Are You Building a Bridge or an Island?

When you're talking about a solution to change the world or start a business, there are really two types. There are bridges and islands. So let's talk about what an island is, and I'll give you an example that'll make this clear. People look at the education system and I'll use these examples because I'm in that system. But people look at the education system and they say it's totally broken. It's so complex, it's not helping students, and it's really hard to change. So I have all these ideas. I want project based learning and competency based, and I want social, emotional. But it's too hard to do in the old system. So what people do is say, I'm going to do it elsewhere, I'm going to go off and find an island, or I'm going to start my own school, I'm going to start my own private school or a charter school. I'm going to prove what's possible. Their belief is that if they can prove what's possible and that it's better, the world will change. And that is the misconception. That is one of the cardinal mistakes of Silicon Valley. That's not how businesses or institutions or the world changes. Now, these islands are incredibly important because it is true that we need exemplars, we need to understand what's possible. Islands create demand for change, but they're not the supply of change. To create supply for change, you have to create bridges. A bridge is a thing that starts where you are today, where your customers are today, but it goes to the island. So a bridge is, I'll get to what we're working on. But I had to decide as I went into K12, did I want to build an island or a bridge. There's value in building either islands or bridges. If you want to start a company, you have to decide which one you want to do. If you want to join a company, you have to understand where they are. So how do you know if you've built an island or a bridge? If you have to educate your customer about the problem you're solving, it's an island, it's not a bridge. Earlier I Talked about the B2C strategies, where you leverage economies of scale to reduce your cost of acquisition. It's very tactical, but that's how it works. In B2B, if you go after your early adopters, you are not going to get the signal as to whether you're solving a problem that they understand. And the moment you go to sell your product or service or solution into the middle of the market, your cost of sales will skyrocket because you have to educate them on the problem. And so what I tell people, especially if you want to solve big problems, you can build islands and there's value in islands. But if you want to do something at scale, you have to go after the middle of the market right away and find problems that they understand that you don't have to spend time or money educating them on. Now, you may be aiming at a bridge, an island. I mean, you may be trying to get them somewhere else. The challenge is how to scaffold them one step at a time to that, to that point. But this is how you know whether you're building a bridge or an island. So when I went into K12, I saw a ton of islands. I just saw island after island. I saw a lot of really awesome private schools and charter schools and district schools that were doing things that were having meaningful impact on the students that they were helping, that had a broad set of and deep set of academic skills they were teaching, plus social, emotional plus cognitive skills. And yet I knew that just the existence of those wasn't going to help them scale that traditional district schools, of which there are 130,000 in this country and 12,000 districts with 50 million kids, are dealing with today's problems. People don't buy the future. Businesses don't buy the future en masse. They buy the present. And your challenge is to find out how to scaffold them to the future.