CodeBase - Playbooks for Building Startups: Startups and Playbooks

I'm Jim Newberry I'm the VP of education at cobase and I got into technology originally through psychology and then became a web developer for 20 years and worked with a lot of different

kind of companies including startups most of which fails I eventually uh started with a company that ended up succeeding and did really well and then since then I've been doing lots of

coaching and mentoring and education with codebase and now I help other startups to try and succeed as well hi I'm Stephen I have built three

startups in fact codebase is my third startup uh the first one I built succeeded the second one failed and I'm on to my third one now it's still alive

um building startups is really really hard really really hard um here are three things I guess I learned over the years um number one

um fall in love with the problem don't fall in love with the solution uh most startups fail because you just fall in love with this idea you've had um and even though the world tells you

the world's not ready yet for your idea and we don't want it and you can't find customers you just hold on to it and you know hold on to for dear life and instead of letting it go so the first

thing is to to be able to let things go to still have a huge amount of curiosity and love frankly for the problem space you're in um but be much more

um flexible about how you actually solve that problem the second thing I learned over time is related to the first thing but it's

subtly different and it's basically to try and develop the ability to have strong beliefs loosely held um again when you're building something

new the very first version of the new thing you're building can be incredibly seductive and attractive and letting go of that is the big skill over time the

third thing I've learned building a startup is that it's if you've never done it before you see a thousand ways of doing it and if you've

done it a couple of times before you see maybe two or three ways of doing it so just try and feel quickly feeling quickly sounds traits are really obvious

it's incredibly hard to do we live in a culture where failure is very very difficult to deal with um but but try and fail fast over time you'll understand that

the big limiter in life is time how many times you can have a go at things so if something's not working just stop it and go again what I find exciting about startups is

uh it's an opportunity to get involved in not just creating something new but and not just creating change but seeing something turn from from an idea and a

really rough and ready idea often um into something much bigger and completely different and involving lots of different people over time in a really really complex

kind of into the lucking system of people and Systems and Technology all kind of mixing in together to make this thing somehow emerge from from all of that complexity that's a really exciting

process it's not it's not easy at all and it's it always goes in a direction that you don't expect and it's kind of that um a mixture of that uncertainty unexpectedness and

um and kind of things going in in a direction that you wouldn't necessarily assume that for me makes it a really exciting thing to get involved with either as a founder or as an employee or or even as an observer from outside as

we are now a code base kind of looking at the companies that we have uh at cobase and the companies that we work with elsewhere as well I think everyone will find their own reason to find startups exciting but for me personally

I was one of those sort of classic people who shouldn't really have a boss to be honest um I graduated didn't really know what to do I studied philosophy it was hard to go into some kind of obvious

professional challenge wanted to build my own thing um I think many people want to do that um more and more in fact what we're trying to do here is just trying to give

you the tools the playbooks the understanding the terminology to just have a better chance of succeeding at it so with playbooks we've seen like in the

last 20 years there's a number of ecosystems around startups of start to develop and everyone knows about Silicon Valley but they're obviously around the world there are a lot of smaller ecosystems as well and what's happened

is because these are kind of groups of companies and people that get together and share ideas and knowledge and over time what's happened is that yeah these playbooks as they were have developed

which are kind of agreed approaches or methods by which you create a startup um now that implies you know from the sporting analogy of a Playbook which is literally a big fat book or a folder of

of plays of like we're going to choose how to do this you know how to win this game over here by playing this play and throwing the ball over there to that guy and they're going to run you know 30

yards and get a touchdown that implies that there's somehow this kind of book out there that you can you can access that lists all the playbooks for startups that's not the case um what there is is there is a whole

bunch of different opinions and articles and resources um spread around the web in different formats um but really A lot of it comes from shared knowledge that through

conversations with with bounders between thousands and BCS and other folks that are involved in in the ecosystem and what we do at code base is kind of keep our ear to the ground on that stuff

