Michel Feaster: belief

Transcript context

…Okay. Well, I just loved it. I was grinning ear to ear, Michel, when you were talking about timing and management. And for me, what this story just illustrates so well is like the absolutely critical role of timing in technology, both consumer and enterprise. I mean LoudCloud was 100 percent the right product. It was AWS, before AWS, and AWS is one of the probably top three biggest and most important products in technology today. But the timing was wrong. And I can’t remember where I heard this but I think Sequoia (the venture capital firm) did a study a number of years ago about what sort of the most important factor for their investment partners in how the quality of their decision-making and the quality of their investments, and they concluded that it was timing. It was getting the timing right in a market. So that was what I had down as my theme for this episode but I think what you said, there’s more to it than that, and that's that the role of talent in technology both from a product and management standpoint, is managing that timing. Like it would have been so easy at LoudCloud to say like, “Well, we got the timing wrong. We’re done.” But what Ben and Marc were able to do was say “We got the timing wrong but we’re going to get the timing right on this other piece of it and we’re going to pivot into that.” And I think that’s what like talking about 10x folks in tech, it’s having that vision and being able to manage timing in a market that’s really what it comes down to I think both in consumer and enterprise. Yeah. Look, I think timing is it’s the one law you just don’t control. It’s interesting. I think Marc Andreessen talks about it. Good market, bad team - they do alright. Terrible market, great team - you’re kind of screwed. And so like, what trumps what? You’ve got kind of is the idea good enough, how big is the market, timing, and then people. So I always say like, what’s the why? What’s the idea? What problem are you solving why? The second question is, why now? Why is it inevitable now that this idea should matter or be more relevant or actually be a business. And the third part is where team is in. It’s like what’s the likelihood you have to execute into that. Then it’s interesting. I think on the people front if you go into Ben Horowitz’s office and Andreessen, he has people on the wall, pictures of people. And it’s scientists on one wall and boxers on the other. And we’re both big boxing fans. But he would summarize it this way, which he says entrepreneurship is the intersection of intellect and courage. So I think it’s not just seeing that the thing is happening. It’s having the courage to fight for the deal on the case of an acquisition or fight for the strategy or fight for your life in the company if you’re failing. I think that can’t be underestimated, is the level of grit and kind of I call it a little bit irrationality that's required in that human capital to be successful. Wow. I love that phrase.…

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