By Marcelo Franco de Sousa, Managing Director at Matcerâmica
A real upgrade to the software in the brain: my mindset is much richer after I returned from San Francisco.
On the basis of all visible differences there is the way they use cognition, not necessarily because Americans are smarter than Europeans, but surely because they exploit cognitive abilities in a much more assertive way.
It is imperative to understand their culture, not to do the same, but to raise our standards of competitiveness.
I highlight three factors that I have observed and consider to be key in the American business culture:
Speed | Focus | Commitment
At speed they are like time, they never stop, not even for lunch, they do not waste time on minor things and they do not complain all the time.
In focus, the attention given to the market, namely the importance of sales, is truly impressive: sales, sales and sales.
In compromise it is not about not reaching the finish line, failure is not a reason to give up or discourage or even disqualify, failure is simply a stage of the process, as in science.
Trust in people, believing in someone else’s ideas/projects and the investors’ availability to take risk, are totally different from our banking reality.
For investors, the decisive factor is a project that solves a problem for which a solution has not yet been found.
For the initial valuation of the project the determinant is the growth rate of the business/sales.
It is evident that scale – in everything, is a determining accelerator.
No one has guaranteed places. Employment relationships are much different, only distinctive competences create bonds.
Of course, there are a few other factors, or values, such as non-risk aversion, where interest and curiosity are clearly ahead of fear, of the unknown or of the fear of failing.
Also worthy of note is a long-term vision where the importance of projects related to artificial intelligence and technological development, i.e., the search for sustainability in the future, is always present.
And, beyond all this, there is a fantastic thing, informality! In everything: in dealing with you, in the access to top executives, in the way of being, in the way of doing things… although it does not look like it, it eliminates a lot of barriers.
Congratulations to the organization of the program!
The last day of visits started at a refurbished military facility called Presidio near to the famous Golden Bridge. We headed to the World economic forum center for the 4th industrial Revolution to have a session about this recently created center and to talk about one specific emergent technology, Blockchain.
The World Economic Forum is the international organization for public-private cooperation and aims to engage the foremost political, business and other leaders of society to shape global, region and industry agendas.
According to the WEF: “The fourth industrial revolution – the current period of rapid, simultaneous and systematic transformations driven by advances in science and technology – is reshaping industries, blurring geographical boundaries, challenging existing business, and even redefining what it means to be human.”
The Forum´s Center for the Fourth Industrial Revolution is a newly established focal point within the international community for multistakeholder dialogue and concrete cooperation on governance challenges and opportunities presented by advanced technologies. It serves as a public-private platform for the collaborative development and refinement of frameworks and protocols that more fully anticipate risks and accelerate social benefits of technology.
In practice, the center brings together governments, business organizations, dynamic start-ups, civil society, academia, and international organizations to identify and prioritize game-changing impacts of emerging technologies, co-design innovative governance protocols and policy frameworks, and pilot and scale them with partners around the world.
They are focusing on 7 pillars:
AI and Machine Learning -> Project areas: decision-making tools for corporate boards, protocols for government use of AI, and standards for AI targeted at children;
IoT and connected devices -> Project areas: prioritizing security during IoT design process, bolstering public privacy protection, advancing transparency and openness, and mobilizing market forces for equality;
Blockchain and distributed ledger technology -> Project areas: digital identity and certification, supply chain integration, smart contracts, and currency and monetary systems;
Autonomous and urban mobility -> Project areas: scaling insights from the City of Boston pilot project, developing city-wide mobility and data management platforms, launching the New Mobility Coalition and building CityWeb knowledge platform for city transportation officials and leading executives;
Drones and tomorrow´s airspace -> Project areas: New paradigms for drone regulation, drone delivery for remote populations, policies for drone-delivered data, reimagining aircraft certification and protocols for medical delivery.
Precision medicine -> Project areas: generating evidence of precision medicine´s effectiveness, data-sharing, and related infrastructure, integrating a precision medicine approaches to regulation, pricing and reimbursement for diagnostics and treatment, and patient and public engagement;
Digital trade and cross-border data flow -> Project areas: developing a regulatory toolkit for e-payments, new policies for enabling e-commerce, a risk-based approach to data policies and accelerating innovation in trade economy.
