I love to ski- it might in fact be my favourite thing to do in the whole world.
The freedom, the thrill, the complete solidarity between yourself and the slope. I'll always be so thankful for my parents for giving me the opportunity to learn this skill and develop a beloved hobby; I wasn't always so thankful though.
In fact for a long time I absolutely hated skiing and I hated my parents for making me do it- I hated the falls, the cold and the fear that came from dangers of uncertainty. Then one day I got on the slopes and realised all that time and effort had meant I could probably ski in my sleep and I fell in love with what I'd hated. In this respect skiing is a good analogy for starting a company up and scaling it into a success- and today I'm going to explore the similarities between growing a company and learning to ski responsibly (and not so responsibly.)
Starting a company is the easy part- growing that company is the difficult part, it requires timing, hard work and a lot of fortune! Just like skiing, you always start small, whether it be on the baby slopes or with an idea and from there the first thing you do is learn how to fail. You fall over and over until you can stand on your own feet, then you fall again- the low risk nature of your environment means you only have so much to lose at the start and as such its important to taste failure while you can afford to.
Before you can begin to grow you need to develop a solid foundation to build upon and just like a young Nathan on the slopes its important everything is properly in place to allow you to flourish later on in that development phase. Whatsapp is a fantastic example as the founders created a very simple app with a solid concept that could be used on any android or ios mobile device therefore creating a foundation that was easy to grow with a high degree of stability.
What Brian Acton and Jan Koum (Whatsapp's creators) also did very well was persist with the apps technology when it didn't work as they'd hoped at first. They had faith in the burgeoning mobile app market and used initial failures as the building blocks of what would be a business worth $19.4 billion (to Mark Zuckerberg) and have 1 billion users by 2016.
This success story can be easily contrasted with the inevitable failure of Zynga. Just like Whatsapp they saw a gap in the tech market for free to play online games but unlike Whatsapp they struck gold relatively early on with their first release- Texas Hold'em Poker and were also responsible for one of the most well known Facebook games ever- Farmville.
These early successes were what eventually doomed them though as unlike Whatsapp they hadn't experienced the failure that forced them to ensure their value proposition was rock solid and so they never thought to diversify themselves from the Facebook platform who essentially 'owned' them without ever officially being in charge- in this relationship Facebook held all the power and Zynga were at their will, meaning when they rushed expansion by building their own data centres for $100 million in 2011 they didn't have a solid foundation and innovation plan to support this growth- resulting in 834 members of staff being made redundant between 2013-2014.
A lack of innovation and rapid growth paired with a flawed foundation is a fatal mix and that low risk environment is gone all of a sudden when you're hurtling down a black run unable to slow your uncontrollable descent meaning a crash is inevitable and the fallout from that crash can have long lasting repercussions.
Zynga are still around today but their chance to reach the heights of Whatsapp have long passed and the lessons they've learnt cannot be applied retrospectively. They may however be useful fo you if one day you decide to start your own business or take up a new winter hobby.
The freedom, the thrill, the complete solidarity between yourself and the slope. I'll always be so thankful for my parents for giving me the opportunity to learn this skill and develop a beloved hobby; I wasn't always so thankful though.
In fact for a long time I absolutely hated skiing and I hated my parents for making me do it- I hated the falls, the cold and the fear that came from dangers of uncertainty. Then one day I got on the slopes and realised all that time and effort had meant I could probably ski in my sleep and I fell in love with what I'd hated. In this respect skiing is a good analogy for starting a company up and scaling it into a success- and today I'm going to explore the similarities between growing a company and learning to ski responsibly (and not so responsibly.)
Starting a company is the easy part- growing that company is the difficult part, it requires timing, hard work and a lot of fortune! Just like skiing, you always start small, whether it be on the baby slopes or with an idea and from there the first thing you do is learn how to fail. You fall over and over until you can stand on your own feet, then you fall again- the low risk nature of your environment means you only have so much to lose at the start and as such its important to taste failure while you can afford to.
Before you can begin to grow you need to develop a solid foundation to build upon and just like a young Nathan on the slopes its important everything is properly in place to allow you to flourish later on in that development phase. Whatsapp is a fantastic example as the founders created a very simple app with a solid concept that could be used on any android or ios mobile device therefore creating a foundation that was easy to grow with a high degree of stability.
What Brian Acton and Jan Koum (Whatsapp's creators) also did very well was persist with the apps technology when it didn't work as they'd hoped at first. They had faith in the burgeoning mobile app market and used initial failures as the building blocks of what would be a business worth $19.4 billion (to Mark Zuckerberg) and have 1 billion users by 2016.
This success story can be easily contrasted with the inevitable failure of Zynga. Just like Whatsapp they saw a gap in the tech market for free to play online games but unlike Whatsapp they struck gold relatively early on with their first release- Texas Hold'em Poker and were also responsible for one of the most well known Facebook games ever- Farmville.
These early successes were what eventually doomed them though as unlike Whatsapp they hadn't experienced the failure that forced them to ensure their value proposition was rock solid and so they never thought to diversify themselves from the Facebook platform who essentially 'owned' them without ever officially being in charge- in this relationship Facebook held all the power and Zynga were at their will, meaning when they rushed expansion by building their own data centres for $100 million in 2011 they didn't have a solid foundation and innovation plan to support this growth- resulting in 834 members of staff being made redundant between 2013-2014.
A lack of innovation and rapid growth paired with a flawed foundation is a fatal mix and that low risk environment is gone all of a sudden when you're hurtling down a black run unable to slow your uncontrollable descent meaning a crash is inevitable and the fallout from that crash can have long lasting repercussions.
Zynga are still around today but their chance to reach the heights of Whatsapp have long passed and the lessons they've learnt cannot be applied retrospectively. They may however be useful fo you if one day you decide to start your own business or take up a new winter hobby.
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