Matt Warren

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Category: Entrepreneurship

Founder journey, startup lessons, and business strategy

  • Value of Vision

    In business, when talking about writing a business plan, or when a consultant evaluates a business, sometimes a vision or mission statement are things that get discussed.

    For a long time I have looked at these kind of things as fluff. It’s a bunch of people wordsmithing a document that will never be read outside of the announcement that it has been completed. YAY! The people writing the software, building the widgets and making sales are often scarcely aware that a mission or vision exists for the company they work for.

    In those cases, yes, a vision statement is less than useless. It is wasted effort, it might even conflict with the actual evidence of the company’s actions.

    But when used correctly, it can align thousands of people to all pull in the same direction. A great mission, can make people excited to work 80 hours/week, to jump out of bed knowing that what they do matters. It can get past the roadblocks to decision making by proving a roadmap to everyone about what they should or can work on.

    In the early days of Google, they had a mission to organize the worlds information. This galvanized an army of amazing engineers to build some truly monumental technology to store and find everything on the internet. It encouraged them to tackle projects like scanning all books, and re-think email. Google has long since outgrown that mission

    SpaceX is a company with the vision of having a sustainable colony on Mars. This ambitious goal underpins both top level strategy, and also bottom up decision making. People work there to be part of something amazing and as a result they are able to hire some of the smartest people.

    There is a reason why spaceX will not go public until after they reach Mars. The stock market doesn’t care about bold missions, they want quarterly reports that show revenue growth and profits. Looking at Google as an example, the pursuit of business growth for shareholders eventually resulted in the cancellation of many benefitial products. The justification of a project requires a solid business case that it must not only be profitable, but also big enough to be worth pursuing.

    All it takes is one bad quarter for some pencil pusher to call for the cancellation of a fun mission-aligned project. After a few of those, we stop believing that the mission is the mission. It stops being fun to work there, it becomes harder to attract the best people.

    The thing about making a vision or mission work is repeating it ALL THE TIME. Put it into every presentation, every memo, every email, talk about it in every interview. When people believe that the vision is real, that the company can actually achieve it that’s when the positive benefits of having a vision.

    As the leader of a company, only create a vision if you are going to do what it takes to make people believe the vision is real and possible based on the actions the company makes.

  • The Last and Biggest Industry Primed for Tech Disruption

    The wave of tech disruption has been picking off industries one after the other since the early 70’s. Until today when it’s hard to think of any remaining sector of the economy that hasn’t gone through, or is in the process of being converted into a software driven market.

    The current biggest industry that is seeing major disruption is automotive and energy with Tesla taking the lead on a major shakeup to how cars work, and eventually with how the energy grid functions. This sector was a long time hold out due to the cost and dedication required to create a successful new car company. Should Tesla’s strategy play out they could find themselves with a global automotive monopoly on an $8T market.

    There is, however, an even bigger market that has not really been touched by technology discruption yet. It is long overdue for modernization and a shift towards software driven margins. Productivity in this sector has been essentially unchanged since the 50’s.

    Construction, and Housing is the biggest untapped market yet to be infiltrated by a technology company.

    Amazon is a technology company that sells books, Tesla is a technology company that makes cars and somewhere out there is an entrepreneur who will start a technology company that happens to build houses.

    What does a technology housing company look like?

    It will re-evaluate housing from first-principals – what is the ideal wall assembly? could you build a house with vacuum double-walled insulated panels? Would people buy a ‘branded’ home with a badge on the front? Could you provide home insurance as a service, have fully integrated smart electrical panel? an integrated thermal management system of heat pumps that moves heat from the freezer/fridge to the hot water tank? Could you change the perception of a home to be a computer you live in? Would it be possible to work with every jurisdiction to have these homes pre-approved for building inspections? biohazard protection level air quality filters, integrated security systems, off-grid by default?

    The ultimate house would be built to a tolerance of micrometers, and be produced at a rate of 100’s per day. It would be termite proof and impregnable to insects or rodents, the exterior would be zero maintenance.

    It would also be a general housing platform that, like Tesla, uses software to unlock the features you pay for so that manufacturing can be streamlined to fewer SKUs.