so we do a lot of reading ourselves and we keep and try and keep up to date with what's going on with other companies how other how different companies do things how they've grown how they've all in the

market that kind of thing think of a Playbook as the summary of a bunch of lessons learned by someone who's trying to build something um they'll note down what worked uh what

didn't work it's almost like a recipe or something if you want to bake a cake so if you follow this Playbook you'll get that far and you can have some kind of chance of

success and de-risk what you're trying to do playbooks are not static however they change with the times we have to stay on top of the latest playbooks playbooks iterate some things are true

and then they're no longer true they need to be tested against reality um but using the Playbook as a metaphor for understanding how you can do things quickly how you can compare it how you

can create language how you can iterate ideas is very strong and so you you build up the knowledge over time but a lot of it's fairly unstructured and difficult to navigate if you're coming

into it new so what we're trying to do with this course is is really trying to break down you know to try and simplify that navigation trying to help you to do that but it's what it isn't is a big

kind of book which you then choose and then execute yourself you need a lot of kind of insight and knowledge yourself in your particular domain where your startup focus is to be able to work out

what's going to work best uh for your particular company and your particular idea skills you learn to build something new with can of course also be mapped to across

to spaces that are already existent oftentimes you'll find that Founders who succeed um sometimes the definition of success

is the exit to an existing large company and they take those skills with them of course and try to embed them there but eventually sometimes if startups

fail Founders also find a new home in existing incumbent places with those skills that they've taken to try and to build new things I think as a as a

society we're in a historical moment of time where we need those new skills that look at creating new things look at

reinterpreting the world look at building resilience doing things more quickly less sort of committee driven all those kind of topics

um so we're hopeful that what you'll learn on the course will not only help you build something new but also if you choose to do so you could go into something existing and take those skills

with you if you look at all the big incumbent companies at the moment they'll all pretty much say the same thing they understand that disruption is real they understand the world is changing uh you understand that there's

a need for them to change and frankly we find it really hard to hire people who can help them with that change of course there's an age cohort thing to this there's a uh you know what Native level

do you have when it comes to technology you know were you born typing you know with your finger or your thumb Etc so um that's the kind of space we inhabit here and the skills you'll hopefully

learn in the course should help you either build something brand new or help existing things refresh Rebrand rebuild and renew their view of the world so if I was going to share a few things

about um startup life what it's like to work in a startup even if you're not a Founder um I think uh there's there's a few things that I would let people know who

are not familiar with it um so for me in particular I think that there's obviously it's the one constant is constant change so in the start of the whole point of startup is that it grows quickly and if

you're in a startup that's growing quickly then things are changing around you all the time um and you so you have to in order to kind of succeed in that environment you have to embrace that and kind of to a

certain extent go with the flow and understand that you can't control everything that's happening around you um but by the same token that means it creates a lot of opportunity to work on things that you would never have the

opportunities to work on or never have the opportunity to learn within a much larger more stable more established organization um and for me that's the thing that really gets me excited about working in

startups is that despite the fact that they they're going to become at times seem quite overwhelming the amount of change that's happening in the amount of uncertainty that's around on the positive side of that that creates a lot of opportunity to learn

new things and to really get to grips with things um yeah and to have a major influence on on the company that you work for in a really visible way actually

um and you know you can you can also change that over time so as the company changes you can change your own focus of what you're currently learning what you're currently focused on what your

main interests are if you like over time um and those those things go I've found at least those those things go outside the bounds of kind of traditional

definitions of career paths and skill sets and and all those things so in particularly in early stage startups there's a real need for for Founders and

early employees to kind of work on everything all together and pick up what you know pick up what's being left on the ground that hasn't been paid much

attention uh even if that's uh requires things that are outside your current skill set so getting outside your comfort zone is something that becomes like a daily occurrence in a startup

um and so you which is great you know that that's great because you get used to that level of discomfort all the time and that can only be a positive thing in your career as a whole going forward