By Frank Addante
(Part 4 of a 5 part series: "So, you need to develop a product?")
Any entrepreneur, CEO or CTO should always have a development SWAT team on hand. This team should be outside of the core development team and outside of the company's critical path. This team can be made up of employees, a virtual group of employees (borrowed from their core team/job) or an outside development shop. It doesn't matter as long as they are super "scrappy" (see Scrappy versus Steady), have great vision, move extremely fast and require little direction or management.
I have had to call on my SWAT teams many times in the past. Sometimes in emergency situations, and other times to take advantage of market opportunities that quickly arise. Sometimes I have had to trash what they produced, other times it became a major turning point in a company's growth.
At L90 (Startup 3.0), we were sued by DoubleClick on the eve of our IPO for alleged patent-infrindgement. They tried to sue us in Virginia. We were scheduled to launch a new data center (of over 300+ servers) in Virginia the following week. With hundreds of millions of dollars in shareholder value at stake, I had to call on my SWAT team to do two things. First, they needed to reroute millions of dollars in computing equipment from Virginia to Texas and setup a new datacenter in less than 2 weeks. And second, they needed to architect and deploy an alternative to our core ad-serving software (which was delivering billions of ads for the Internet's top web sites at the time), because DoubleClick was trying to get an injunction to shut us down. The SWAT team was able to pull-off both of these seemlingly-impossible objectives within weeks and it gave us a lot of leverage in settling the bogus lawsuit in our favor.
At StrongMail (Startup 5.0), in the beginning, our biggest selling challenge was that it was difficult for us to visually demonstrate the value of our infrastructure solution. We had developed the world's best engine, but it didn't have a steering wheel (our strategy was to rely on other companies' steering wheels). Our internal development team was busy focused on developing our core product, but I needed to develop an application with an attractive, easy to use web user interface. I called on one of my outside SWAT teams and within months they were able to create an application on top of the StrongMail infrastructure that made it easy to demonstrate the value of the core infrastructure and it made the selling process magnitudes easier. It turned out to be a catapult for the company, and sales have been booming since then. The application is now being used by some of the world's most successful companies. After the initial product was developed, it was folded back into our internal engineering team and became part of our core product offering.
Without having a SWAT team on hand, it could have taken 10X as long to build a team, product specs, an architecture and a roadmap. The SWAT team helped us kick-start the project and get it to market in less time that it would have taken us to interview and hire a small team.
A solid SWAT team is invaluable, and to me, it is essential.
Next... Outsourcing (Part 5 of a 5 part series: "So, you need to develop a product?")
By Frank Addante
(Part 3 of a 5 part series: "So, you need to develop a product?")
Good engineers are hard to find. In today's highly competitive job marketplace, it is becoming increasingly more difficult. My solution: cast a wider net. Focus on the best talent, regardless of their location.
I've built development teams in Chicago, Los Angeles, Silicon Valley and India. I've also hired engineers scattered in random locations around the world. I've built companies and teams where 100% of the development team was located at the company headquarters and other companies where none of the developers were at headquarters. I've realized that it doesn't really matter where they are, if they are the right people. There are many pros and cons to having your engineering team outside of the company headquarters (and/or in multiple locations), but I think the pros end up balancing out the cons. The main benefit to having your engineering team all in one place, at the company headquarters, is certainly communication. The con is that the developers can become 'tainted' or distracted by all the other business happenings and it can skew their thinking and creativity.
There are also geographical workforce talent pool advantages and disadvantages. Chicago was the easiest place to find engineers; they were cost efficient, hard working and very loyal. Los Angeles was a bit more difficult to find engineers; they were the most creative but more expensive than Chicago. Silicon Valley has a lot of engineers with a lot of experience, but also lot of competition, which makes it the most expensive place to hire engineers and loyalty can be a challenge. I will talk more about outsourcing in point #5, but India has terrific intellectual capital, is less expensive (however, costs have been quickly rising), but, it is very difficult to find "Scrappy" engineers (see point #1) and communication can also be a challenge.
At StrongMail Systems (Startup 5.0), our first three developers were in India. It was a challenge in the beginning, but ultimately, I attribute much of our success to making the model work. We started with three extremely talented, creative and innovative engineers. They were able to attract other talented engineers in India as we grew. There were many communication challenges in the beginning, but once we overcame them, we were able to leverage a full 24 hour development cycle between the U.S. and India and, as a result, we were able to develop product much faster than the competition. At L90 (Startup 3.0), our engineering team was based primarily in Chicago while our headquarters was in Los Angeles. As we evolved our business plan and tweaked our marketing messaging, our engineering team was shielded from a lot of the distraction (being in a different location, they didn't get sucked into the "water cooler" conversation or hallway chatter) and they always remained 100% focused on building innovative products driven by customer need. Of all of my companies, communication was probably the strongest at L90, even though the engineering and design team were completely separated from sales, marketing, business development and customer service.
Focus on the best people, not the best location... By casting a wider net, you can find better talent, better manage your costs and gain many other tangible and intangible benefits (e.g. loyalty, development and support expanded across multiple time zones, multiple geographical talent pools for growth, new and fresh perspectives, etc.) Fortunately, we live in a world where virtual locations are not only possible, but advantageous.
Next... Build a SWAT team (Part 4 of a 5 part series: "So, you need to develop a product?")
