And what we do in a design sprint is kind of work up to that big moment. We we work up to that moment of a prototype in customer's hands. The very first thing we do in a five day design sprint on Monday is we sort of map out the problem. So we say, hey, what's the biggest problem we have right now or the biggest question we're trying to answer? And it's by mapping it out and then identifying that focus, it's kinda giving us permission to say, okay.
We're not gonna worry about the other stuff right now. Like, the other stuff is important, but, like, if we don't get this one thing right, none of it matters. So we Yeah. We very deliberately choose that focus. Then the second day, Tuesday, the whole team contributes ideas, but they don't do it in this sort of, like, brainstorming, shout out loud, like, kind of classical, you know, you know, innovation type of of way. We do it in a very concrete way, which is people sketching.
Welcome to The Investor, a podcast where I, Joel Palofinkle, your host, dives deep into the minds of the world's most influential institutional investors. In each episode, we sit down with an investor to hear about their journeys and how global markets are driving capital allocation. So join us on this journey as we explore these insights. So we are live. Really excited about the discussion today.
You know, there's a couple parallels with myself and the speaker, John, you know, with my with my experience previously, you know, working in product and making that pivot from product to venture capital. I think there's a lot of really exciting things to talk about, but excited today to really introduce our speaker, John Zoradsky.
He's at Character BC, also the co author of Sprint, which is one of the most famous methodologies, especially used by Google Ventures and some of the biggest tech companies. So really excited to dive deeper in terms of the the impetus and the origin story of that of that book and the background story of of you, John. So excited to have you on. Thanks for popping in and being generous with your time. Yeah, it's a pleasure. Thank you, Joel. Yeah, well, let's jump right into it.
So John, why don't you tell us a little bit about your background where you grew up? I know you're in, Milwaukee. Yeah. Or or Wisconsin. Yeah. Milwaukee. Yeah. Milwaukee. So familiar with that area. I worked there for some time. But maybe you can talk about just kind of your your upbringing, your background. What did you study initially, you know, breaking into this industry and how you got to where you are now? And then we'll we'll kind of, jump into different topics as they come in.
Yeah. Sounds great. And always fun to start with the life story because it's an easy one, right? It's like I know it intimately, obviously. Yeah, I grew up in a small town in Wisconsin, about 1,000 people, 32 kids in my high school class. My family owns a manufacturing business, so I've had this orientation toward making stuff, engineering, and got to just dabble with a bunch of things as a kid, mostly offline, but then starting to be online a little bit.
I was born in 'eighty three, so in the late '90s, got online for the first time, started to get computers and be able to make stuff on the computer. Went to University of Wisconsin with the idea that I would study engineering, but I found that maybe I should have had more patience and stuck with it, but I just really didn't like the way that it was taught. Sort of that classic, when are we gonna get to actually making stuff that I think a lot of engineering students struggle with.
Kind of decided to dive more deeply into this interest in design. I mean, I didn't even really know it was called design, but like, had been doing desktop publishing on the computer. I'd been doing a little bit of like HTML and CSS kind of early days, web stuff and was much more captivated by this idea that you could create things very, very quickly as a designer. And so started to get into that and initially did that in the world of print.
My very first design job was at a newspaper, a daily newspaper in Madison, Wisconsin, where I was literally just laying out the newspaper every day, but very quickly got interested in the web and had a small design agency in Madison and built enough of a portfolio that I was hired as one of the first employees at a startup in Chicago coming right out of school called FeedBurner.
And FeedBurner was founded by four co founders who had worked together before, including Dick Costello, who went on to become the CEO of Twitter. And they just took a chance on me as a young designerdeveloper. So I was part of that team very early. We were acquired by Google a couple of years later, got to work on a whole bunch of stuff at pretty large scale inside of Google, as well as some zero to one projects.
I don't think, the bigger tech companies don't have a lot of zero to one projects anymore, but back in those days, mid 2000s, Google still did, including YouTube, where I was the product design lead for the YouTube channels platform. Really kind of imagining from scratch, like, what is a YouTube channel? What do you need to do with one, etc?
And so that was kind of the first ten years of my career was like an IC designer focused on product, thinking about go to market, of course, but I had this really interesting opportunity starting in 2011 to jump over to the venture side. And it remains, I think, an unusual path for somebody with my background, but it was a great opportunity because when Google Ventures was being started, they really wanted to set themselves apart from other corporate VCs for sure.
But even other just sort of multistage VCs, Andreessen had started around that time. So a lot of the big names that were in the VC world were kind of the more established brands of Kleiner and Sequoia and those that had been around for a long, long time and had this sort of established traditional model for supporting their portfolio companies. But GV really interesting approach, which was let's bring people from Google.
Let's get engineers, let's get designers, marketers, product managers from Google who have worked on super successful Google stuff, and let's make them available to our portfolio, but make them actual partners on the team. Like set up an operating team where these people are partners, but all they're doing is supporting the portfolio. And so that was what I did. I was at GV for six years. I was a partner on the operating team focused on product and go to market design.