    Many of the existing problems with houses can be delt with – house insurance is expensive because a flood or fire can result in massive remediation costs. To counteract this, the builder should provide the insurance policy to the home owner – all claims are dealt with by the builder which provides the feedback loop to inform design decisions that improve future houses.

    The real differentiating factor though is going to be having a house that is software upgradeable and gets better every month with upgrades. If you could re-imagine a house as a software platform what kind of things would it do (that you don’t get with smart but dumb “smart home” systems)? perhaps a home that can play hide and seek with you, maybe it can find your lost stuff, talk to you in the room you’re in, lock all doors in the house, identify and trap intruders. maybe it would not require manual light switches, and it would auto-open doors for you. video and audio calls could follow you room to room. A smart home that makes being at home fun and social, or relaxing and serene with a single command. A house with a fart app.

    There is the need out there for order of magnitude better homes than what is currently constructed. Nobody has invented it yet. And to the company that creates the first computer you live in, they will have the chance at dominating a $13T market.

  • The Frequency of Disaster

    In the midst of the current global crisis for COVID-19, I was reminded just how often we have found ourselves in Bug-in situations over the last decade. We have been personally impacted by 4 significant events in the last 12 years.

    In 2018 a tornado ripped through a power distribution station in Ottawa knocked out power for the better part of a week. All our frozen food thawed, we were without internet and hot water for long enough to be worried. The limited communication and power made it difficult to know what was going on, or keep our phones charged.

    In 2013 we were in Calgary for the flood of the century. My office was flooded and closed for several weeks when all of downtown Calgary was under several feet of water. Luckily our house was on high ground.

    And back in 2008 we were in Vancouver when the power substation downtown exploded. This time as well, my office was impacted and shut down for a week.

    These events that last long enough to outlast all our laptop batteries, or the normal week worth of food in the house are where it starts to get into the territory of an emergency scenario. And given just how often these events seem to come up, having some preparation is probably a good idea.

    We’ve averaged one emergency scenario every 3 years, there’s no reason to believe that those are unusual odds to continue into the future.

    Probably not a bad idea to have emergency preparation as part of an annual re-assessment calendar reminder.

  • Change Begets Change

    It’s amazing just how much making a change can trickle to other changes in life. Moving and a new Job are things that can kick off a cascade of other impacts. This year I did both of those things.

    Switching from a self-employed, and renting back to employed in a normal 9-5, and owning + mortgage resulted in many changes in my day-to-day.

    I used to be engaged with personal projects – multiple websites I was working on launching plus writing, drawing, and creating a youtube series. These were things based on my interests and ambitions. I had time to go to the gym everyday.

    Since buying a house, all of those things have stopped progressing. Of the 24 hours in a day – 8 are sleeping, 8-9 are working and the remainder are spent in traffic, eating and working on the house.

    It’s been a near complete change in my day-to-day patterns of living.

  • 50 Year Apollo Anniversary

    Hard to believe that it’s been 50 years since the Apollo astronauts landed on the moon. It’s a long time ago, before my time when all that action went down.

    The Apollo mission was created and launched with teams of inexperienced kids who were hired right out of college at the age of 21 and 22 mostly and were on average around 26 years old by the time NASA finally landed on the moon in 1969. With strong motivation and the ambition of youth even the most challenging problems were overcome.

    Apollo was an expensive program at the time, but it is also up there with the best investments the US government have made – along with the interstate highways.

    Today, after 50 years of productivity growth access to the moon is within the reach of private enterprise. The next ten years promise a flurry of activity to get back there.

    The people who went to the moon 50 years ago or were part of the effort or were just alive to witness it are now seniors. “We” didn’t get to the moon, they did, and the reasons, and technology they used is lost to us today.

    It’s exciting to see this generation make their own mark and out-do things their parents or grand-parents achieved.

  • What’s going to happen to the ISS?

    What’s going to happen to the ISS?

    After two decades of ISS being the only game in town when it comes to space stations, things are finally starting to change. The decommissioning for ISS is in early planning stages now and the progress happening on new replacement stations from NASA and China, and perhaps Russia, as well as privately owned stations are starting to look like they are potentially close to finding a viable market. The future of space stations is looking bright.

