Startups and Smalltalk

Sebastian Sastre sebastian@flowingconcept.com

@sebastianconcpt #Smalltalks2014

Can you spot bugs? we can talk about that later

Startups and Smalltalk

Stay open to new views of old things

Wild ride. Irreverent and provocative.

Take notes of personal insights

Non-linear

Probably full of wrong advice

Hopefully an update non-nonsensical conversation starter

Startups and Smalltalk

Why a startup?

What’s a startup?

Where Smalltalk fit in all this?

Challenges and Opportunities?

Some tools to tackle challenges

Suggestions on what can be done in order to maximize the chances of success at those opportunities

What are we going to cover?

Actually… who are we?

Who is in the room?

Teachers? Engineers? Designers? Investors?

Enteprenerus?

Friends of Teachers? Friends of engineers? Friends of designers? Friends of investors?

Friends of enteprenerus?

Oh hai! Nice to meet you…

Want to have your own business?

Why a startup?U nutz?

In this economy? With this government / election / re-election?

Usual suspects: Money, Power & Fameself-centered drivers

• Financial freedom

• Put a dent in the Universe

• Good influence in your ecosystem

• Purpose, leave this world better than you found it

• You mention it

• Suggestion: be something ethical, the opposite to a jerk-ish taker ;)

Less self-centered drivers AKA sensible capitalism or inclusive capitalism

Bear in mind: your impact in your economic ecosystem will bridge the gap of currently disconnected people.

Or not :)

The right kind of crazy vs.

coocoo?

Results.

You're either kicking ass or you are not

How much results oriented can you be?

Or how much can you learn to be?

Agile’s 1st principle, anyone?

AHA moments come from problems!

How to know if business idea is good?

isGoodEnough ^1000 people allSatisfy: [ :guy |

guy isHappyAbout: something ]

Significant Impact yet starting small is okay!

Have many many many Quantity leads to Quality

Observe replicant vector on audience Measure resonance, decide

What is a Startup? No, really!

What is a Startup?Sweet angel money? Not always smart to take or needed

Big VC money? Not always accessible and or needed

Big companies inventing new hardware? Apple, Tesla, SpaceX

Good Corporate Innovation?

Two guys in the proverbial garage?

All of the above?

The natural state of a start-up is to die; most start-ups require multiple miracles in their early days to escape this fate. But the

density and breadth of the Silicon Valley network does sometimes let start-ups cheat death. ~ Sam Altman (Y-Combinator)

Study all you can find about this guy: Steve Blank

Technology is not a problem anymore! Hyperconnected world with means to fix many things easy,

has a hard time to identify what is the valuable thing to solve?

Startup = Experiment couple of dudes in discovery mode

If technology is not the problem anymore, what’s the problem now?

Business: acquiring customers Movements: acquiring meaning followers

The good experiments will help you discover 1000 people allSatisfy:

Where does Smalltalk fit into this?

You tell meWhat is the conquer the world plan?

Where is the next billion dollar market? Where Smalltalk would shine in it?

Real problems and clients waiting for solutions are certainly there.

How are the Smalltalker teams planning to take those markets?

How are they mentoring the next generation?

Are we seed investing the next generation?

Are we changing accordingly? In what?

How? Adds up? Makes sense?

actually… lets do something that scales better

Some hard reality check questions:

Startups and Smalltalk

• Rockstar teams? like in remarkably productive?

• High speed in customer development / business discovery?

• Okay, how friendly are we to "insanely great" design?

• How fast can we iterate?

Challenges

Opportunities

Where does Smalltalk fit into this?

• Dynabook

• Alto

• MacIntosh

• OOP

• SUnit

• Extreme Programming

• Agile

• Scratch

• OLPC

• …

What is raining now?

• mobile phones and tablets

• Single Page Applications

• JSON

• RESTful API's

• Javascript libraries to deal with "anything known by hoomanz"

Some slides from "Mobile is Eating the Wold" by Benedict Evans from a16z

http://a16z.com/2014/10/28/mobile-is-eating-the-world/

What future will you invent?

All you need to know about investing in one slide

• seed = testing the waters

• angels = starting the machine

• VC = growing a business

• make something that achieves CAC <= 1/3 LTV

http://www.forentrepreneurs.com/saas-metrics-2/

Teaching a non-nerd to program? very hard Teaching a nerd to business? actually very doable

Biggest challenge?

http://www.clearlycultural.com/geert-hofstede-cultural-dimensions/uncertainty-avoidance-index/

Cognitive Traps

What problems and tools do we have?

Big opportunity

Abundance of small "mundane" problems

Design a profitable business, Don’t know how?

Ask! Google! Quora! People! Mentors!

Think small well designed and flexible starts that can grow in operations and distribution

Partners, partners, partners

Design things that attract great people

Learn to do social networking

Want a new opportunity? Go out, ask, shut up and listen

Can your super-powers deal with these super-villains?