And really my focus was on helping our portfolio companies kind of de risk their core product and market hypotheses. So what are we building? How do we position it in the market? How do we acquire and convert and retain customers? Those really, really fundamental things that every startup needs to figure out.
And got to work with about 150 of our portfolio companies in the time I was there, including Slack, Flatiron Health, One Medical Group, Gusto, and a whole bunch of other really interesting companies. Along the way, as you pointed out, we wrote this book called Sprint, which really described our methodology for doing that work with startups. So we can talk more about the process, but jumping in with a team saying, hey, what's the biggest thing you need to figure out right now?
Let's bring 100% focus to that. Let's rapidly come up with some solutions, some prototypes, test those with real customers. And so that increasingly became my focus, running these sprints and telling the world about these sprints, sort of kind of promoting this approach to building products and bringing them into market. And so that kind of formed the basis for what we're doing at Character. We are a seed fund that supports startups with capital and sprints.
So what we do is sort of bring a fairly classical approach to seed investing. Small team, very focused, all we do is seed investing, but then we pair it with this really unique form of support that comes from the design sprint methodology that we created at GV and at this point have used with well over 200 companies. So, anyway, hopefully that wasn't too long, but that's kind of the the story and the journey up to today. No. I think that's helpful.
And I think one point to extract from that is, you know, there's usually some type of pivot or jump off point into venture. I traditionally came from engineering, and then I pivoted into product and then hard pivoted, you know, so I kind of hard pivoted a few times. I think what was helpful was that you were working at a product organization.
So I think sometimes, even if you don't have the chance to pivot kind of like you did, I think working in areas, where there's partnerships with product management, especially if the if the corporate entity has a venture fund and they do need, kind of technical teams and product people to complement their decision making, that could be an end. Obviously, there's no, you know, cookie cutter path to get in.
But I think the fact that, Google had an organization where they tapped their product teams, was really helpful. Maybe you could double click on how the product I guess, what was the makeup? Was it kind of the typical pizza pie team? It was like engineering design, and product? I'm like getting memories now of, you know, these organizations, but were they kind of complementing the product launches of portfolio companies? Or were they doing kind of like, user, like, for example, for Slack, right?
Like, you guys, invested in them. But, you know, as if I'm just trying to think about, like, how us VCs could kind of use those methodologies maybe for diligencing or even maybe for, sourcing and screening. You know, where where could that be inserted, whether it's the sourcing, screening, diligencing, or investment committee with the product design and engineering teams? Yeah. Yeah, such a good question. So at GV, I think the the impetus had two components.
One was let's provide something unique to stand out in the market. So let's not get lumped in with other corporate VCs. Let's leverage something that's unique to us, a unique source of competitive advantage. Yeah. And that was the strength of the teams, the people that Google had. Know, Google GV was not started as a strategic fund, so it wasn't like, oh, we're gonna invest in stuff that's related to search that we're gonna we're gonna buy later. You know?
It wasn't like that at all, but it was like, you know, what is what are we uniquely good at and how can we sort of leverage that for an advantage in the market? And then the other component of it was how can we give our companies a better chance at success? How can we truly alter the trajectory, alter the odds for them and set them up to be more successful? And so I think that that really informed our philosophy and our approach in a lot of ways.
You know, we didn't want to just be this temporary sort of bolt on to an existing team. We didn't want to fill in gaps that a team already had at a start that we had invested in. Yeah. Our emphasis was always on how do we amplify the existing capabilities of this team? How do we accelerate their progress toward product market fit? How do we help them at these pivotal moments, these inflection points in the business?
How do we help them really de risk and make sure that they're working on the most important things, that they're on the right track? And so we would look for these moments. We would look for, you mentioned Slack, the case of Slack, we actually invested a little bit later stage, but I don't know if you remember, there this sort of famous or infamous story that came out that was like, Slack is the fastest growing business app of all time, or something like that.
It was like this sort of catchy And that was basically when we invested. But when you looked at that growth, it was pretty much all startups or not just startups, was all tech companies, right? So it was people who sort of had this built in understanding, and in many cases, this experience set around group chat, right? They knew what that was, they had used it, they understood why it was valuable.
And so the thing that we worked on with them as a product and design team was how do you bring Slack to the rest of the world? Because to continue the growth and to reach the opportunity that we saw with the company was like, everybody's gonna have to use this thing, right? And we believe it could be valuable for virtually any kind of team, but how do we position it in the market? How do we explain what the product is? How do we convince somebody to start using it?
And then most importantly, how do we get them to try it? How do we get them over that hump of like, this seems interesting, and to like, I'm actually gonna try this, I'm gonna try this with my team. And so we ran a series of design sprints focused specifically on that.
We were going out and recruiting customers who were not from tech companies, you know, fit the sort of the profile of a customer who would be a good fit for Slack, but weren't at another tech company and put them through this and be like, hey, can we convert this person? Like one customer at a time, you know, five customers at a time, can we convert them and actually get them to sort of buy into the promise of Slack?
Yeah. I mean, I think what's interesting with Slack, with Zoom, with Calendly, even Docssend, they use the product for growth. So I'm sure that's kind of a term that you use all the time, you know, product led growth. Right? So Slack, you can create your own communities, and then there's a there's a free version.
