Sukhinder Singh Cassidy: The Value of Speed

So what's the value of speed, right? Lots of people talk about being really fast. And you sort of say, well, if the journey is going to take a while and it's going to have all these inflection points and it's going to be this journey that's sometimes horizontal and up and to the right and then horizontal again, like, should I be thoughtful or should I be fast, right? And I think the most interesting thing people think about when they think about the value of speed iterations on product releases or what have you is about the rate of progress. I think it's about the rate of learning, right? So as you all know, there are many examples in the Valley of companies that weren't the first in their field. Google certainly wasn't the first on performance advertising. Pinterest was not the first mood board. Facebook was not the first social network, right? It wasn't always about being first, but it was about the rate of somebody's learning on top of yours if you were the first player at a faster rate. Right? And so speed is not to be confused with market timing because you can be as speedy as you want and there is still in some ways an element that is out of your control, right, which is when is the customer ready for what you have, right? At Yodlee, the best example is 10 years ago we thought we had a data platform, right, for financial data and that the customer would want to aggregate their financial data in a single place. And for 7 years Yodlee ticked along. And you know when Yodlee became hot again? When Mint got sold for $170 million. No one's like, ah, that's what a data platform is. It took 7 or 8 years for people to understand or for the market to be ready. It took a beautiful consumer application in financial services for people to recognize the value of a data platform. We were wrong on timing. But we were right on speed. Because all the way through that journey, I think Yodlee was successful in learning at a faster rate than anyone else. Right? The other key benefit of speed, of course, is market conditions change. And your ability to respond to those changes as an entrepreneur may be the difference between whether or not you have enough money to make it to your next round, to make it to your next milestone or not. And the key example I would give here is that when we started Yodlee in the early days, it was 1999, plenty of money. We raised $50 million in our first round from Sequoia and Accel. Things were going well, but we had this competitor called Vertical One. And they were doing B2B while we were doing B2C. We really thought, hey, the key is to become a consumer destination, aggregate everybody's data, we can be the next Yahoo, but my Yahoo. And Vertical One, meanwhile, was working with banks and brokerage companies and licensing their data. And we could have continued on our way. There was no capital shortage at that point, or even sort of lack of— it was a— the first bubble. But what there was, was a lot of competitive pressure because Vertical One was going out and pitching banks and they were calling us and we wanted to stay on a B2C platform and Vertical One was really pitching all these banks. And we walked into one board meeting 3 months after we started the company, a month and a half after we raised $15 million on a B2C vision and we chatted about what Vertical One was doing and how we had the risk of Citibank and Merrill Lynch and Bank of America and all these other players having their consumers access somebody else's product. And we walked out of the board meeting and it pivoted to a B2B company. Then we went out and we acquired our competitor. And in 18 months, we locked up every bank and brokerage company in the country, everyone. Then we raised $52 million from AOL. And a month later, the bust came and every company went out of business and we had $52 million in the bank and 30+ banks that were counting on us for our technology. And that's how we stayed. Alive, right, from 2002 to 2004, 2005. So speed was of the essence, right, because the market shifted, right. Not to be confused, as I said, market readiness for your product. But I think the value is not being the first. The value is the rate of your learning. And you want— if anybody is going to cannibalize you on your own business, you'd rather it was you, right. And if anybody is going to figure out what the tweak is on top of your platform, you know, that makes it go from here to here, you'd rather it be you. So it's all about the rate of learning and ultimately the rate of progress, but really about the rate of learning.