Heading to the Hyatt Regency San Francisco Hotel, we met Jonathan Littman and his wife. He gave us a lecture about innovation and design thinking and shared with us his experience after more than 30 years of professional experience. We put in practice his methodology to create a new product or service for people in San Francisco. Guess which group won the competition ?.
During the session, Jonathan shared with us a summary of his book, The Ten Faces of Innovation. If you haven´t read, please buy one copy for you today.
The last session of the day was at Wework, another famous co-work places around the bay area. We visited the facilities and had a session about AICEP Portugal Global, an independent public entity of the Government of Portugal, with the goal of attracting foreign investment to Portugal and supporting the internationalization of Portuguese companies into the global economy.
But the most interesting part was the Pitch session, where we could put in practice what we´ve learned during the seminar and test our pitches. Each one of us delivered a pitch followed by group feedback. It was definitely a great learning experience.
That was it. Four days of visits and talks and the seminar was done!
On the fifth and last day, we had only a morning session to wrap up and discuss what we’ve learned during the week. We had also a speech on how to be an innovator leader and how to implement innovation in our companies. But this is a topic for another article.
This third article about my experience at Silicon Valley will talk about elevator pitch, Intel, Google, and Carbon 3D.
The third day started at the hotel meeting room with a presentation on how to deliver an elevator pitch. The process is simple but not easy as it demands a lot of training and rounds of practice and improvement.
Besides all those pomp and circumstances around start-ups´ pitches, everyone should dominate the art of selling effectively an idea or even themselves in a short period of time.
The framework presented is composed of 3 main steps: The catch, the core, and the closing.
The catch part is the most important one because if you are not able to connect and make people interested in listening to you, doesn´t matter what comes next. The first 30 seconds will drive the effectiveness of your pitch and must attract peoples´ attention with one single sentence.
The core must make clear the highlights of your value proposition always mentioning the needs of the market, your commitment to deliver, the benefits or values you bring to the table and how do you differentiate yourself from the competition.
Lastly but not the least, comes the closing. The golden rule here is to test the audience´s interesting and not be afraid to ask what you want (money, follow-up meeting, make a job offer, ask for a job, etc.). Keep eye contact, do not lower your voice and show enthusiasm.
A great example can be seen in this video of a young guy who won an elevator pitch competition.
Pitch session done. Now, jump on the bus to face another 2 hours traffic to reach Mountain View.
The first agenda of the day was a visit to the Intel museum on the ground floor of Intel´s office. Nothing very clever to share here but was great to remember the history of a great company that has disrupted the computer science world. We also learned how Intel´s chips are made from Silicon.
Actually, there is an interesting though that worth sharing, which is one of the most famous phrases by Robert Noyce, one of Intel´s founder. These words could not be more suitable for the Silicon Valley ecosystem!
Moving forward to Googleplex, we were hosted by Jason Amarante one of Google´s Program Managers. He is working on google voice product that is the competitor of Amazon Echo. For him, Google’s competitive advantage in this market is the amount of data that Google “control”.
We visited only the outside part of the complex as we were not allowed to go inside of any building. By the way, to enter Facebook´s village you need to be an employee or be with one as a host. At Google, anyone can walk around and visit the outside facilities.
Not surprisingly, Google has very similar amenities at its employees’ disposal as Facebook. But in this case, was kind of weird to see 4 employees playing beach volleyball in the middle of the day and during working hours.
We also visited the place where Google keeps all Android versions´ symbol. For each version, there is a different symbol, they are all related to candy and follow the alphabet order.
Cupcake, Donut, Eclair, Froyo, Gingerbread, Honeycomb, Ice Cream Sandwich, Jelly Bean, KitKat, Lollipop, Marshmallow, and the last one Oreo.
As an ex-project manager, I was also curious about which software they use to control projects and report status. Jason said that they use everything from Google, meaning everything on google drive, no Microsoft Office at their desktops and Hangout instead of WhatsApp for internal communication.
Next stop: Fintech world. We arrived at Credit Sesame, one of the most successful fintech startups in the US, and were received by the company´s CIO, Pejman Makhfi. Pejman explained to us the company´s business model and how they were able to raise US$ 77 million from 5 rounds of fundraising. You can search more about the company here.