And then, you know, it kinda takes you all the way up to the point where you need to get a little more value and and then you upgrade to maybe the pro and you you kind of have an enterprise team. I think Notion has the same thing. So that's kind of a pattern that I've been seeing. Even with Zoom, it's kind of like embarrassing if you, get the notification that the the forty five minute free plan is expired.
So it's kind of almost like publicly shaming people if they don't have the premium, version, but it works. And then I think same thing with Calendly. Think Calendly, I mean, I've been using Calendly for the last like four years, but I remember when I first used it, it was free. But then if you wanted to create different increments, which I thought was really valuable too, you know, because sometimes I only want to meet with people for fifteen minutes.
So that was a really interesting study to determine what is that inflection point where people may pay for something. And I think especially with Slack, I mean, people want to have teams and they want to collaborate. And then, you know, I think I think the the biggest thing with Slack, which still is there, is they delete your two week history after.
Yeah, so you lose your history and I think you can't upload, which is probably based on a lot of user experience research in terms of kind of what would make people, you know, wanna pay. Yeah. Yeah. And and so, you know, in terms of, you know, you asked about kind of where does this sort of approach this sprint methodology? Where does it fit in sort of the, you know, the the venture flywheel, if you will? And so it started as primarily like, let's support our companies post investment, right?
So that was the core thing at GV. But we really started to see these powerful signals of how it helped us with with sourcing. Right? Like, people knew about the the design sprint. They knew about our team. That became a part of the the brand at at GV. Mhmm. And with character, we've we've taken that even further. So we actually the the the Sprint method is sort of embedded. It's kind of the strategic kernel of what we do at every single step in that flywheel.
So a lot of our sourcing leverages Sprint. The ways in which we decide which companies to invest in both initially, but especially in follow ons are informed by what we learn in sprints or what we have learned in sprints before. We use it as sort of how we earn access to invest, so how we win deals, like by sort of pitching this thing, offering this thing that's very, very unique among firms, among VC firms.
And then of course, we still use it to support the portfolio companies post investment, but it truly does become a flywheel because when we do a sprint with a portfolio company, you know, for example, you know, we published a case study of a sprint we ran with Phaedra, which is one of our portfolio companies.
It's an ex Google DeepMind team who's building industrial AI control systems, you know, we do that work and then, you know, the founder of that company introduces us to a friend of his who's leaving DeepMind to go start something else in machine learning. And then, you know, we have this really powerful ability to to get access to that deal. So it kind of all all feeds on itself.
And I think part of what was exciting about starting our own fund was being able to say the Sprint method, this really unique thing, the source of competitive advantage, it's not just one thing on a menu. It's like it is the strategic kernel. It is the sort of fundamental point of leverage that we're using to give ourselves an edge at every part of that that VC flywheel. But it seems like for character, you're also doing it for pre investments too. Right?
Because I think it can be really interesting. I guess, have you done that as, like, maybe a prerequisite? Like, maybe they do a small sprint with you, or are you still using it mainly for post? Because I could see it being an amazing tool for venture studios as well. Right? All these venture studios, they're building their own ventures. I mean, Google, you know, definitely, I'm pretty positive adopted it when they're built, you know, all the products that they did.
But if you're a venture studio, you're funding, you know, companies from product creation all the way to growth. Yeah. So kind of, you know, using the de risking mechanisms of the sprint. Yeah. Could definitely help. And I can just see it being kind of like a betting mechanism saying, hey, you know, what can we do a little, you know, mini sprint together where we do maybe some product validation or something? Totally. Yeah. So there there absolutely are studios that have adopted it.
In fact, High Alpha, which is a venture studio, they they use a version of the Sprint method for all of their kind of company creation, that part of the process. Yeah. In terms of how we leverage it pre investment, fund is only two years old. So we're like a startup where we have a bigger vision, there's a bunch of things that we think are true, and we're sort of systematically validating those hypotheses.
And where we've started is seed investing and using the sprint method as much more of part of our pitch. So saying like, Hey, you know this thing, you've heard of this thing, maybe you've even read the book, maybe you've even A lot of our founders were in sprints that we ran at GV six, eight years ago. So they've already seen the value of the process, but we've started to move further upstream.
So we took our first step moving upstream with Character Labs, which is our sprint program for pre seed founders. So we're technically not running a sprint pre investment, but we're making a very, very small pre seed investment. And then we're running, like, a series of sprints with those teams, a sequence of sprints back to back. Yeah. And then we're gaining a lot of insight from what we learn. We're building a really strong relationship with those founders.
We're getting to see those teams up close, you know, see how they work. We're getting to learn a ton about the business. And then in some cases, we're able to invest more money in those companies. So I think that, you know, you will likely see us in the future continue to move further and further upstream as we continue to sort of validate the hypotheses behind the strategy. But you're absolutely right. I think like you know, every investor is looking for sources of unique insight.
And, you know, frankly, are limits to what you can learn, like even if you're on the board, right? There are limits to what you can learn in a typical, you know, investor founder relationship. When we run a design sprint with a startup, we spend like thirty five hours together in a week. It's like 10x more time than any investor is gonna spend with a founder, even over many months.
