The most critical phase in a founder’s journey is generally described as generating funds, however this is putting the wagon ahead of the horse. Asking investors for money is essentially an egocentric activity unless a firm has a growing group of consumers who are strongly involved with its offerings. However, if a firm has achieved product-market fit, clever investors may compete for a piece of the pie. According to Frederique Dame, a GV investment partner who formerly headed product and engineering teams at businesses such as Uber, Smugmug, and Yahoo, achieving product-market fit is not a linear process, which means each firm must discover its own path.
She advises portfolio firms’ founders on hiring, marketing and communications, and product development as part of her role as a partner. We spoke about her experience validating product concepts, obtaining usable consumer data, building user-centric work cultures, and dealing with some of the particular issues that come with expanding teams from a few dozen to several thousand people in a fireside discussion at TechCrunch Early Stage.
Dame oversaw strategic projects at Uber that helped the firm grow from 80 to 7,000 personnel, including moving away from spreadsheets and toward technologies that provided openness and accountability. As early-stage employees are accustomed to employing ad hoc techniques to get their work done in order to accelerate their careers, I inquired about her attitude to the job from a culture standpoint.
Set aside your ego and pay attentive attention to your consumers. Trust me with what you don’t know or what isn’t working, because we’ll have to work on it anyhow after we invest. “I believe the first step is to recruit individuals with low egos and to have a low ego yourself,” she remarked. Because the software wasn’t enrolling drivers rapidly enough when Uber first debuted, early passengers regularly experienced surge pricing. Dame responded by instructing members of the company’s distinct rider and driver teams to concentrate on a single issue.
“We noticed there were several products that were incompatible… between onboarding drivers, internal systems, and [including] driving directions within the app,” Dame explained. “Having driving directions is vital, but having Uber is pointless if you have surge pricing every time you get into an Uber or if you can’t obtain an Uber.” It became evident after undertaking driver outreach that they hadn’t been paying attention to customers: The majority of drivers in 2011 utilized flip phones with limited web browsing capabilities. Many people went to internet cafés that didn’t have the latest versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Chrome to join up.
“They were failing because they were staring at an error page.” “It’s critical to understand your consumers’ user journey and what you’re doing with your product,” Dame added. “Be fanatical about customer service and chat to them as often as possible.” Put as many ideas to the test as you can (without asking engineering for help). Teams must iterate swiftly and often to acquire consumer data in order to achieve product-market fit, but there is an inescapable conflict between the need to test new ideas and the desire to ensure that road maps presented with investors remain aligned with actual product pipelines.