Cognitive Traps• Defensive of "your baby is ugly"

• I rock vs. I can do something to make you rock

• End of the road vs. An Ecosystem

• Productivity matters (you need to deliver more value and faster; you are being taxed as you read this)

• Poor decisions formed by an educational system that has trained you not to thrive creating but to (a) shut up and obey the statu quo and (b) keep the machine running

The four Villains

• Villain 1: Narrow framing (unduly limiting the options we consider)

• Villain 2: The confirmation bias (seeking out information that bolsters our beliefs)

• Villain 3: Short-term emotion (being swayed by emotions that will fade)

• Villain 4: Overconfidence (having too much faith in our predictions)

Excerpt From: Heath, Chip. “Decisive.”

Cognitive Bias ~ Homo Sapiens Sapiens Anti-patternsObservation, introspection, reflection, Critical Thinking are good signals

Specially the Auto-Critical-Thinking / Do good revisions and re-editions of yourself No change, statu quo, defensive, being reactive are Comfort Zone signals Exciting new possibilities, other people shining eyes, are best Compass

How to find value?• Feel their problems

• Designers are your new best friend

• First stage of the Design Thinking process? Empathy Maps

• Yes, empathy like in listening what they need, think, say and feel and maps like in acknowledging what their truly, emotionally engaging, problems and needs are

Oh! It’s going to be soooo beautiful…

Pragmatic convenient experience beats beautiful hands down

A better question is: Can you make it beautiful and convenient?

Want to create a thriving community around a specific technology / business?

Positive feedback is key. Do you have barriers to make it happen? Be merciless to demolish barriers!

Study all you can find about this girl: Kathy Sierra

Startups and Smalltalk

Why a startup?

What’s a startup?

Where Smalltalk fit in all this?

Challenges and Opportunities?

Some tools to tackle challenges

Suggestions on what can be done in order to maximize the chances of success at those opportunities

What are we going to cover?

Use Metcalfe’s Law

How?

Nodes and Amplifiers

People => Nodes

Where is the biggest value in Smalltalk?

What people is doing? => Amplifiers

YOU

enough with inferring implicits…

People and Nodes meaning

Lets talk about Amplifiers

ACTION"But I, can’t! I don’t have time!"

Reality check: if you don’t care, nobody will

[ I CanNot ] whileTrue: [ study 4 villains again. you doNotStayTrapped ]

Positive Feedback Loops

Show something cool in 60 seconds

Screencasts are great

Philippe Back doing casual interviews, talk with him

Don not try to impress the world (you’ll be paralysed)

Simple things count

You showing it count

Foundational: Help fellow Smalltalker

Technical help not enough

Use antagonism as red flag. Find ways to defuses it

Find co-founders with complementary skills

Prospect partnerships

Be curious and ingenuous on new possibilities

You are the change maker You go out and figure it out

Make an Angel Fund• Be curious

• Go there and network

• Put some skin in the game and be an angel so you actually learn what matters to make the ecosystem work (quantity of money is orthogonal to the learning opportunity you create if you do that)

• Feel their problems, learn

• Ask interesting questions and listen, people likes to be listened, so do it more (and take notes on insights)

• Also, you might actually be really lucky and have stocks of the 1 out of 10 startups that gets hot and makes good money

• I’m involved in the getting together 2 groups of angels, one on the Netherlands and one in Brazil, get in touch to know how we help each other

Get Involved in an Accelerator

• Feel their problems

• Always hungry of great developers

• You might actually have a protagonist or mentoring role in accelerators

• Hangout more there, stay orbiting them

• Always make time for opportunities regardless of origin and form and never for bad business

Found and Fund many Startups

• Do lots of experiments

• Find business

• Go to StartupWeekends and workout that muscle

• Great ideas only: it’s either “hell yeah! or no”

Make tech that solves their problems

• Python was inspired to make unix terminal users more heroic

• Angular was done to make frontend developers more heroic

• Unix terminal, no internet no nothing without it

• Lower the friction to valuable problems (interesting or mundane)

• Drones, nice programming of small hardware

• 3D printers, smart things, internet of things

• Single Page Applications

flow https://github.com/flow-stack/flow

Flow's mission is to provide consultants, startups and software houses with a competitive Smalltalk full-stack framework that allows them to quickly deliver a demo with all the modern html5 features the market expects today (2014). The idea is that they can tactically use this framework to keep momentum up among their prospects and clients and scale things to full successful projects delivered by kickass productive teams or individuals

Make tech that solves their problems

In a way, you are already an angel of Smalltalk projects, because you care enough to watch this up to this point.

The whole community have Smalltalk angels there and depending on what you do, there are more inspiration and results coming

Final thoughts

Looking forward to hear your thoughts! Thanks!

• QA? Demo?

Sebastian Sastre sebastian@flowingconcept.com @sebastianconcpt #Smalltalks2014