Sure. And so, obviously, there's some operational kind of challenges with scaling that, but we've been through a bunch of those at GV, so we feel good about them. And and, you know, for us, we we do think it's a really cool source of of unique insight and and relationship building with the founders that we work with. Yeah. So two questions I have. One is how you landed that role at GV.
And the reason why I'm a little passionate about this is because I was a product manager for a long time wanting to break into VC. So I can imagine me working at Google, like with my eyes on how do I get into Google Ventures. And, you know, I can imagine, like, almost everybody wanted that that role. So what, you know, for people in the future that are working at tech companies or even at Google, what are some things that they could focus on to really stand out as like, one of the candidates?
Because I'm sure that the teams are super small, they could probably only really have a few people working on this stuff. I think you had a unique advantage because you really led some of the core flagship products at Google. Mean, considering YouTube, which became successful, but, so the obvious, I'm assuming is just kind of like do really well in product and to be a leader have influence.
But are there any other skill sets that maybe Google employees or just kind of tech companies can people like tech companies can refine to maybe join their company's venture fund? Yeah. In in reflecting on on that opportunity and and sort of why why it clicked for me, why I was a good fit for that that opportunity, there was a handful of things that that stand out.
And I think that the most important one was not just that I was, you know, successful in product or working on on successful products, but that I had been involved in a bunch of projects at an early stage. So, you know, still inside of Google, but things that were Yeah. Startup esque.
And I think that it's a very, very different experience and sort of approach that you need compared to, you know, you're the head of product for some well established thing and, you know, you increased revenue from X to Y, and, you know, that's great. But the activities that you need to do, the orientation that you need to have at an early stage startup is very, very different, right? It's not about incremental improvement.
It's about fundamentally learning, derisking, validating what you're doing. Like, do people even understand what Slack is, and can we get them to try it? Like, what even is a YouTube channel, and will people invest their time in building audiences and building brands on this platform? These types of fundamental questions. So I think, you know, I was just always really attracted to those questions. Sure. And, you know, even starting at FeedBurner, you know, starting in that role.
I mean, I was, you know, joined the company when there were fewer than 10 people. And like, everything we were doing was like the first time we had done it and the first time anybody had done it because we were building a pretty unique kind of content distribution platform around RSS that nobody had done before. And so I think that was one thing. I think another was really staying in the role of a generalist.
So, you know, not trying to niche down into being, you know, the best designer for a certain kind of product or the best designer for a certain part of the design process, but really, you know, staying general, jumping around a bunch. And it actually wasn't even until later in my career when I start started started to, realize what some of my unique superpowers were.
Like, in those early days, I sort of thought of myself as a pretty good designer in general, but not really great at any one of the disciplines sort of within the world of product and go to market design. Yeah. So those are a couple of things that come to mind. Think, you know, I think fundamentally, like, you know, there's basically three paths into the world of VC. You know, there's like, there's the apprenticeship path, which is, you know, you join as an intern.
This is what my partner, Eli Blee Goldman did. Like, join as an intern, become, you know, associate, become a principal, become a general partner. It happens. It's it's getting more and more rare, but it definitely happens. I think that outside of that path, you know, there's there's two things that you can sort of nurture and develop as an individual that are gonna be really valuable to to VC firm. One is your network.
So one is just, like, being in the flow and being well respected and well liked by lots and lots of founders. Yeah. That's like a very, you know, it's like a company acquiring another company to get access to their customer base. Know, it's just sort of like classic, like, we need deal flow. We need to continue to develop our ability to source. You seem to know a lot of founders, you know how to find them, you know how to stay in touch with them, build relationships with them.
That's always valuable. But the other thing that I think is valuable, and this is the third path is develop some capability, some skills, some ability to support portfolio companies in a way that is uniquely valuable to companies at that stage or to companies in that sector. And so, you know, that's kind of the, you know, operator turned VC approach where, you know, there's this very like weird set of skills and mindsets that you need to know how to build early stage companies.
And, you know, increasingly, I think VC firms are prioritizing those skills and understanding that you need to be, you need to have some sort of unique advantage to win those deals and to support those companies.
And so I think that's, you know, for people who are maybe coming from a large product org and interested in VC, like figure out like what it actually takes to successfully build a startup as opposed to successfully growing something that's already going pretty well inside a big company and just really try to try to hone your skills there. Yeah. And then the third, I'm assuming, is just a traditional, like, educational path where you do your MBA.
Well, so the the the the third so the three were, one, the apprenticeship route, which I think, you know, the the the MBA path is sort of a a I think a flavor of that. Yeah. Two, the network approach, and three, the sort of operator skills approach. Yeah. Yeah. I I totally agree with that. I mean, part of this is really an access game, you know, just getting access to, some of the best deals through the network.
I think all three of those definitely, by default kinda, you know, depend on a network closely to be able to get access. And then, you know, I'd love to kinda just dive a little deeper on the sprint framework for people that are just super new to design sprints. You know, there's a lot of people from different backgrounds in this audience. So maybe you can just kind of give us a quick primer on, you know, the beginning workings of design. You know, Steve Jobs used to say it's how things work.
