Zivity and Tivo: The Importance of an Advisory Board Redux

I had my best President's Day ever!

Yes, shocking I know, since President's Day is fabled for its awesomeness as a holiday so how could any one President's Day be better than another? Well, allow me to tell you.

I met up with one of the co-founders of Zivity for some french toast and to chat about business-y things. Take any opportunity you have to talk to smart people about what they do, especially when it's founding a startup. Zivity was founded a few months before Tenuki, so talking to Zivity's co-founder is like looking through a little window into my future. She had all kinds of advice for me, but at the top of the list was the importance of a good advisory board. Especially, in the early months.

Zivity has managed to assemble a top-notch advisory board through a domino effect. They got a couple of good advisors and those advisors recommended other good advisors. Zivity is smart: they have gotten advisors that cover the different aspects of their business, rather than focusing exclusively on technical advisors, which is a problem, I suspect, in many other startups.

So that was an excellent way to start my morning: tea, toast, and transfer o' knowledge. Then I stopped into a nearby thrift store that having a 50% off sale. I wandered past a stack of old VCRs and lo and behold, on the top of the stack was a Tivo! For 10 dollars! Five bucks on sale!

And it works, and it has a lifetime subscription!

Ah, sweet, sweet President's Day.

Why You Need a Good Advisor

Tenuki is still at its formative stage, where big things can come from small moments. John and I pitched friendly to one of our advisory board members in a coffeeshop in the Mission (not Ritual, but good guess). His feedback not only helped crystallized the pitch but actually changed our entire approach to the problem we are trying to solve

When you’re developing a piece of software you’re generally developing it for yourself, or someone very much like you. I think this a problem for a lot of engineers, interfaces that are intuitive to them are nebulous to the average user.

Dan, our advisor, challenged us with this question: how would a blind man use your product?

It’s not a facile question. Everyone lives with a set of assumptions about we interact with the world, and for the most part we assume that others see things as we do. With moral issues, it’s often easy to recognize the perniciousness of our assumed biases as soon as they are challenged by someone else. But for seemingly trivial matters, such as how to interpret a red stoplight, few people stop to consider how much behavioral conditioning affects our reaction.

The blind man question keys into the problem of accessibility. How can we make our service usable by someone who can’t see? But it also encourages us to reconsider the product from a different perspective, a very alien perspective from our own. This is invaluable.

It took me a day or so for the insight to really sink in. Then it hit me in the shower as I was visualizing our pitch to VCs. I suddenly saw the entire demo in my head and how to present it. I called John and he had had a similar revelation a couple hours earlier (he's an early riser, I am decidedly not)

Dan’s insight shifted us away from focusing on a particular embodiment (his words) of our solution, and refocused on the nature of the solution. As a result, we realized that the value of what we had conceived was not where we thought it was and we've refocused on that element. Sorry to be vague, but this early on, you can't let out anything specific.

In any case, the take-away, young entrepreneur: get some good advisors!