Tracy Young and Doug Leone discuss how startups should pick problems to solve. Young argues that solving problems you personally face makes better businesses than chasing trends. They point to successful companies built this way.
I think the first step is to make sure we prioritize the right problems. Something that has worked for us is we sort of. Because as a startup, there's just this barrage of problems that are coming your way and we only have so much resources and time. And so our big task here is to make sure we're working on the right problems. I like to sort of think out a little further and our team does, too. Like, if we don't solve this problem, how bad is it going to be six months from now? Is it going to become 10 times worse and it's going to completely come back and bite us in the butt? If so, we should probably solve it right now.
Fantastic. Doug, have you seen this type of mindset from other founders? What's the common element that you see here? What did you find so unique and compelling about Tracy and Plangrid? Well, I think the very first thing I'd like to say is a bad 1988 sound, that it's kind of strike that in the future. So what we found is a few things. First and foremost, what we saw is a company with 20, 25 people with no salespeople, with revenues coming in, all the employees with salespeople, and they were answering the phone. And that is so unusual because when you start a company, the toughest thing to do is product market fit. If you can do product market fit, we can help you do everything else. Imagine a world where you don't have product market fit. What can we do as investors, as partners? So we had that, and then we just saw something else. And that is we had a founder who, who solved a problem she had in the business. And let me give you a whole bunch of other cases. It's a lesson to you. If you're going to start a company, solve your own problem. I'll give you just four or five examples. The founders of Airbnb, Brian Chesky and Joe and Nathan, needed money. They rented a room in their house, and that's how they found that market. They solved the problem. They have Cole Cash flow. The founders of Zappos couldn't find a pair of shoes. The founders of Medallia, which is an enterprise company, probably one of the best private companies in the market. They understood the mismatch between customers and vendors by being very unhappy customers at a hotel in London. And yet the hotel kept on using them as references closer to Stanford. The founders of Yahoo, Jerry Yang, there's a building named after him, couldn't find anything on the yellow Pages. They solved the problem for themselves. They just happened to be a proxy for the next million people, or the founders of Cisco System here at Stanford, again, trying to network, discuss the campus networks. And so, key number one, a little message. If you're going to solve a problem, if you want to start a company, don't intellectualize some crazy stuff you know nothing about. Solve a problem you have, and there's a chance that if you're up and coming and you're in the right circles, you go to the right schools, that that problem is just that you're the beta site for the next 5 million people. Tracy was that beta site. The other thing that we saw, though, is a very passionate founder domain. Knowledge, solve their own problem, committed, authentic. Those are the ingredients that we look for when choosing a company with whom to partner.
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