However, what stroke me most was the fact that the PowerPoint presentation used, the same used to present the company to VCs, were impressively simple! Seriously, imagine a blank slide (zero background), with I title without any different format than bold and a diagram with simple arrows connecting databases and other figures. All slides were like that!
So, if you think you need design and some beautiful slides to sell your idea or project, you might be wrong. I´m from a theory that the level of beautifulness in a presentation is the opposite of the level of content. But I´m not saying that good slides that make some explanation easily are not important.
The next stop was the 3D print company called Carbon. I thought that I was going to visit a company that prints stuff using 3D technology. However, during the tour, I realized that their business is actually manufacturing 3D printers and produce specific resins to use as supply. It was like visiting Xerox when they started to produce copy machines and sell tonners as supply.
I strongly advise you to watch the TED talk delivered by the company´s founder in which Joseph DeSimone explains their cutting-edge 3D print technology. They have more than 100 patents on this technology and a partnership with Adidas to print midsoles for its Futurecraft 4D sneakers (see picture). They will produce 500 thousand this year and are expecting to print 5 million per year by 2020.
The day ended in an amazing event hosted by Reed Smith, one of the biggest law firms in the world. Good food, good drinks, and amazing people to connect with.
In July I had the opportunity to participate in a one-week journey of leadership, innovation, and network in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, the GSI (Global Strategic Innovation Executive Program). On this second article, I´ll share my experience about the second day when we visited Facebook, Stanford University and Plug & Play.ond day started very early as we needed to commute from San Francisco to Mountain View and Palo Alto.
Allow me to take a break here and mention how bad is the traffic between San Francisco and Silicon Valley! Took us almost 2 hours to reach Facebook´s village.
Anyway, let’s get back on track…
We visited just one of many Facebook´s offices around there and was enough to confirm what is being said about the company. They definitely have created something different and nailed the “culture in practice” kind of strategy.
They have a huge fleet of busses all day long that brings and sends employees home even from places as far as 90Km away (with Wi-Fi, of course, so they can work on the way). I could just write one entire article to share what they provide as “benefits” for employees. All of it to try to motivate employees, foster innovation and, of course, hold employees for a longer period (on average, employees are staying at this kind of companies less than 3 years before moving out to another challenge). I already mentioned recruiting challenges at the bay area in the article about the first day, so companies are creating different strategies to hold the best guys.
If you send me a message, I can send you the video that I made inside the village.
With expectations already high, we reached the Stanford University to listen and have lunch with Professor Burton Lee, professor, and researcher on European Innovation & Entrepreneurship. The goal was to talk about the key features of Silicon Valley Trends and Global Tech as well as making some comparison to the European environment and culture.
Among a bunch of smart discussions, his four main topics were SCALE, SPEED, COMPETITON FOR TALENT, and CORPORATE CULTURE, ORGANIZATION, LEADERSHIP & STRATEGY and I´ll do my best to share the main thoughts on each topic.
Please bear in mind that these ideas have authoring rights by Prof. Burton Lee, so if you use them, please don’t forget to cite Prof. Burton Lee, as I have done here!
Scale
His point about scale is related to how emerging technologies such as big data, AI, blockchain, IoT are not only enabling new markets but also allowing companies to reach a scale speed that was not possible before! He also made a very interesting comparison between assets driven companies to tech-driven companies in terms of market valuation (which as we know is more about scalability than book value itself nowadays).
The graph is from 2015 and compares only US and Germany, but I believe is enough to prove his point. For instance, what is the main way for BMW to grow? Sell more cars. But to sell more cars they need to invest upfront and heavily in manufacturing facilities that worth billions. Now, what is the main way for Google to grow? Just hire more engineers! Of course, I´m simplifying the scenario to make my point, but you get it.
As we are mentioned cars and technology I´ll finish this topic with a strong prevision by Professor Burton Lee. He said that in the near future, software inside the cars will value more than the car itself! Do you agree?
Speed
Scalability leads naturally to speed! Or vice versa 😉
It took about 75 years for the telephone to connect 50 million people around the globe. Recently, a simple app like Angry Birds can reach that same milestone in a matter of days! In the past 10 years, the rate of adoption of new technologies has accelerated at a dizzying speed. Can we keep up with it all?
