In this 5‑10 minute presentation Joshua Fraser outlines why his team at Techstars is adopting a weekly OKR (Objectives and Key Results) cadence and what they have learned in the first week. He attributes the idea to Techstars mentor Zach Knives, a former co‑founder of Rally Software, and frames the practice as a three‑month experiment. Fraser lists seven core reasons: (1) providing a clear weekly purpose and measurable outcome; (2) creating shared understanding across the team and with other cohort companies; (3) aligning daily work with the company’s long‑term mission to become the leading property‑data provider; (4) enabling a focused progress‑tracking experiment that can be evaluated after three months; (5) using WIP (work‑in‑progress) limits to set realistic weekly task caps; (6) applying the “minimum effective dose” principle to set achievable goals and avoid excessive failure penalties; and (7) fostering communication and mentorship through brief weekly check‑ins and regular mentor meetings. He describes the concrete ritual: each Monday the team presents its prior week’s OKR to the cohort, receives applause for success or drinks a “failed juice” shot for missed goals, and spends about 15 minutes on the weekly OKR and 30‑60 minutes on monthly/quarterly reviews. Fraser also highlights practical examples such as building a B2B sales page for non‑technical users and scheduling intensive mentor sessions. He emphasizes openness, availability on Slack, and a willingness to step away from meetings to support the team.
Chapters
Team, I'm going to take 5 to 10 minutes to go over like 7 reasons why we are doing this okr and what we've learned. I guess what I've learned from the first week of being here at techstars and so this OKR review came from a guy named Zach Knives. He is a very intelligent engineer and he's getting has like our classroom lessons a few times a week on what he's learned in his entrepreneurial career. He's sold various companies. His last one was Rally software which he was number two part of a co founder and grew from a couple people to 650 and eventually IPO'd. And these strategies that he implemented were the keys to his success and various other techstars companies that have brought through now his current role as the VP of Education at techstars. So I don't want to take up too much of your guys time here, but I put together a few things on like why I think that this is really critical for us and as we grow as a company, why little things like this can be so beneficial in the long run. So what it does by doing a weekly OKR goal is that if every Monday we set a goal, it gives us a purpose for the week and it gives us an objective that we can either accomplish or fail. I'm doing this while I'm at techstars. And so what we're doing is every Monday we present in front of the other 12 companies what our okr was for the week before. And if you succeed, everyone gives you a clap. And if you fail on Wednesday night we have a thing called an 808 where each week a company puts together a thing where we get to talk about business and kind of mingle over a few drinks. But you have to drink failed juice on Wednesday if you don't accomplish your okr. And last week it was a shot of vodka with a sardine in it. So last week Jordan, David and I did not accomplish ours. I'll take the blame for that. We were not prepared on Monday morning with our new okr. And so we will be drinking failed juice. Actually I think 80% of the companies will be. So I don't feel too bad. I have no doubts in my mind that we will knock it out of the park for the next 12 weeks that we are here. So number one, this gives us perfect purpose for what we're doing every single week and it's an actionable outcome. So we can decide and the rest of the team can also decide whether or not you accomplish or fail. And this is a really good metric for us moving forward for kind of opening the lines of communication and letting everyone see into what everyone else's role is. Number two is, well again kind of going back on that is that it's a shared understanding point. You know, it helps us with structured thinking, it allows us to communicate effectively with each other when other people are having struggles in areas that we may be able to help in. And it values validates what we've learned. So very common. We'll see. I'll see startups in various different industries will go through the exact same problems that we do. And not to mention when we onboard new employees, they're going to go through problems that many of us have already had. So if we have something that we've learned through one of these okrs that's preventable for a new hire in the future, now it's going to be documented and the team is going to be aware of it and we can, you know, speed up that learning curve for a new person and, or someone that's coming into the company just as a consultant or for whatever reason that is. The third thing is going to be they talked about having kind of the most critical question of okrs and that's what is our mission? Our mission is to be one of the biggest data providers in the property space within the next couple years and then tie it into various other spaces of data. This is a booming industry. The real estate disruption industry is massive. Some of the research that Vikash did noted that in the last six or seven quarters, $400 million of venture capital money went into real estate disruption companies. That's crazy. So our mission right now is to become the biggest property data provider with the biggest ecosystem of B2C people in it, which is kind of where the US realty records comes in. And everything that Jordan has been working on with the API for businesses tie together. So that's really what our outcome looks like in the next two years. The next question is are we getting there? Which that's so critical to be able to look back and ensure that every week, every day, every week, every month, every quarter, we are making the necessary steps to get to our end goal. So that's another reason that we're doing this. And trust me, this is a three month test. I'm going to do it every day or I'm going to be doing it every week. You guys are going to do it every week. And after three months running it back, we all get to sit down as A team and go over what we loved, what we hated, and we will figure out the best way that it works for us. This may not work for us, but I want to do this experiment for the next three months and I hope the rest of you are on board. So next. One of the things that Zach had said was the main goal is to create progress through focus, through learning. So these okrs really dials that in. We want to be able to track our focus or our progress. We want to ensure that every week, every single one of you is very focused on getting at least one thing done. And to say that the OKR can have several different variables in it and what they were calling that is the WIP limit. So WIP work in progress. So if you had a sticky board of say 10 of your top tasks and three of them were at the very top for you to get done this week, if you got all three of those done, your WIP limit for that week would be three. Pretty self explanatory. If you can get four done, it would be four. And so every week moving forward, that's how many you want to, you know, aim for. And we all learn from that. The next thing I'd like to say is that let's take this with kind of a grain of salt and what we're doing is we're setting achievable goals. We don't want to drink the failures. That's the bottom line. So it's the minimum effective dose. So last week we had the idea of getting the B2B sales page for non technical consumers like myself. We usually end up paying the bill. Jordan talks a lot about how this API has an endpoint which to a technical person that makes perfect sense. To the other 80% of the people in the room it might not make sense. So we had to build a page that speaks more to people like myself and quite a few of us at the company. So our goal was to get five people there and unfortunately we didn't get that done. So we're drinking the fail juice and now we can look back at last week and realize why we didn't get that done. It was a really simple goal and I would say we set the bar low and we still didn't get it done. But you know, this week my OKR is I'm meeting with another 26 mentors today. I met with 26 yesterday and it's another 26 or 30 on Thursday. So it's about six straight hours of meetings with two mentors at a time. And I tell them about our story, we have 20 minutes with them, they give me feedback and whoever I resonate with I get to say yes or no or maybe with and then I'll spend an hour with them in the next week. A really good question to always ask at the end of your OKR and what your key objective is is if I get this done, what will happen so that it causes what it's kind of it's very open ended but it makes you really question is what I'm working on focused on the end of the goal? And then once again I don't Evan brought this up this morning. I don't want this taking a ton of time. This should take your weekly OKR should take 15 minutes. The monthly and quarterly OKR should take half an hour to an hour with your team. And I'm always available for a call. I'll conference in. I'll be on speakerphone. I'll just sit in the background and be silent if you want. But I'm looking forward to this. I hope the rest of you are too and know that I'm pretty much always on slack. You can email me anytime and you can always call me literally anytime. I'll walk out of any single one of these meetings if one of you calls me. So that's what I want.
