Enjoy the Disruption
Month
[Note: the irony of me writing this post is that at this very moment I have a nine month old getting fussy directly into my ear. My partner is starting to give me the stink eye as well. I hope she doesn’t read this.]
I was lucky enough to be invited to FooCamp earlier this year. Imagine a 2.5 day weekend spent with about 200 tech people that are 10x more accomplished and brainiac than you, and that’s FooCamp. Oh, and we sleep in tents and make our session agendas. It was awesomesauce.
I went in fully expecting to be immersed in a world of tech. And that was certainly true. There were two sessions however, completely unrelated to tech, that really stood out for me. One of those was put forth and led by a fellow entrepreneur who was about to become a father for the first time. He was calling for advice from any other fathers attending. For all of us “been there, done that” fathers the advice was nothing new. No one went into what it was like to run a startup at the same time as having a baby, but some general work/life balance was discussed. I’ll save my thoughts on how to [try and] achieve that balance for a future post. My personal take-away was that being a dad is a huge asset to a new company, rather than a limitation.
To be clear, it is not that I felt the opposite before that session, but it certainly helped to verify some of my previous assumptions by having more data points. Whether a correct assertion or not, I’ve always felt that there was a slight stigma in Silicon Valley that you can’t be as effective as a founder if you are a dad. The perception is that you need to be spending all waking hours devoted to the company. Whenever I find myself not doing something startup-related, I envision that scene from “The Social Network” in which Sean Parker yells at Dustin Moskovitz to get back to work after he takes his eyes off of his computer monitor for 5 seconds in the Palo Alto Facebook house. In essence, the perception is that parents are more of a liability than an asset. Is this true though?
It’s true that if I were single then I would definitely be able to devote more time to nothing but work. We could debate whether those extra hours would be as effective (i.e. are there diminishing returns or not). I won’t go there though. Instead, I’ll propose that given a hypothetical of a parent and non-parent working the same number of hours, that the parent will have a greater impact.
[Aside: When I went with my co-founder to pitch investors, I was fully prepared to explain that I was a father and why it wouldn’t be issue. It never came up, but if it had, I know that our own investors would be fully supportive.]
So, back to that hypothetical then. I’ve been a father for eight years now, and without a doubt, it has made me a much more effective manager in the office. Being able to effectively manage projects, competing interests, and people is the number one asset, other than vision, that a startup founder can bring. Indeed, more startups are founded by people in their 30s (more in mid-late 30s), than any other age group [Here’s a list of some of the more well-known startups founded by 30+ year-olds]. I’d also hazard a guess that many of these are also fathers; many I know for a fact who are.
No offense to the non-parents out there, or founders in their early 20s, but effective management only comes with experience. So, unless you’ve been in a managerial role for years, or happen to be a parent, you are going to be less effective in some aspects of your business. What I wish I had known before FooCamp, was that I was not alone. That many startup founders are parents. This is why I felt the urge to write about the topic, so that other parents, who equally feel that stigma, will stop questioning themselves. It’s an asset to be a parent.
There are many other assets besides management that I’ve discovered help me just because of being a parent. Rather than go on though, I’d like to hear from others. So go ahead and make a comment. And if any other startup parents are in London then I’d love to meet up and do some parent hacking together.
Ahhh, and he’s down for a nap finally! Up since 5am on a Sunday :(
@pgroth pointed me to this blog post from a recent post-doc now turned research group leader. Fact is, careers outside of academia are now the norm and majority, rather than “alternative.”
Michael Jordan, arguably the greatest basketball player yet. His son? Not so much. Wayne Gretsky, also arguably one of the greatest hockey players ever. His father? Not so much. The list of superstar athletes goes on. Similarly, children of the world’s tallest people are never as tall as their parents. What’s going on here?
It’s a well known statistical ‘rule’ known as regression toward the mean. In any sampling with extreme outliers, a second measurement will not have such extreme outliers. It happens throughout nature and is also visible athletics. Though less proven, it is also visible in business and in culture.
We can take the investment world as an example. For every Google or Facebook, there are at least 10x the number of failed investments or 'small wins’ at best. The venture capital industry is at an all-time low over the past decade in terms of return on investment, ROI. The big VC firms will sink hundreds of millions of capital investment into approximately 10 companies per year in hopes that ONE will be a 'homerun.’ Over the past decade, even that one in ten strategy has often failed. This part is important: These are not just a random 10 companies either. They are companies with past success (e.g. revenue or customers) and often run by experienced founders with past successes. Do you see what is going on here? Regression towards the mean.
That statistical phenomenon is why I am troubled by the strategy of science funding agencies today. An article in last week’s UK Guardian highlights how funding agencies such as the Wellcome Trust, RCUK, European Research Council, Royal Society, etc all have the strategy of funding the 'superstars’ of academia. The same strategy is occurring in the U.S. as well. The Guardian article highlights that this strategy is terrible for up-and-coming academics who find it increasingly difficult to be awarded funding. It is also drying up funding money across a breadth of universities in favor of concentrating that money into just a few. This is certainly a bad strategy in terms of what it means to individual researchers, but perhaps even more importantly, it is a bad strategy for science as a whole. Why? That whole regression towards the mean thing as discussed above.
'Superstar’ academics are similar to the Michael Jordans and the successful startup entrepreneurs. Regression towards the mean indicates that follow-on success is rare. One could argue that since it is the post-docs doing the research in most superstar academics’ labs that this statistical principle no longer applies. I would argue that is still does, as often only 'superstar’ grad students or post-docs are selected to join the 'superstar’ lab. That’s speaking about the people, but we must also remember that the projects themselves become concentrated and are subject to regression towards the mean. With fewer projects funded (in the venture capital example above, fewer companies invested in) it means fewer breakthroughs will happen. This is troubling.
Regression towards the mean is really just the statistical principle behind such clichés such as “don’t put all your eggs into one basket”, “lightning never strikes twice,” and “one-hit wonder.” Why are funding agencies choosing to ignore a well-known principle? It makes no sense.
Here is what I propose. First, we investigate more fully the consequences of current funding strategies that concentrate research money into just a few individuals or universities. Personally I’d forgo the first point, but this is governement or large private foundations who don’t change things without further study, so I’m being realistic here. The second thing that we do, and where I would personally start, is to start copying the “Dave McClure model."
Dave was one of the first engineers at PayPal before anyone knew that PayPal existed. A few years ago he noticed something about the investment strategies of VCs. He recognized the regression towards the mean principle taking place. Dave has done something most other investors have not done, which is to invest small chunks into a TON of companies. He’s already approaching 500 companies since starting this strategy in 2010. In fact, his early-stage investment group is called 500 startups. And his success rate? Much higher than the old investment model of pouring huge amounts into a tiny number of companies. Yet, Dave does more than just give money to new ideas. He also nurtures those ideas within a framework and network of mentors who have 'been there, done that.’ This makes a lot of sense.
Can we apply the 500 startups strategy to science funding then? I think we can. Start by awarding smaller chunks of funding to many more academics*. BUT, we must also create a mentorship framework, which today is virtually non-existant at the faculty level in academia. The software industry has 'best practices’ for programming, etc. Surely by now, we have best practices for the scientific method, writing, thinking, navigating the tenure track, etc within academia. Yet, I hardly see all of this codified and combined with personal case studies from successful academics. Funding agencies should not leave it to individual departments to set that up, because it will rarely happen. If funding agencies, and more importantly the public, want a larger ROI then we need to rethink how we distribute and utilize grant money.
Let’s unbork the funding crisis.
*[This seemingly would upset many academics who already have large research budgets. There are solutions to this as well, which I won’t go into now.]