Yeah. But, you know, I'm sure there's been some evolutions in terms of what good design is. So maybe you can just unpack that for us, especially for the audience. Yeah. Well, at risk of veering into sort of wonky definition territory, I think what a lot of people think of as design is actually production.
So Okay. You know, they think of design as making the mock ups and how should we lay out this page and like what's the interaction around this button and, you know, what's the specific, you know, text on this landing page. And that's production. That's production work. It's all really, really important work. But it flows downstream from what I view as the heart of design, which is what are we building? Who is it for?
And how do we make sure that we can get it into those hands and that it's gonna stick? And so for me, design is less about the specific craft of producing those deliverables. And it's more about leveraging the skills of a designer. So, you know, sort of journey mapping, ideation via sketching, structured decision making, prototyping, customer research, leveraging those skills to fundamentally answer those questions of like, what should we do? What are we even doing here?
Like figuring out those basic questions. And it's done collaboratively, right? It's not like you send the designers off and they figure it out and they bring it And when you look at sort of technical co founders, the work that they're doing in those early days is design work.
They don't maybe have the vocabulary, but they're answering those questions or figuring out like, you know, the skills that they're using are a little bit different than a designer's skills, but they're the same basic activities that they're engaged in. So the reason I share all that is that I think it really underpins, like, what we do in a design sprint. So the big idea with a design sprint, if we're gonna zoom way, way out, is like we're gonna build something that looks real.
It's gonna be a prototype, and we're gonna put it in front of customers. And so when you look at it through that lens, like, you can answer almost any kind of question, right? You can answer questions about like, is this the right feature? Like, are these the right product capabilities? You can answer questions around like, does this make sense to people? Are we explaining it in the right way? You can answer questions on like, what do people think of the price?
Like, can we get people through a conversion funnel? Like, can we actually get them to sort of take a chance on trying this product? And what we do in a design sprint is kind of work up to that big moment. We we work up to that moment of a prototype in customer's hands. The very first thing we do in a five day design sprint on Monday is we sort of map out the problem. So we say, hey, what's the biggest problem we have right now or the biggest question we're trying to answer?
And by mapping it out and then identifying that focus, it's kinda giving us permission to say, okay, we're not gonna worry about the other stuff right now. Like, the other stuff is important, but, like, if we don't get this one thing right, none of it matters. So we Yeah. We very deliberately choose that focus.
Then the second day, Tuesday, the whole team contributes ideas, but they don't do it in this sort of, like, brainstorming, shout out loud, like, kind of classical, you know, you know, innovation type of of way. We do it in a very concrete way, which is people are are are sketching. So either I think they called that the crazy eights. Right? That's that's one of the sketching activities.
It's called crazy eights where we really push people to generate a lot of ideas much more rapidly than they normally would, but still but still concrete. You know? Still, like, what does it actually look like? It's not just, like, five words on a sticky note, but, like, what are you actually talking about? Yeah. What should we put on the page? Like, what should we put on the screen? I I adopted that for one of the fintech products I was working on when I was working at fintech.
I I was kind of reading the book at the time and I was like, hey, guys, let's try this thing called Crazy eights. And just to add something into a search like queue, like if you want to kind of add something to a watch list, you or if you're kind of thinking about how to how to, you know, characterize selections. I had all the engineers get involved too, and everybody's sketches look completely different. There were some people that required like five taps to kind of get to where their goal was.
And then there were some people that were actually pretty good that just kind of were able to streamline the the intended outcome in, like, one tap, you know, one or two taps. And then and then what was cool was for us, we we took two or three of the best ideas and they kind of combined combined it into one. Yeah. And that's exactly what's cool about it is you kind of create this playing field, this level playing field where everybody's sort of producing the same format, which is this sketch.
And it's amazing because you sometimes get an engineer or somebody in customer support or whatever, who's like maybe not normally involved in that part of the process. Like you get their ideas and oftentimes the ideas are really great. We've seen that in a bunch of sprints. And then once you have that playing field, it sets you up really nicely for the next step, which is to decide which of those solutions are the most promising.
And so here's where we also borrow from the world of design with things like design critiques, you know, which are these very structured forms of kind of reviewing and deciding which concepts to move forward with. But basically trying to say, hey, we've got all these ideas based on everything that we know so far, which one do we think is gonna work the best? Like, let's dig deep into our intuition and figure out, what do we think is gonna work here? And then that becomes the prototype.
So on Thursday, we intentionally constrain it to just one day prototyping. So it's, you know, we want people to be comfortable with this idea that you're going to do something that might get thrown away, it might not get used. The purpose of what you're building in that prototype is to learn. It's not to define, you know, it's not, again, it's not that production step of what are we actually doing, but it's like, what is the thing we can make in order to answer this question?
And then Friday, the last day of the sprint, you're literally testing that prototype with four, three, four, five real customers. So these are customers who fit the target profile of whoever you're building for. So you're not just like grabbing friends or random people, you're actually going out and running a recruiting process and saying it's, you know, accountants who own their own bookkeeping company, have fewer than a 100 clients, and they're making X amount of money, right?
