Over time, I try very hard to distill the largest productivity lessons I have learnt in the past few years as a founder of Homethinking. The first was simply the elimination of meetings of all shapes and sizes into a just-do-it culture. The second has come more recently through transforming myself to think in a culture of metrics and scientific thought (hypothesis, proof, conclusion) for every creative or unknown decision. It quite literally has allowed me to improve revenue per page 4-5x in a horrible year for real estate and decluttered even more time that I used to waste on thinking whether A was going to be better than B. And most of all the lessons are kept for prosperity and can be used over time in a cycle of continuous improvement (Note 1: Homethinking is still an Italian restaurant on the web but compared to the first two years I spent on it, there is now a sense of inevitably that it is a viable concern where I can be wonderfully financially independent and not have to have a boss if I don’t want one. Note 2: Real estate will still suck in 2010 and hopefully one of these years I’ll benefit from market forces!)
I was thinking about this recently when listening to Mark Pincus talk at Stanford’s Enterpreneurial Thought Leaders Podcast. His answer to a question about what he as Zynga CEO would tell his formerself as CEO of Tribe.net struck a chord with me and neatly summarized why I love to work each day on what I do. Emphasis added and p.s. the whole podcast is fantastic too.
Steve Blank: What’s the one thing you’d ask yourself back at Tribe? What’s the one thing you’d smack [your former self] on the head about?
Mark Pincus: The biggest lesson that I’ve gotten is about testing. It’s about set high goals and then test. Assume you’re going to get it wrong. Build this leveraged approach.
If I could do it all over again, I would have made Tribe a platform to test many ideas of social networking. We tried just one.
Oh my god what the hell was I thinking? Just one? At our company we have several hundred tests going on every day and in every game. I would’ve done is made Tribe a platform to test every configuration because that’s what is so beautiful about the consumer Internet is that it is about repeatable formulas and once you find a formula that works it seems to stay that way forever. It doesn’t seem to break for a long long time so the biggest one would have been testing.
