe them, because they are great stories. The stories of Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, or Mark Zuckerberg all making it big on one idea and their gut instincts make us all believe that if we can just come up with that one idea we too can create the next Facebook. But reality is more complicated than that.

Over the past couple of years, I have worked as an entrepreneur in residence and program director of the Entrepreneurship Center at RPI. During this time I have mentored more than 100 student and faculty startup teams. I have seen how strong the desire to put the pedal to metal is. Eric Reis in his book The Lean Startup² writes about how entrepreneurs are taught to just do it. I couldn't agree more. In my career, I have had that same desire to just build it. Ironsilk was a classic case of moving too quickly, of being too focused and of executing too well. Focus on executing a plan gets rewarded in mature firms like GE and IBM, but will kill most startups. Why? The answer is that most entrepreneurs are focused on the wrong things. Instead of focusing on testing the underlying assumptions that their startup is based on, they are focused on executing business plans that are filled with untested assumptions. In my experience, I find that entrepreneurs do this in an attempt to fit traditional management techniques to a startup environment. I too have found myself