Talent Isn’t Enough for Distributed Startup Teams to Succeed.

Distributed teams may be the new reality, but it doesn’t change how startups need to inspire unreasonable efforts to succeed.

It’s been a strongly held opinion of leading investors in Silicon Valley that your startup team needs to be in one location to succeed. Only recently has this opinion started to soften due to the extreme cost of living in the Bay area. Now you “go where the talent is”.

For a variety of reasons we did that 5 years ago before it was an early stage startup trend. We built a highly talented 40+ person product team in Kiev, Ukraine. It’s something we’re extremely proud of as a company.

Despite all this, I still agree with the thinking behind the opinion. Why? Because while talent is a necessary ingredient, it’s not the most important one.

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. — George Bernard Shaw

Startups require exceptional effort and creativity. What most people don’t realize, is that it’s more than you typically imagine. It’s unreasonable. Something no rational HR policy or simple life hack could manage.

It’s not reasonable to physically visit every one of your first customers, the way the founders of Airbnb did. It’s not reasonable to work 130 hours and pull an all-nighter a week as Marissa Meyer did in the early days of Google.

How do you get someone to abandon all personal plans on short notice and decide to live in Dongguan, China as your manufacturer falters and any further delays mean you’ll run out of cash? There are countless hardware startups I personally know of that have faced this real challenge and someone always stepped up to make it happen.

The problem is that people naturally resist doing things that they think are unreasonable. To do the unreasonable, they need to be convinced.

Properly defined, a startup is the largest group of people you can convince of a plan to build a different future. — Peter Thiel

“Reality Distortion Field” was the term to describe how Steve Jobs convinced his team to believe the impossible was possible. Elon Musk is famous for doing the same. He engages directly with his team at every level, down to the assembly line, to convince them of his vision and how to handle every important detail from first principles. Most entrepreneurs aren’t Steve Jobs or Elon Musk, but the successful ones all do this in their own way.

The idea of convincing may sound complex or even manipulative. In my experience though, it can be straightforward and genuine. Through research, experience and imagination entrepreneurs convince themselves of a new reality first. Then all they need to do is openly share their own inner dialogue about what convinced them with the team. Repeatedly. This is a highly personal, yet straightforward act that can inspire early employees to do unreasonable things and can create a culture that reinforces it as they scale. Especially if those early employees get their role in the process and do the same in return with future team members.

Convincing can get easier with early success. Enthusiastic early users. A noteworthy investment. But it often can get harder too. Way harder. Most startups meander or full-on pivot. Slack was started as a gaming company. You have to change the plan in order to survive, much less thrive. Convincing someone of your vision once is hard enough. Doing it repeatedly as you meander or pivot takes another whole level of Jedi mind trick. But the successful ones have always figured it out.

I wonder if successful pivots will be less common when distributed teams are the new reality for startups?

Our own experience is more meandering than most I’ve heard of. It’s been 8 years of grinding it out. We are profitable and growing, but still relatively small and not yet scaling. Not many startups find this space. They usually flame out or explode. There aren’t any guidebooks on what to do next. So we keep experimenting and trying new things. I often feel like we’re some sort of experimental test lab for convincing.

We have to do it repeatedly, across time zones and across cultural barriers. And by cultural, I don’t mean traditions, food, language etc. Those are the wonderful parts of working in a distributed team. I mean workplace culture. Things like how working time is valued, what is considered a skill worth developing and what it means to do a good, high quality job. These kinds of cultural differences exist everywhere. Both within the US and outside. And from our experience, these are the ones that are hardest to overcome in startups. Why? Because, even when everyone is working in good faith, these cultural differences can be the source of major execution challenges.

Like any company, we’ve had execution failures. We got our research wrong on user needs. We underwhelmed users with fragmented experiences that we didn’t resolve well. We missed important delivery windows (ex. launching after the school year ends for educational products). Some of this is directly attributable to not being convinced as a whole team of what we were doing. I didn’t always understand my role in the process and invest the time to tell the story repeatedly. We didn’t catch how much the language barrier worked against our team relating to how I communicated my own inner dialogue at times. And workplace cultural differences made it more difficult for the remote team leaders to understand their role as first followers and bring others along, with some notable exceptions.

Were these failures determinant in our business? Not yet. But they do motivate us to want to be better.

We’ve used the same tools and techniques every modern startup uses to communicate. But no amount of messaging can convince people to do unreasonable things. We travel and video conference as much as is feasible to communicate with our voices more. But quarterly meetings and weekly video conferences don’t provide enough repetition to convince others of the reasons to challenge themselves. Its clear to us that your voice needs to be heard more often to really make a difference.

Over the last few years we had built a video discussion tool for educators called Recap. While it was growing successfully, we always felt it had more broad potential than just in the classroom. So we started looking into how we could evolve it in new directions. At the same time, as an experiment, we launched a voice only feature within Recap that was quietly well received with existing users. So this gave us the inspiration of starting to experiment internally with voice memos to help address our own communication issues.

Before this experiment, we had never opened up the exploratory phase of new product development to our distributed team. We had always delivered finished specifications. While this technique helped speed up the start of development, it never really resulted in the kind of mind share we wanted and needed. This time we did it differently and opened things up early. We used the asynchronous voice to help us navigate the uncertainty that accompanies this phase. I started by sharing my own inner dialogue about what was getting me excited with voice. After a slow, nervous start, we started to get insights back from the whole team. Several team members contributed thoughtfully that I literally had never heard speak before, which was an amazing breakthrough on its own. And we really started to pick up steam when one key team member said “I guess this really works!” which encouraged even more people to participate.

This exercise helped inform what we needed to build, with more voices than usual. But just as importantly, it helped build a shared inner dialogue about what we were trying to do that has carried us all the way through development.

We continued this throughout development. Our team has shared the struggles they were having learning new technology, when we decided to transition to React Native from iOS. This helped us have more empathy for their challenge, and also helped us manage resources and scope better. We were also able to gain better alignment on the the nuances of what is Minimum Viable Product (MVP). The subject of “viability” always raises questions with developers, and it’s a debate that we haven’t handled as well in the past.

Fast forward several months and it’s about to launch. We’re calling it Synth. It’s a bite-sized podcasting platform. Synth transforms podcasting into an approachable, conversational way to truly listen to each other and find your voice. For life and work.

We’re excited to reach this milestone after a long stretch of hard work.

Distributed teams like ours are the new reality for startups. Time will tell the true impact of this trend on the success rates of these companies overall. While it’s too early to say the impact of Synth on this particular problem, we have found it to be incredibly valuable with our own distributed team. We’ll continue sharing our experience on how it works as we launch and grow the platform.

To get started, sign up at gosynth.com.

Feel free to contact me directly with questions at blamb@gosynth.com.