Competition for Talent
It´s the third time that this topic pops up during the seminar. And it is not a coincidence at all as numbers such those on the graph speaks for itself.
According to business inside“Oracle offered at least one candidate a $6 million package made up of salary and equity incentives to convince them to join the company, a source told Business Insider.”
From the same Business Inside article: “In October, the New York Times reported that the typical salary for PhD-trained AI talent is around $300,000 to $500,000 in salary and equity, but that some well-known people in the field make double-digit millions”
Are you as CEO, founder or even director willing to write a higher check for someone below you at the organizational structure? If not, I´m sorry. You definitely need to change your mind.
This topic is a Ph.D. thesis itself. Dr. Burton Lee spent some time here comparing different types of organizational structure and how it can influence a company´s culture. We discussed, for instance how Microsoft was able to change from a cross-department competitive culture to a more collaborative one.
He also showed us a study from Google after years studying effective Google´s teams. They came up with 5 traits that the most successful ones shared.
1. Psychological safety: Team members feel safe to take risks and be vulnerable in front of each other;
2. Dependability: Team members get things done on time and meet Google´s high bar for excellence;
3. Structure and Clarity: Team members have clear roles, plans, and goals;
4. Meaning: Work is personally important to team members;
5. Impact: Team members think their work matters and create changes.
Another conclusion in this kind of study from Google was some key qualities of team members identified.
“What matters isn’t so much who’s on your team, but rather how the team works together”
What mattered most: Trust / Listen first / Show empathy / Be authentic / Set the example / Be helpful / Disagree and commit / Be humble / Be transparent / Commend sincerely and specifically
Regarding this topic, Burton Lee recommends to us a book called “Team of Teams”, by Chris Fussell, David Silverman, Stanley A. McChrystal, and Tantum Collins.
In the end, after almost 2 hours of very interesting discussions, he stated as a conclusion that “Speed of innovation & Decision Making + Competition for talents and markets shape Corporate Culture and Structure.”
This whole session just reinforced what Peter Drucker said: “CULTURE EATS STRATEGY FOR BREAKFAST”! This is a personal battle that I had to fight over my 10 years of professional experience. Most of the time what we see is Top Executives just trying to impose what they think is the best strategy or culture for the company with beautiful slides and marketing initiatives after spending millions of dollars with a big four consulting firm. Same works for the culture of innovation. Almost every company wants to have innovation on its DNA, but most of them are doing wrongly stating with the solutions in mind (ex: implement an app, use IoT, etc.) rather than focusing on creating an enabling culture to foster innovation. But this is a discussion for another article.
As Burton Lee also stated: “Company Culture is the core of Innovation Platform”.
To complete this already amazing day, we went to visit Plug and Play. Our host was Jackie Hernandez, the SVP of Operations & Customer Engagement. Apart from being a very charismatic person, she works for the group for 12 years and saw all the road being built by the company´s founder and CEO, Saeed Amidi.
Plug and Play was the crib of some famous unicorns such as Google and PayPal.
They are an innovation platform that brings together the startups and the world’s largest corporations. If you are from an early stage startup, you should definitely subscribe to be part of their (disclaimer, they do not require equity as investors!) They invest in over 250 startups a year and have connections to 300 of the world’s best VCs.
During the visit, we had also the chance to interact with Gideon Marks, a very experienced startup mentor at Plug & Play. He shared with us his thought and lessons learned about startup funding. An interesting one that I took for me was his advice to never report efforts, but always report PROGRESS! Doesn´t matter how hard you worked or what sacrifices you made, the results and progress will separate success from failure and amateurs from professionals.
“You gain knowledge by listening, so develop big ears like an elephant. But stay away from talkers, with a big mouth like a hippopotamus”
My conclusion here is based on numbers. Plug & Play, for instance, evaluate over 10.000 startups every single year, they select then 250 to invest or accelerate and only 1 is expected to become a unicorn! You do not need to be a unicorn to be successful in the startup environment, but you have this goal, keep this numbers in mind, but never drive your decisions or give up because of these odds. Not everyone will, but anyone can succeed!