    In 60 years of human space travel fewer than 600 people have been in space. And the maximum number of people who have been there at the same time is 13 – a record set in 1995.

    The good news is that since the ISS has become fully operational we have maintained a continuous presence in earth orbit. The ISS crew complement of between 3 and 6 people has been held since the year 2000. The limiting factor in putting more people up on the space station at the same time has not been the size of the station, but on our ability to have escape vehicle capacity to leave in the case of an emergency.

    The ISS is currently scheduled for end of life in the late 2020s. There have been discussions at NASA about how to do that. It’s a complicated international investment and different parties may have different ideas for what to do with the modules and equipment they have up there.

    In the case of the Russian modules, rumours are that they are investigating the potential of taking their components off to re-use on a Russian space station. NASA is potentially looking at the possibility of finding a way to off-load the operational aspects of the station to private industry. Certainly de-orbiting the whole thing would be dangerous and seemingly wasteful.

    China meanwhile has quietly already launched 2 short lived experimental space stations and is planning a larger modular Chinese station to call their own.

    NASA and international partners have shifted their focus to the new Gateway station. A small orbital outpost in heliocentric orbit of the moon – our first attempt at building something outside of Earth orbit. Though not designed to be permanently crewed, Gateway builds on the same modular design principles used for the ISS and will create new obligations to get astronauts out to lunar orbit on a regular basis for the foreseeable future.

    This is I think one of the biggest lessons from operating the ISS for the last 20 years. A great way at ensuring stable funding over a long time horizon, across multiple changes in governments is to have complex international agreements and sunk costs into the infrastructure that would be a waste to very publically abandon.

    In the private sector, things might finally be approaching a point where lower cost reusable rockets from SpaceX and Blue Origin make a privately owned and operated space station something that has a viable business case. NASA has been advancing a vision of increased private activity in space starting with the successful goal of privatizing the supply rockets to the ISS. Now they are looking into finding ways to make it possible for private industry to operate space stations.

    The best benefit from introducing multiple companies to operate at the same time (rather than picking a single contractor to build something like say – the space shuttle) is that we get diversity of ideas and visions. A variety of rockets to choose from, with different trade offs for cost, payloads, and scheduling. Paying companies for the service, rather than time and materials contracts puts pressure on the supplying company to work on things that can deliver value to more customers than just NASA. They still need to go out and drum up other business to make things work financially.

    When it comes to space stations we need the diversity of ideas more than ever, because there is wide open un-test potential for what to build, and unknown, untapped demand for things we might want to do in space if it was more affordable to do so.

    This is why companies like Bigelow aerospace has attached a test module to the ISS to validate it’s inflatable module technology and prepare for a more ambitious development of an orbital space hotel.

    Axiom space is a private company that likewise has developed conceptual modules for expanding the ISS and building independant space stations. They have proposed a future of expanding and replacing modules over time on ISS, essentially to rebuild it into something new.

    Blue Origin has submitted a proposal for a space station that looks to be based on a New Glenn upper stage. They are in the early stages of discovering the viable business strategy for building space habitats.

    Other companies like – SNC, Space Adventures, SSL/Maxar, Boeing, and Northrop Grumman all have their own visions for what the biggest opportunities are for using a space station be it for science, in space manufacturing, tourism or for servicing other activities in space.

    Space stations are central to the future commercialization of space and part of the bigger picture of expanding human influence out to the moon. We can’t have a human presence in space without a place for humans to stay. The rockets are coming that will make it more possible than ever to get people up in greater numbers and lower cost. The next challenge will be to build enough places for them to stay and work when they get there.

  • Growth Mindset

    I’ve been reading this book, Mindset: the new psychology of success by Carol Dweck. It’s been on my list of books to read for several years now and I’m finally catching up on the backlog.

    What finally brought it to the top of the list was finding out that this book is forming the basis of the corporate culture at the newly reborn Microsoft since Satya Nadella took the reins. Understanding what has changed at Microsoft to transform the company over the last while from a place that didn’t appeal to me at all just a few years ago, into a vibrant and positive company is interesting.