So it's just a really, really targeted customer profile. You're showing them the prototype, you're taking them through kind of an interview, and then the very last thing that you do is you actually kind of fill out this scorecard. So I think a lot of user research sort of ends with like, oh, what were the insights? Like what were the observations? Just sort of like very general, a lot of like kind of hypothesizing about, well, here's what we think people meant by that.
At the end of a design sprint, we actually have the scorecard where we're like, we list out like all the risks or the questions that we had, and then we're like, yes, no, yes, no, yes, no. It's just like very, very clear, very quick. And it gives us a lot of clarity. So the next week we know like, okay, that actually worked great. Let's build it. Let's ship it. Or that, wow, that did not work.
I'm really glad that we learned that in five days instead of like spending the next couple of weeks building it. Let's go back to the drawing board. Let's try some different approaches. So that's kind of how the process works at a high level. Yeah. No. That's helpful. And then the pre seed accelerator, what's the entry point of the founders that are in? Do they have a product? Is it more of a concept?
And I guess, you know, maybe maybe dive in on your your definition of pre seed because it's different for everybody. Yeah. So Character Labs is our sprint program for pre seed founders. And, you know, we really think of it as as founders who have a clear understanding of a market or an opportunity in a particular market. And they they probably have an inkling of the product they might build, but they really haven't built anything. They don't have a product in the market.
They probably don't have customers. They don't have users. They certainly don't have kind of a growing level of customer adoption, which is what we look for in sort of our core seed investments. But it's also not like an incubator stage where it's like, I wanna start a company, but I don't know what it is. You know, it's usually people who come in and say, Hey, I, you know, I'd spent the last five years working in logistics tech.
I'm gonna, you know, I see this opportunity here, or, you know, I, you know, have this really unique background in sort of defense tech and, you know, military training, you know, programs. And I'm gonna I see this opportunity to kind of bring new new software approaches into that. Know, it's people who kind of have that pairing of like, some specific opportunity in mind, but they haven't really made much progress on validating the specific product approach.
Yeah. And what's a what are some characteristics, of some of the founder? Almost made a dad joke there. But Yeah. What kind of character are you looking for for the character labs? Because there's a lot of great founders out there that are kind of really early. I'm also building a product as well. So I'm kind of curious to know, like, what, you know, I'm getting I've iterated my product at least like, you know, 15 times, you know, and now it's on iOS and Android.
So what are some of the things that, you look for in the people, to to make sure that they're investable when they're building a product? Yeah. We I mean, I think the most important thing is we look for builders. We're looking for people who can do the work, not just people who have an idea.
And and then it's people who can who can build rapidly, you know, the sort of high velocity, this orientation toward trying things, answering questions, you know, that sort of hypothesis driven approach because it's very compatible with with the sprint method. And we think by then applying the the sprint method over top of what they already have is sort of this this inclination to to work in that way, we can really accelerate them.
We can really sort of amplify the progress that they're making so far. Mhmm. So, you know, I think, you know, those are some of the kind of more skills based or sort of mindset based characteristics. I think they also have to have an open mind because even for me, you know, like, some of the products that I built, I just get feedback from the customers. And Yeah. You know, I think that, you know, there's a couple of things that I wanna talk about as well Yeah.
As far as just teams and where they struggle. Yeah. So, you know, one of the biggest mistakes and, you know, I want you to share your opinion, too. But in my opinion, one of the biggest mistakes is listening to the customer too much. You know, mean, the famous quote is like, if you if you ask your customers what they really wanted, they just, you know, they would just ask for faster horses.
Yeah. So I think you have to kind of take the I think what was really good about Steve Jobs is he knew what people wanted, even though they didn't even though the product didn't exist. Right. So he knew about the MP3 player before, you know, when we had CDs, when there was no concept of like MP3s and customers weren't really asking for MP3 players. I think they're asking for smaller CDs. Remember the remember the little mini CD mini disc?
Yeah. So they're like, they probably would have asked, hey, you know what, like, it'd be great if you can make the CD like half the size so I can put it in my pocket where like, I think thinking maybe beyond that, like another paradigm is like, what if there was no CD at all? It was just completely, you know, digital and you didn't have to carry anything.
You know, so I, I guess in my mind, that's probably a character trait, like being open to kind of doing testing and and validating and asking customers things, because I think a lot of times as a product builder, there's a budget that you're stuck to as well. You spent all this money on on doing a set of wires and, and mock ups, and then you already, you know, you already launched first version. Yeah. You know, making those changes, there's an additional cost.
So some people may, I'm assuming, give you a pushback and say, John, like, I've already like shipped this and I've already spent all this money building it. So I think your methodology is like, let's not even build it. Let's just do a couple pieces of paper and share them with people Yeah. And have them fill out a survey.
Yeah. You you know, part of part of why we launched Character Labs is that we think that founders are too reliant on customer discovery, which is essentially like which is sort of what you're describing. It's like, let's go and ask customers what they want. Let's ask them what problems they have, and then let's give it to them. Mhmm. And, you know, the the obviously, you have to have some of that. Right?
