Inspiring New Designers as Envisaged by Foundation Capital Partner Steve Vassallo

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Foundation Capital Partner Steve Vassallo writes in FastcoDesign (a pretty cool alternative design feature) a tribute to the late Steve Jobs who he celebrates as the father of approachable design.

More than ever, we live in the design-minded world Steve Jobs helped usher in. No individual has more greatly influenced the role of design in tech, or is more responsible for raising consumer expectations for thoughtfully made products, than the late Apple co-founder. In the half decade since Jobs’s death, design has come into its own as competitive lever for businesses, a set of practices for solving important problems, even a method for optimizing your life.

Now, co-founder Steve Wozniak above deserves some credit too as he points out that Walter Isaacson 2011 biography adaptation by Aaron Sorkin over-amps Jobs’ role in certain settings- like a lot, Woz says. He notes that he spoke to CEO John Scully to defend the Apple II team, not Jobs, when the team threatened to quit. Woz also encouraged the famous ‘1984’ ad for the Super Bowl even when the board rejected it – even offering to split the $800K ad cost. Woz was recruited to return to Apple by Jobs but declined, though he still admires Apple, which has rallied due to the continued problems Samsung has had with the Galaxy 7 (market value impact of over $20B today from the recall, Bloomberg reports).

Now Vassallo does lay out some excellent design lessons from Jobs’ Apple tenure including:

1. Be Wildly Ambitious.
First, you need colossal ambition. It’s rare that massive new product categories are launched at established companies. But after Jobs returned to Apple as CEO in 1997, he did it five times. (This summer’s sale of the 1 billionth iPhone) demonstrates people’s insistence that their interactions with technology be frictionless and delightful.

2. Think Big And Small.
The stories that get told about Jobs are always of how exacting he was, down to the type of wood tables he wanted for the Apple Stores. So, there’s no doubt that Jobs was a designer’s designer down to his marrow, and these sorts of stories make for good copy. But the under-reported feature of his success was how adept he was at switching focal points and letting go of his fixation on simply the product.

3. Tell Persuasive Stories.
Another aspect to being Steve Jobs was his gift for storytelling—his uncanny skill at reading the audience, finding the right way to frame a story, and galvanizing others around a shared (re: his) vision. The “one more thing” teaser that Jobs used to drive journalists and Apple enthusiasts wild with at big keynotes wasn’t a function of his charm—it was an old narrative trick called a cliffhanger. Great storytelling can be your most powerful tool for disseminating and scaling your vision.

4. Let The (Other) Geniuses Thrive.
Lastly, Steve Jobs is remembered as a singular genius, but a key component to his genius was his ability to find talented people and rally them around his cause. Without Steve Wozniak’s engineering prowess, Jony Ive’s keen design acumen, or Tim Cook’s gift for building out unrivaled supply chains—Jobs would not have been able to produce the first Apple computer or the iPod, or manufacture an iPhone that didn’t retail for $4,000. Healthy as his ego was, Jobs wasn’t deluded about this fact. He once said, “Great things in business are never done by one person, they’re done by a team of people.” Steve Jobs’s true brilliance was in designing a system for repeatable genius.

The Transformative Business Model

Picture Credit: Leandro Castelao

An interesting Harvard Business School article called “the Transformative Business Model” by Stelios Kavadias, Kostas Ladas, and Christoph Loch investigates 40 new business models with widely different outcomes. These business models relate to how companies organize to serve customers and deliver value, the complimentary firms that they select to partner with, and the means by which their supply chain operates. The professors summarize:

We usually associate an industry’s transformation with the adoption of a new technology. But although new technologies are often major factors, they have never transformed an industry on their own. What does achieve such a transformation is a business model that can link a new technology to an emerging market need.

So, part of the trick to to see the emerging market need before competitors do and to find the early adopters among the customer population that make demand go viral. As the business model evolves, the key is to select, allocate and organize the critical resources (i.e. MP3 combined with a pay-per-listen music service like iTunes driven by an easy-to-use online menu that is a front end to remote, large scale storage such as the Apple Cloud). The authors allude to Thomas Kuhn‘s concept of “paradigm shift” when they explain, “Most attempts to introduce a new model fail—but occasionally one succeeds in overturning the dominant model, usually by leveraging a new technology. If new entrants use the model to displace incumbents, or if competitors adopt it, then the industry has been transformed.” NPR did a nice profile on Kuhn’s 94th birthday last July 18th, defining a paradigm shift as “an important change that happens when the usual way of thinking about or doing something is replaced by a new and different way.”

Interestingly, even though a natural scientist, Kuhn was highlighting that paradigms determine large areas of experience at the same time and the “shift” involves an accelerating adoption of a new way of thinking or doing something. (Kuhn fascinates me and I wrote my senior thesis at Yale in the early 1980s about the shift from a bipolar world to a unipolar political economy in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union).

HBR always does the basic takeaway points well (analysts take note)- the professors define the “Transformative Business model” as linking technology and the market:

1. A more personalized product or service.

Many new models offer products or services that are better tailored than the dominant models to customers’ individual and immediate needs. Companies often leverage technology to achieve this at competitive prices.

2. A closed-loop process.

Many models replace a linear consumption process (in which products are made, used, and then disposed of) with a closed loop, in which used products are recycled. This shift reduces overall resource costs.

3. Asset sharing.

Some innovations succeed because they enable the sharing of costly assets—Airbnb allows home owners to share them with travelers, and Uber shares assets with car owners. Sometimes assets may be shared across a supply chain. The sharing typically happens by means of two-sided online marketplaces that unlock value for both sides: I get money from renting my spare room, and you get a cheaper and perhaps nicer place to stay. Sharing also reduces entry barriers to many industries, because an entrant need not own the assets in question; it can merely act as an intermediary.

4. Usage-based pricing.

Some models charge customers when they use the product or service, rather than requiring them to buy something outright. The customers benefit because they incur costs only as offerings generate value; the company benefits because the number of customers is likely to grow.

5. A more collaborative ecosystem.

Some innovations are successful because a new technology improves collaboration with supply chain partners and helps allocate business risks more appropriately, making cost reductions possible.

6. An agile and adaptive organization.

Innovators sometimes use technology to move away from traditional hierarchical models of decision making in order to make decisions that better reflect market needs and allow real-time adaptation to changes in those needs. The result is often greater value for the customer at less cost to the company.