    The quick takeaway from the book is the distinction between having a fixed mindset and a growth mindset. These are not innate but are learned beliefs about various aspects of ourselves and others. For example, you might believe that IQ is a basic measurement of our core ability that doesn’t change. On the other hand, you might believe that IQ scores can change based on learning and training. These distinctions exist across a wide variety of our beliefs – Leadership, salesmanship, introversion, extroversion, personality, sports skills, music talent.

    The book re-enforced things which I believed to be inherently true, but framed the distinction between fixed and growth mindsets in a way that shone a light on people and interactions I have had in the past. And in that regard, I hope that it will help to make me more conscious of the distinction of foundational beliefs in future conversations

    Highly recommended book, which is becoming more important than ever as tribalism has reduced our ability to understand different perspectives.

  • Velocity vs Speed

    This past year has been one of the most interesting I’ve had. Quitting my job gave me the time to pursue a wide variety of interests. And I did use the time this year to get a lot of unique things done – blockchain development, built a chat/finance app, wrote a space strategy plan/planned a podcast, launched a couple dozen websites, built a beer fermentation cooler, did some e-commerce, designed a bike and custom electric motor, prototyped an AI app to learn Mandarin, designed a space launch system 1/100th the cost of SpaceX, invented a new scheme for proof of work, and designed a business strategy AI.

    These are things that wouldn’t have happened if I was also doing a job.

    However that variety and wide range of things had a drawback that very few of these things moved forward enough to get traction. Speed in lots of different directions, but low velocity. 

    My resolution for the next while is to plan and focus on velocity. To structure my time and the work I do to lead in a singular direction. 

  • Designing a Bike

    I love bikes, want to be able to use them more often than I do, and have been looking for something to do as a hands on project that doesn’t use the computer so much. Building my own bike seems like a neat and unique project.

    When thinking about what I would want in a bike there are a couple things that I would put as the most important design constraints.

    1. the frame should be as simple as possible, ideally something that has very few parts and could be manufactured entirely by robot.
    2. It should be hackable and extendable for easily adding trailers, baskets, etc.
    3. should allow for electric motor version with a mid-mounted motor.
    4. should should theoretically possible to make it very inexpensive to build.

    While thinking about and researching a lot of the existing products on the market I thought there was some opportunity to create something better and unique. It started with an electric motor and transmission design.

    I designed a motor integrated with the crank and isolated sprocket so that the pedals and motor can independently power the belt drive. This is housed in a single small unit and will allow for a simpler fixie style rear wheel hub while still allowing the pedals to idle. By moving most of the mechanical complexity into a single component which can be enclosed and made water tight it can be made maintenance free and high reliability.

    For the bike frame itself I want to think about something that requires no, or very little welding, ideally it would be made from as few parts as possible. Car unibody design gave me the idea of doing something with stamped metal sheets. I wondered if there was a way to build a bike frame from a single piece of metal with only a couple of mount points for the seat post, stem, rear wheel, and crank to attach to it. A key thing was to have a rear wheel mounted on only one side (like some motorcycles do). This allows the frame to be stamped out of a nearly rectangular piece of metal which reduces wasted scrap and eliminates many steps from traditional bike manufacturing.

    What’s next? There are two things I need to solve. Firstly, there’s a lot of engineering to refine the design enough to validate it. Secondly, I need to build a prototype. The steps and knowledge required to get to a testable bike is well outside my expertise so any realistic future where this gets built will need a team working on it. There are two ways that I could get this done. Either open source the bike design and try to attract a community to continue working on it or hire people. In either case one of the logical conclusions for this kind of project would be to do a kickstarter to fund production after the prototype is validated.

  • Soft Launching

    Last week I did a soft launch of the revamped Blockagram platform that I’ve been working on for the last while.

    Blockagram is a service that allows you to send messages to people for marketing purposes with a small amount of Bitcoin to incentivize them to both subscribe to your marketing list, and act on the messages they get.

    Ultimately, I hope to build it out to expand the number of services that businesses could make use of to spend Bitcoin, and that consumers could earn bitcoin from. It’s a missing part of the bitcoin economy that is preventing faster adoption. If businesses have opportunities to spend bitcoin on things that would drive more business then they would have an incentive to accept bitcoin for payments.

    It is a small step towards something bigger, and is the start of what has been the hardest part for me (historically) of shifting from exclusively development work to working on finding customers and operating the business.