Like, I think, you know, what's often sort of glossed over in, you know, thinking about Steve Jobs is like he was spending his entire life, every waking moment, studying the ways that people use technology and then later media. You know, he got involved with Pixar very, very early. So this was his whole world, and he had decades to develop intuition that sort of gave him this this sort of aura of just being, like, preternaturally, you know, like, sort of visionary about the future.
But and it's not that he wasn't, but the reality was, like, he had sort of he had built up this this intuition based on literally decades of study and observation and, you know, kinda going through these cycles of of trying things and seeing what worked and seeing what didn't work. And so part of our kind of philosophy is like, make sure you have the basics down of an industry. Like make sure that you understand kind of the basic workflows and sort of the day in the life of a given customer.
But then trust yourself. Look inside, like harness that intuition, like sort of harness that creativity, give your space to like think bigger than just give the customer what they want. But then go back to the customer to check your work, you know?
So maybe it's a little bit too nuanced or it's a subtle shift, but it's instead of ask the customer what they want and then build it, it's much more like build what you think the customer needs and then double check with them that you're kind of on the right track. And so by working in sprints, we think that you kind of do more of latter, right? Because the customer test comes at the end of the sprint, not the beginning of the sprint.
And so we think especially for pre seed founders, it's just a much more powerful way to work. It's a way that allows you to move a lot faster. It's a way that allows you to be, as you said, more open minded, and to hopefully get to a place that's really unique.
That's like really special where you've actually built that kind of step change, generational change in terms of the solution that you're bringing to the market rather than that incremental, sort of, you know, little bit better kind of giving the customer what they want. Because that also gets you to penetrate that one place where it's like, look, we're just solving problems. I think what's important for humanity is to just take something that changes the game completely. Yeah, right.
And I can't even think of the last time that happened to me. I mean, some people may say it's the iPhone, or like the iPad. I mean, for me, the only recent one was, to be honest, Uber, like seeing the Uber show up. Then recently, I mean, I was moderately surprised with Zillow because I was looking at a home to invest in some real estate. And this person like responded to me and called me.
I usually don't pick up the phone, this person like, do you want to talk to the to the realtor that's selling this? And like in real time, I got patched in. So I thought that was really cool. And I started thinking like, you know, one of the biggest problems with GPS and LPs, right? You're you're you're upgrading to LinkedIn Navigator, you're buying PitchBook, you're pinging all these LPs to hopefully close your fund.
What if there was like a person that's like, Hey, John, do you want to meet the this pension fund? You know, I can patch you in right now, you know, literally on the call. So was thinking like, you know, that's kind of an interesting paradigm shift that could change the game, because right now we're using Calendly, right? To kind of book a time with somebody. And again, I'm trying to do a design sprint with you, in real time. I don't know, for you, like, when's the lab?
You know, what what was like that moment? Like, have you seen a product recently that kind of like blew you away? I mean, I guess chat GTP is probably the new one. Yeah, I'm still not completely like blown away. I think it's cool that like you can ask a question and I think it's really interesting that it can write code. Yeah. But I think that's the hot one now.
But is there anything else that's kind of like a a chat GTP or, like, an Uber kind of experience that you felt recently or, like, at least in the last two to three years? Yeah. I mean, these are the these are the kinds of things that we try to invest in. So like, try to look for companies that are bringing some real differentiation, like a real technical differentiation in the approach that they're taking, but then they're pairing it with really deep behavioral insight.
So they really understand the customer, market, and so they can hopefully achieve these amazing step change advances. One that has blown my mind recently that isn't I'm not actually a customer of, but we're an investor and it's not an investment that we've announced, but it's a foundation model for designing new physical materials. Right? So it's like So it's like a Canva for physical materials? Sort of. It's more like an LLM. So it's more like a GPT.
Instead of outputting text or images, it's outputting sort of the specification for a material that could be manufactured. Oh, interesting. Okay. And it's kinda like build me this fence that's made out of ceramic or something, and then it'll kind of come up with the actual like the underlying materials of like the chemical, the catalyst, or the the plastic or the, you know, material that's gonna go into a battery or something like that.
Yeah. And and just, like, just I mean, it was, you know, just in in learning from that team and thinking about, sort of drawing the parallels between like, oh, if we can do this with text, we can write copy, we can generate images. What if we can do that in the physical world and make it so that like, the sort of power of imagination, know, sort of the power of creativity isn't limited to like things on a screen, but it's limited to things in the world.
Like, that's really like, again, I'm not a customer of it, but I'm an investor. And so just like, was really amazed by that. And then another one that comes to mind that's also in our portfolio that I am a very, very active user of is Reclaim, which is a smart calendar assistant. So you tell Reclaim, it connects to your Google Calendar, you tell it about your habits, so the things that you wanna do on a certain cadence, even if it's as simple as having lunch or your workouts or whatever.
You hook it up to your task manager so it knows about the projects you need to get done. But then it can also schedule your meetings, so your one on one meetings. So you say, hey, Joel and I wanna have a one on one every two weeks for between thirty and sixty minutes.