That´s it for the 2nd day. But before reaching the hotel in San Francisco we had to face the terrible 2 hours traffic again!
In July I had the opportunity to participate in a one-week journey of leadership, innovation, and network in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, the GSI (Global Strategic Innovation Executive Program). During the next few articles, I will share my personal takeaways and learnings, some curiosities and information, books and articles recommended, as well as the name of some very interesting people and companies that I had the opportunity to meet.
In a nutshell, the program included (i) lectures about innovation and Silicon Valley culture, (ii) visits to 10 companies (e.g. Facebook, Google, Plug & Play), (iii) a session with Prof Burton Lee at Stanford University, (iv) a session with Johnathan Littman (author of 10 faces of innovation), (v) a session at the recent created World Economic Forum´s Center for the 4th Industrial Revolution and, of course, (vi) network events.
On this article, I´ll share what happened during the first day.
We started the day with a welcome session about how to create a culture of innovation and what are the main characteristics and differentiation factors that make Silicon Valley the winner of this market. The session was led by Carlos Oliveira and Torben Rankine, both partners at Leadership Business Consulting. According to them, the six characteristics behind the title of most innovative place in the world are:
1. Risk-taker culture
2. Focused on disruptive innovation and global perspective
3. Cooperative and pragmatic networking
4. Through enablement ecosystem (Universities, Government, Investors, Support services, etc)
5. High availability of investment money
6. Great pool of talents and attractive for talents
All of it combined creates a strong ground for creativity and for what everyone around innovation wants: Scalability!
Do you agree with them? Would you add or remove some characteristics?
We moved then to visit Autodesk, a company that is truly disrupting industries such as design and architecture engineering, media and entertainment, and manufacturing, using complex mathematic models and a software developed by them running in the cloud. By the way, the software is an open source for small projects and your company can just start to use it today.
Apart from the business model, their museum is well worth visiting.
My major takeaway from this visit is that there is truly no limit to disrupt industries using emerged technologies such as 3D printing (more about 3D printing on the 3rd day) and Artificial Intelligence (AI). One particular project caught my attention and can illustrate easily my point.
On this picture, we can see past, present, and future! The building in the back is a very old one with a very limited shape. The one on the right is a new building recently finished and already shows some interesting and challenging curves from the engineering and design perspectives. The last one is the upcoming future! It was inspired by the F1 cars and how their shape interacts with the wind. The whole structure turns like a spiral and has other “features” such as 6 floors dedicated entirely to entertainment, including indoor parks for cycling!
But the main difference between them is that the concept and the design of the last one were all developed by a computer and not by a human being! Very simply speaking, designers, engineers, and architects create the parameters, inputs the constraints, climate and soil conditions and the software runs interactions on the cloud and comes up with dozens, hundreds, thousands or even millions of possible solutions. It´s like solving a puzzle.
Take this other project called “Infinite seats” as an example. You basically enter your goal (e.g. a simple chair) and constraints into the computer – four legs, an elevated seat, weight requirements, materials – and then the algorithms look for the most efficient way to produce the design. The program offers thousands of ways to build a perfectly honed chair, all of which meet the designer´s criteria. And, because the computer isn´t constrained by preconceived notions of what a chair should look like, it is free to come up with solutions that you, me and even the most famous design in the world might not have imagine before!
The chair on the right, for instance, does exactly the same function but costs way less money and time to be made and uses way fewer materials.
However, I do believe that human creativity is not taking back seat to technology. Instead, the software serves as a partner in exploration and frees up the designers and engineers to concentrate on more critical decisions and behavior analysis.
The third stop of the day was a session with the CEO and Founder of Talkdesk, Tiago Paiva. A very friendly Portuguese guy who runs a successful startup that serves the call center industry. The company aims to simplify the future of customer service, improving the customer experience, as well as the call center agent experience and pushing the limits for real-time communication. They claim to be the “most technically advanced could-based contact center software”.
Tiago told us his trajectory from not having money to buy a computer to be the CEO of a company with more than 300 employees that raised $24.5 million from Venture Capital and Angel investors in 3 years.
He also shared with us his biggest mistake so far and what he thinks he did right. For him, the biggest mistake was to delay too much to hire executives and management team to help him to structure and grow the company. He was not expecting the fast growth and underestimated the process of hiring good people around the bay area. However, what he thinks he did great was to not raise too much money at the beginning of the operation. Although, it is kind of weird hearing that at Silicon Valley, he actually has a good point. For him, having a limited amount of money forced him to make smarter and leaner decisions and learn how to be frugal. Not mention his equity protection, of course.
If you have a business that demands a call center or if you are a call center service company, do yourself a favor and investigate what Talkdesk is doing!
We moved then to visit a collaborative workspace and innovation hub founded on the principle that people work better together, The Vault. Their business model adds to the common co-work concept some nice features related to entrepreneurial education, supporting early-stage technology startups and creative agencies. They offer mentorship and acceleration programs, as well as particular training for founders and software developers. They also run pitch events and collaborate with investors and other private institutions in order to pave the way for the startups that “rent” their spaces. They claim to be a more calm and quiet space than big competitors such as Plug&Play, Runaway, and Wework. (Disclaimer: after visiting Plug&Play and Wework during the next days I must say that they were actually saying the truth about noise and focus).
As usual, the best part of the day was the last session (at least in my opinion). We went to visit the company called SalesHood and we were received by the founder himself, Elay Cohen, which is the ex SVP of Sales and Partner Productivity of Salesforce and author of the book that has the same name as his company (Worth read if you work with any kind of sales). Elay is a showman and a very friendly guy! He gave away to everyone one hardcopy of his book and delivered an inspiring pitch about his career path and the company he founded 5 years ago.
He started actually telling us the story of how he was able to multiply Salesforce´s top line results by ruining a worldwide training program, and this was exactly what triggered his current and successful business. His main point was that, although the old-fashion training model worked for some time at Salesforce, at some point it became unsustainable as they reached hundreds of thousands of sales members across the globe! “Must be a better and more efficient solution”, he thougth back then.
After some time invested and after finding the best co-founder, they created what he calls an enablement platform to improve the performance of your sales team, regardless of the industry! Their pitch is:
“We help you create modern, high performing teams. How? We get more of your team performing like your best by enabling them to share knowledge, learn best practices and exceed their attainment goals.”
If you have a company doing any kind of sales, you should definitely check them out and ask for a trial. Connect on LinkedIn with Jon Titchener and Zach Turner, or even with Elay Cohen himself and drop a line.
My takeaway here was the need to create not only a structured sales process that can be replicable and scaled but also a systematic way to allow sellers and management team to share stories! To give and receive feedback regardless of where you are in the world! Looks like a social network platform totally driven to boost top-line results.
Was a great first day and expectations just went high as companies like Facebook and Google and sessions at Stanford and World Economic Forum’s Center for the 4th Industrial Revolution were yet to come!
From the 9th till the 13th of July 2018 another edition of the Global Strategic Innovation – International Executive Program (GSI IEP) was held in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, California.
In this 8th edition, eighteen Executives from fourteen different companies participated in GSI IEP, eight from Leiria, one from Braga, seven from Lisbon, one from Cape Verde and one from Brazil.
Their main objectives were, among others, to apprehend and import some of the cultural features that make Silicon Valley the most renowned innovation cluster, but also to know the technological trends that are changing the way of doing business and to learn how to interact with Silicon Valley’s companies using their business language: the elevator pitch.
In addition to the communication effect, the development of a pitch is a fundamental tool for building a (winning) business idea, since it works on the clarification of the business competitive advantages.
For five whole days, those Executives were totally immersed in the innovation environment that is so characteristic from the Bay Area. Was it worth it?
The best way to assess it is from the participants’ insights: “Excellent, I think that from now on nothing will be the same!”; “Top program, loved it!”; “I feel that my level of ignorance has just increased…”; and the words like “Amazing”, “Transformative”, “Open-minded”; “Discovery” were also used.
Throughout the program, the team spirit that developed amongst all the participants was fantastic, with informal end-of-day programs and constant sharing of photos and videos, mainly by whatsapp and by email. Networking is also an important component of GSI.
We must thank to all GSI IEP 2018 participants. We gained a lot from your insights throughout the program! We will meet again soon for the Alumni event!