And it looks at both of our calendars and it finds a time that we're both free and it dynamically rearranges our calendars around those habits, make sure that we have time for things like lunch, like exercise, make sure that we have time for the work that we need to get done, and then find a time when we're both available for that one on one without all the email back and forth, without the Calendly where one of us has to kind of pick through and say, Oh, he's free then, am I free then?
I don't know, way to have this other conflict. Like, it's just happening automatically. And it's like, you know, I've never had an executive assistant, but like, it feels like what I imagine it's like to have an executive assistant.
Somebody who's like, making sure that everything is just kinda like perfectly, like, locked in on your calendar and that you have enough time for the things that really matter and you're not you're not kind of, you know, getting sucked into things that that aren't important. So that's that's a product that has, like, just really changed my my conception of, like, what the calendar is and how to engage with the calendar. What's a product idea that you've maybe wanted to build?
Like, I I've got one too, so I wanna get your feedback on it. But, I mean, has there been kind of like a a burning product that's like, wow, I would love to build this one day? The closest thing is well, there's a handful of things that, like, I sort of wish existed. But the one that I've been thinking about a lot lately is essentially like a AI Copilot for, like, product decisions.
And I've seen a couple of customers working on or a couple of companies working on So kinda like an AI product manager, like prioritizing Yeah. Backlog. Yeah. Yeah. And even down to, like, which idea should we test first? Like, this one or that one? Like Mhmm. I haven't thought deeply enough about it to even, like yeah. I mean, if I if I was serious about it, like, you know, I would run sprints on it and try to, like, see what that might actually look like.
But Maybe it listens to hours and hours or analyzes videos of sprint meetings. Yeah. Yeah. Totally. It creates an avatar for the product manager. I mean, I would say, look, I mean, I've worked in these product teams and you know, we don't have to air out dirty laundry. But like my my issue that I've seen is kind of like sometimes the the engineers and the product people want to be designers too.
And then it kind of pisses off the designers because like, wait a minute, you know, you're supposed to like, write the requirements. You know, so the designers sometimes get defensive of their job because they're like, Oh, you know, you should never mock up anything because that's my job, you know, so we've had some drama in the past, but like my product idea is this look, so I am, I'm surprised that the form factor for iPhone for the phone has not changed in the last like decade.
You know, you can pitch in Zoom, especially for just taking photos. You know, I got two little kids at home. I'm like, by the time I like, unlock my phone, open the phone and then position it like, you know, my daughter's cute pose is already like passed by. Yeah. You know, so it's like too much. So imagine I for me, I think it'd be cool if there was like this earpiece, maybe it's an earring or something, you know, and I tap the earring and it starts recording and live streaming.
Yeah. And I tap it again and then it stops. Yeah. But like some type of like wearable that maybe looks cool that just makes that just makes kind of like my memories I view better, you know, because a lot of times when you take in the phone, if you're if you're holding it, it's kind of not the same kind of viewpoint is like when you remember your memories. So that's something I was like an idea I've had for the last five years.
Yeah. Maybe like an, know, maybe later on in my career, it'll be something. But I think there's just got to be an easier way, I think, to capture photos and videos in the moment. And then I think even for safety, right, to kind of hold somebody accountable. If you're in danger, at least you can live stream it and it, you know, gives out your location. Yeah. I know there's a lot of privacy issues with that too, but, we're already holding phones and live streaming anyways, you know?
So that's just one idea I have. yeah. And then I think that You don't have to roast me on that on this publicly. I think the really cool thing about that then would be, like, the recall scenarios that you have. So, like, you know, it's one thing to like, once you've captured things in the moment, like, how can you actually use that to augment your memory? How can you Yeah. Be reminded of, you know, like think about the silly things we do.
Like, we screenshot the the ticket, you know, the barcode to like, for an Amazon return or the ticket to get into a concert or whatever. If we were capturing those things in real time, then we could theoretically also have our devices tell us about that. Like, remind us, like, oh, hey. You're you're, like, you're you're near the the concert venue. Like, here's that thing that you you like do. To to get in. Yeah. Here's the barcode.
Like, you didn't have to, like, actually remember to, like, screenshot it and then be like, wait, where's that screenshot? Like, I've got hundreds of screenshots for, like, every single event that I go to. So, yeah, that'll definitely support my memory, my my device memory. But, hey, man, this was amazing. I know we're out of time. Yeah. But, you know, we we covered a lot of rabbit holes and talked about product and venture. So appreciate you being generous with your time.
And congrats on all the cool things that you do. And I think you have a really interesting and innovative approach to, to sourcing great founders. So kudos to you and all that you do for the community. Thanks. Yeah, thank you for the opportunity to chat. And it's, it's been super fun. And I really appreciate your questions. Yeah, thank you so much. Yeah, hopefully we get to get get together. Dave Dave Saxe gave us a shout out. So shout out to him. I think he's in he lives in your hood, right?
He does. Yeah, I just saw Dave a few weeks ago. Yeah, support. Well, care. We'll catch up soon. Sounds good. Thanks, John. Yeah. Bye.